What is the religion of Juche that is practiced in North Korea?”
Part 2 of 6 in our Inside the Hermit Kingdom series about the people and culture of North Korea. Ben Piven is a multimedia producer at Worldfocus who went to North Korea in August. He writes about the isolated Communist nation’s Juche state religion. North Korea is a Cold War relic, but its communist roots alone do not explain the widespread adoption of the ideology knows as Juche — essentially a hybrid of East Asian Confucianism and East European Stalinism. Despite the fact that state literature decrees “man is the master of all things,” Juche (“self-reliance” in Korean) is relentlessly collectivist. Juche emphasizes rigid hierarchical authority and the harmonious arrangement of highly deferential individuals. Economic independence and military self-defense are its primary goals. Juche is the main philosophical component of the political system known as Kimilsungism, which emerged from the leadership of Kim Jong-il’s father, Kim Il-sung. The Kim Il-sung cult overshadows reverence for
