North Korean Christians Live in Fear Their Children Will Expose Them
by JOHN HAYWARD
BreitBart.com
30 Mar 2018
Life is perilous for North Korea’s underground Christian community, especially since their children have been taught that Christianity is an evil subversive force that threatens the noble and pure Communist state, and Christian parents have every reason to fear their kids will expose them.
In a March article for Open Doors, an activist group that helps persecuted Christians around the world, a North Korean Christian using the pseudonym “John Choi” explained that children as young as nursery school are taught to revere the ruling Kim family as gods with mystical powers, venerating them with rituals that resemble prayer as much as the professions of loyalty demanded by authoritarian states.
Choi says some of the weird mandatory religion built around the Kims is stolen from religious traditions in other countries, such as giving thanks to the dictators for one’s “daily bread” in the manner of the Lord’s Prayer, and a myth that depicts the late Kim Il-sung as a Santa Claus figure who brings presents to faithful children.
North Korea’s dictators are very jealous gods who will tolerate no other gods before them.
“The North Korean state wants their people to love only the Kim family and hate the ‘American imperialists’ and ‘South Korean puppets,’” Choi explains. “To increase the hate for North Korea’s enemies – which are the Americans (and in their view, all Americans are Christians) – the government of North Korea has produced negative propaganda. Films, musicals, paintings and cartoons portray Americans and Christians in a bad light. They ‘show’ how the enemy has exploited and killed North Koreans.”
To that end, North Korean propaganda depicts Christian missionaries as fairy-tale monsters. Choi recounts a story taught to children in school textbooks about a missionary who mutilated a little boy with acid and killed him for the crime of stealing an apple from his orchard. Adults get propaganda films depicting Christian pastors as rapists.
In a January interview, a man named Lee Joo-chan who escaped from North Korea and became a pastor in China told Open Doors that Christian parents must keep their faith secret from their own children because the brainwashed children might expose them to the authorities. Parents are also terrified that their children could accidentally sing a Christian song or repeat a Bible verse in public, or be tricked by their teachers into revealing that their parents have Christian literature in their homes.
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