A week after the State Department’s annual listing of countries “blacklisted” for their lack of religious freedom, comes horrible new testimony and details from North Korean refugees, charging incidents, in 2003 and before, of violent persecution of North Korean Christians named, and executed, by the government as “Protestant spies.” The 128-page report detailing the allegations is titled “Thank you, Father Kim Il Sung” — a reference to the “first phrase North Korean parents are instructed to teach their children,” as the report clearly states, but also what reads uncomfortably like a cue to further enrage religious readers with the phrase’s parody of a thanksgiving prayer: God turned upside down. Likewise the prominence given, in a wire report on the story, to one refugee’s assessment that, in North Korea, “‘Having faith in God is an act of espionage.'” Arguably true, but also a statement with an implication of agenda that seem out of place next to allegations that a group of North Koreans were steamrolled to death in one of these incidents and, whether they were martyrs to the faith or merely hapless victims, are now equally dead.