The group Open Doors UK in a recent report said North Korea is the “worst place on earth for Christians” because the totalitarian state does not tolerate dissenters, forcing everyone to worship the country’s leader, currently Kim Jong-un.
There are an estimated 300,000 Christians amidst a population of 25.4 million there, and an estimated 50-75,000 Christians are in the country’s labor camps, Open Doors claimed.
After Christian missionaries entered the country and began to spread the Gospel, “they were all blacklisted and red-flagged” by the government, Kim Chung-seong said, and “more than half of them are in hard labor prison camps throughout the country.”
Yet despite poor conditions and the threat of imprisonment, the number of Christian believers in North Korea is growing, Kim said, and their faith is strengthened through persecution.