North Korea views prayer and worship as weapons, says former detainee Kenneth Bae

North Korean officials regard prayer and worship as weapons so effective they have the power to overthrow the government, a Korean-American missionary said.

Kenneth Bae was working as a missionary in North Korea, bringing in other missionaries through a series of trips, when he was arrested in 2012. He was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor, but served only two years of the sentence before he was released in 2014, according to CBS News.

Bae said North Korean authorities considered his missionary work as a threat, and one of them labeled him as the "most dangerous criminal" they had encountered.

"One of the prosecutors told me that I was the worst, most dangerous American criminal they had ever apprehended since the Korean War," he recalled. "I said, 'Why?' and they said, 'Because not only [did you come] to do mission work on your own, you asked others to join.'"

Apparently, North Korean authorities viewed prayer and worship as weapons. Bae said there was a time when a prosecutor accused him of attempting to overthrow the government "through prayer and worship."

"They really took prayer as a weapon against them," he said.

Recounting his experiences as a prisoner, Bae said he still feels like he bears the "103" badge across his chest, as he was prisoner number 103 when he was in the labor camp. When he was there, he had to remind himself that he was a missionary and he had to embrace the suffering that had come to him in his labor to let people know about Jesus.

Bae was released in 2014. U.S. Intelligence James Clapper brought him out of North Korea along with another prisoner.

Bae wrote the details of what he had gone through in the North in a book entitled, "Not Forgotten." He urged readers to remember the citizens of the isolated country and have compassion for them.