North Korea

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Traditional Korean religion once flourished freely across the undivided peninsula. Buddhism reached Pyongyang's monasteries under the Goguryeo and Goryeo kingdoms, Confucian family ritual shaped social life for centuries, and the indigenous shamanic practice of the mudang endured alongside both; by the early twentieth century Pyongyang itself was known as the Jerusalem of the East for the density of its Christian churches. Almost all of this was suppressed after the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was founded in 1948, when the ruling party began enforcing state atheism and treating independent religious loyalty as a rival to the personality cult it built around the Kim family, closing congregations and sending believers to political prison camps.

What survives today survives in two very different forms. A small number of showcase institutions, among them the Korean Christian Federation, the Korea Buddhist Federation and the Korean Catholic Association, operate under close state supervision and are widely described by outside observers as serving foreign visitors rather than functioning as living congregations. Cheondoism, a homegrown nineteenth century faith blending Confucian, Buddhist and folk elements, survives as the one indigenous religion the state tolerates in an officially organized form, a distinction none of the peninsula's older imported faiths has been granted.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

North Korea's constitution formally grants citizens freedom of religious belief, expressed through the approval of religious buildings and ceremonies, but conditions that right on religion never being used as a pretext for drawing in foreign forces or harming the state or social order, a qualification broad enough in practice to void the guarantee it accompanies. The United Nations Secretary-General has described the resulting reality as an almost complete denial of the rights to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, a de jure guarantee set against a de facto near total suppression.

No independent religious organization is permitted to exist; only a handful of state sanctioned federations operate at all, and religious activity outside them has no legal path to recognition and is treated as illegal by default. The criminal code punishes the unauthorized import, manufacture or possession of religious materials, and separately punishes what it calls superstitious activities conducted in exchange for money or goods with up to seven years in a labor camp; religious activity by young people is specifically prohibited. North Korea has been designated a Country of Particular Concern for religious freedom violations every year since the designation began in 2001, most recently redesignated in December 2023.