UNIFICATION CHURCH

UNIFICATION CHURCH . The Unification Church is a messianic, millenarian religion, dedicated to the goal of restoring the kingdom of heaven on earth. It was founded in Korea in 1954 by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon (b. 1920) as the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity (HSA-UWC). Within a quarter of a century it had become one of the best known and controversial of the contemporary wave of new religious movements. In Korea it is known as the Tong Il movement; in the West it has been referred to by various names such as the Unified Family, or the Moon Organization; then, during the 1990s, it was reconceived as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU), with the Unification Church being merely the religious arm of the movement. However, despite their attempts to be rid of the label, the movement's members continue to be widely known as "Moonies."

History

Moon was born in what is now North Korea in 1920. He claims that on Easter Day 1936 Jesus appeared and asked him to assume responsibility for the mission of establishing God's kingdom on earth. During the next two decades Moon is said to have communicated with various other religious leaders (such as Moses and the Buddha) and with God himself. This resulted in a body of teachings eventually published in English as the Divine Principle (1973).

During the movement's early days in Korea it met with considerable opposition from both the established churches and government officials. Moon was imprisoned several times, and at one point spent two and a half years in a Communist labor camp. In the late 1950s Unification missionaries went to Japan and the West, but it was not until the early 1970s, when Moon himself moved to the United States, that the movement became known to more than a handful of Westerners. Over the next ten years, however, Moon's name became a household word as he spoke on lecture tours and at large rallies, and hosted leading academics at international conferences and local and national dignitaries at lavish dinners. The movement also received considerable attention by supporting U.S. president Richard Nixon during the Watergate crisis.

Several valuable properties (including the New Yorker Hotel and the Tiffany building in Manhattan) were acquired by the organization. Businesses affiliated with the movement (including fishing concerns and ginseng production companies) appeared to prosper. Cultural activities (including the Little Angels dance troupe, the Go World Brass Band, and the New Hope Singers) flourished. The Unification Theological Seminary was established in Barrytown, New York, in 1975, Sun Moon University appeared in Korea (1993), and the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut, which had been founded in 1927 as the Junior College of Connecticut, was rescued from financial disaster by the Professors' World Peace Academy, an organization created and supported by Moon, in 1992. Newspapers and other publications, including the Washington Times (in 1982), were launched in Tokyo, New York, Latin America, and elsewhere.

Clean-shaven, well-groomed Unificationists became a familiar sight on the streets of North America and Europe, selling candles, candy, cut flowers, potted plants, Unification literature—and the Unification Church itself. Those who joined as full-time members in the 1970s and 1980s were disproportionately white, middle-class people in their early twenties. As in Japan, they lived in communal centers, but by the early 1990s most grass-roots members had been sent to their hometowns, where (like the Korean members) they tended to live as nuclear families, no longer working full-time for Unification-related businesses.

Partly because of a high drop-out rate, the number of fully committed members has always been considerably lower than the media (or the movement itself) have suggested; indeed, there have never been, at any one time, many more than 10,000 full-time members in the West, where the movement has not grown substantially since the 1970s, but has come to rely on second-generation members to sustain its membership (although, following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a modest number of new converts were recruited in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union). In Asia, full-time membership is unlikely to have exceeded two or three times that number. There is, however, a considerably larger category of people who express support for Unification beliefs and/or other aspects of the movement while, perhaps, maintaining allegiance to another religious tradition. Indeed, with the passage of years, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between core Unificationists (rather like priests or monks) and those who are more or less loosely associated members of the wider Unification congregation. As with many new religions, the aging of converts and the arrival of second and subsequent generations has been accompanied by a tendency towards "denominationalization," or general accommodation to the wider society with a lessening of sharp dichotomies between "them" and "us."

Beliefs

Unification theology is one of the most comprehensive among the contemporary new religions. The Divine Principle offers an interpretation of the Bible that, it is claimed, can unite all religions. God is portrayed as a personal being who created the world according to a few universal principles. All creation consists of positive and negative (male and female) elements; these unite into larger units, which in turn unite to form still larger wholes. Adam and Eve were created so God could have a loving "give-and-take" relationship with them. The original plan was that they should mature to a stage of perfection when they would be blessed in marriage; their children and their children's children would populate a sinless world in complete harmony with God. This, however, was not to be. The fall is interpreted not as the result of eating an apple, but as the consequence of a disobedience that involved the misuse of the most powerful of all forces: love. The archangel Lucifer, whom God had entrusted to look after Adam and Eve, became jealous of God's love for Adam and had a (spiritual) sexual relationship with Eve. Eve then persuaded Adam to have a (physical) sexual relationship with her. As a result of this premature union, which was Lucifer-centered rather than God-centered, the fallen nature, or original sin, of Adam and Eve has been transmitted to subsequent generations, and the whole of history can be seen as an attempt by God and man, especially key figures in the Bible, to restore the world to the state originally intended by God.

Ultimately, restoration is possible only through the person of a messiah, who with his wife will perform the roles in which Adam and Eve failed—that is, those of True Parents. They (and those whom they bless in marriage) will have children born without original sin. But for this to happen, humankind has to create a foundation ready to receive the messiah. In practical terms this involves the concept of "indemnity," whereby a good, sacrificial deed can cancel "bad debts" accumulated by a person or his ancestors. The role of the messiah is seen as an office filled by a man born of human parents, but free of original sin. Jesus was such a man, but, largely through the fault of John the Baptist, he was murdered before he had a chance to marry. Thus, he was able to offer the world spiritual but not physical salvation through his death. Numerous parallels between the period before the time of Jesus and the past two millennia are believed to indicate that the present is the time of the second coming. In 1992 Moon publicly declared what his followers had long believed—that he was that messiah, he and his wife being the True Parents of all humanity.

Unification teachings now extend well beyond the Divine Principle. In particular, there has been the development of what might be termed Moonology, which elaborates on the achievements of Moon and his immediate family, both on earth and in the spirit world. In 1993 Moon announced that the first True Family had been established (by him and his wife, children, and grandchildren) and that the world had entered the Completed Testament Age (CTA). In 1997 Moon instituted a new tradition, Hoon Dok Hae, meaning to meet for reading and disccusion, enjoining members to read, from 6:00 to 7:00 every morning, passages from his speeches, which now constituted the basic scriptures for the CTA. On the first day of each week, month, and year, and on the movement's holy days, members take the Pledge, a short statement in which they vow allegiance to God and "True Parents" (Moon and his wife), but on May 5, 2004, Moon announced the change from the "era before heaven" to the "era after the coming of heaven," and, henceforth, the pledge services would be observed every eighth day. The most important Unification rites are the mass weddings, known as Blessings. In the movement's early days, members were "matched" with a partner suggested by Moon, and were expected to practice celibacy before and for some time after the Blessing. By the mid-1990s, however, Blessings were extended to include millions of couples, many of whom did not attend the ceremony and had little awareness of their being associated with a Unification practice, let alone the practice's spiritual significance.

Moon has always spoken of a close relationship between activities in this world and the spirit world, but the connection became increasingly pronounced with two revivalist movements. First, several members claimed to have received messages from Moon's son, Heung Jin Nim, following his death in 1984; then, in the late 1980s, Moon's family recognized his embodiment in a young Zimbabwean member. For several months "Black Heung Jin Nim" enjoyed a privileged position, traveling the world and meting out punishments to members who confessed to having strayed. Eventually, however, he was denounced and returned to Africa, where he started his own movement. Another Unificationist revival, associated with Chung Pyung Lake in Korea, dates from the mid-1990s and involves the channeling of messages from Mrs. Moon's mother (and others in the spirit world). Members are expected to attend forty-day workshops for healing, contact with the spirit world, and participation in ceremonies to liberate their ancestors. According to the Unification Church, billions of couples have been Blessed in the spirit world, and in 2003 advertisements appeared in major newspapers containing testimonies from religious and political leaders (including Moses, Jesus, Muḥammad, Karl Marx, Pol Pot, and John F. Kennedy) declaring Moon to be the True Parent of humanity.

Controversies

Throughout the world, the Unification Church has attracted considerable hostility from the media, cult-awareness movements, several government bodies, and, indeed, the general public. Among the many accusations are that it uses brainwashing or mind-control techniques to recruit and keep its members; that it breaks up families; that its leaders live in luxury while the rank and file are exploited and oppressed; that it manufactures armaments; that it is politically right-wing and has had connections with the South Korean intelligence agency (KCIA); that it is merely a front for a seditious organization that is attempting to take over the world and establish a theocracy with Moon at its head; and that it violates tax and immigration laws. (In 1982 a federal-court jury convicted Moon of conspiracy to evade taxes and sentenced him to eighteen months' imprisonment.) Other controversies have surrounded the financial situation of Unification-related businesses and the church's attempt to establish a large community, New Hope East Garden, in South America.

Attacks on Moon's personal behavior have come from a variety of sources. In 1993 an early member, Chung Hwa Pak, published The Tragedy of the Six Marys, claiming that Moon had frequently indulged in the sexual "restoration" of the world by having sex with women who would then be expected to have "restoring" sex with six men. In 1995, however, Pak publicly retracted his account. Another book, published in 1998 by Nansook Hong, the estranged wife of Moon's eldest son, described how her husband was addicted to hard drugs, committed adultery, and beat her while she was pregnant. The book also mentioned Moon's illegitimate son and suggested that, far from presenting the ideal example of a God-centered family, the Moons seem to constitute an uncommonly dysfunctional unit, with several of their children deserting the movement. The movement has vehemently denied the criticisms leveled against it, expressing particular concern where such accusations have been used to justify kidnapping members to make them renounce their faith (although, apart from Japan, few countries continue this practice of "forcible deprogramming"). Except for the occasional, short-lived exposé, the media and cult-watching organizations for the most part have lost interest in the movement as it has matured and become less high profile than it was in the 1970s and 1980s.

Bibliography

Unification theology exists in various versions. Exposition of the Divine Principle (New York, 1996). There have been many versions of this text, and this is the most recent version. Basically the theology is the same, though stresses and presentation vary. The first full translation into English from the Korean is Divine Principle, New York: Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, 1973. Moon has not actually penned any of the versions; they were taken down by his disciples from his talks/sermons and later plished/translated/interpreted by other Unificationists. English version is is accessible at http://www.unification.net/dp96. Numerous books, mostly partisan, have been written by members and close associates of the movement, ex-Unifications, and conservative Christians; Nansook Hong's In the Shadow of the Moons: My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Family (Boston, 1998) is one of the most critical exposés, and the 600-page volume 40 Years in America: An Intimate History of the Unification Movement 1959–1999 (New York, 2000), by Michael Inglis and Michael L. Mickler, provides an extremely useful overview of public and internal developments from the church's own perspective. Sebastian Matczak's Unificationism: A New Philosophy and World View (New York, 1982) provides a theological critique and comparison with other thought systems. For sociological approaches, see John Lofland's Doomsday Cult: A Study of Conversion, Proselytization, and Maintenance of Faith, enl. ed. (New York, 1977); David G. Bromley and Anson D. Shupe Jr.'s "Moonies" in America: Cult, Church and Crusade (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1979); and Eileen Barker's The Making of a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing? (Oxford, 1984). Massimo Introvigne's slim volume The Unification Church (Turin, Italy and Salt Lake City, Utah, 2000) follows events up to the end of the twentieth century.

Eileen Barker (1987 and 2005)