Religious Freedom in North Korea

A Forum 18 News article reports that a Russian Orthodox church is being built in Pyongyang:

Pyongyang, North Korea's capital, has two Protestant and one Catholic church, which are suspected of being "show churches" for display to foreigners, so it remains unclear whether any North Koreans will be able to or will dare to regularly attend an Orthodox church under construction. The building is funded by the North Korean state, and Forum 18 News Service has learnt that it is "65 per cent finished". By the early 1900's, about 10,000 Koreans had converted to Orthodoxy due to Russian missionaries in the now divided Korean peninsula. Dmitry Petrovsky, of the Moscow Patriarchate's Department for External Church Relations, expressed the hope to Forum 18 that links with this past missionary activity remain, as is the case with Orthodox churches in South Korea. Four North Koreans are studying at the Moscow Theological Seminary, and Petrovsky remarked to Forum 18 that they are displaying "zeal and a genuine interest in Orthodoxy".

This is a country where an estimated one in 50 is a government informer, and parents are said to be too afraid to pass on their faith to their children.

Forum 18 derives its name from Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (freedom of worship).

An earlier Forum 18 overview of religious freedom in the Hermit Kingdom concluded that any increase in religious activity probably resulted from returning defectors sharing a faith newly acquired abroad, and that this poses a threat to the regime:

the regime's concern that South Korean Christian groups in China pose a security threat to North Korea is not entirely illegitimate. For many years, South Korean organisations and individuals who wish to conduct humanitarian activities in North Korea or along the Chinese border with the DPRK must receive the approval of the South Korean Ministry of Unification. South Korean government approval of their activities was also conditioned upon their willingness to gather "intelligence" on its behalf.

One certain thing in all this murk is that the main religion in North Korea is worship of Kim Il Sung, the Eternal Leader.