Unification Church

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Unification Church

The Unification Church, formally the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, represents a blend of Christianity and Confucianism. The movement maintains an elaborate organizational structure and claims several hundred thousand members worldwide, but membership has declined since the 1970s. Full-time American membership, which peaked at five thousand to ten thousand, is currently in the range of one thousand to two thousand. At present, church growth is greatest in Latin America and Africa.

Sun Myung Moon: Founder of the Unification Church

The Unification Church was founded by Sun Myung Moon, born Yong Myung Moon in 1920, in what is now North Korea. His family converted to Presbyterianism when he was ten years old. At age sixteen he had a spiritual vision in which he was instructed to complete Jesus' unfinished mission of restoring God's kingdom on earth. By 1944 Moon began gathering disciples. His anticommunism and revisionist Christian theology resulted in his imprisonment on three occasions in the 1940s and 1950s. Following the Korean War he settled in Pusan, founded the Unification Church in 1954, and published his major theological treatise, The Divine Principle (1957). In the late 1950s he dispatched missionaries to Japan and the United States. In 1960 Moon was wedded, for the second time, to Hak Ja Han, who bore thirteen children over the next two decades. In 1971 Moon immigrated to America, which served as his primary residence until the mid-1990s, when he expressed disenchantment with American hedonism and began redirecting his movement's initiatives toward South America. He further announced that he had fulfilled the conditions requisite for the messianic role in the Restoration process (see below).

The Divine Principle

The core of Moon's theology, the Divine Principle, is the sequence of the Creation, Fall, and Restoration. God created the world to reflect his inner, loving nature; Adam and Eve were to share the joy of love and to form a perfect, God-centered family. However, Adam and Eve failed to realize God's purpose, as Eve was spiritually seduced by Satan and prematurely consummated a physical relationship with Adam. Sexual indiscretion thus constituted the Fall, the ultimate source of human sinfulness, and humanity thereby became rooted in a satanic lineage. Humans bear responsibility and must pay indemnity for their sins to earn the opportunity for Restoration. Jesus offered the most recent such opportunity. Although he was successful in creating the basis for spiritual Restoration (through acceptance of him as savior), he was crucified before achieving physical Restoration by establishing a new lineage of God-centered families. Moon represents the new messianic figure who can complete the Restoration process by bringing all relationships and institutions out of the satanic into the God-centered domain if humanity embraces his leadership.

Organization

Moon is a successful corporate executive with a network of enterprises in Korea, Japan, and North and South America. These corporations include industrial, food, fishing, newspaper publishing (most notably the Washington Times), consumer goods, and recreational enterprises. In the United States, corporations are organized through a holding company, Unification Church International, with profits redistributed to Moon's religious agenda. These projects and organizations include a broad range of political, economic, social, intellectual, and artistic initiatives that are all intended to link individuals and organizations to his messianic mission. The primary source of funding has been Japan; businesses elsewhere have had mixed economic fortunes. Recent organizational changes include the founding in Brazil of the New Hope communities, which Unificationists regard as the new Garden of Eden, and Moon's replacement of the Unification Church as the organizational vehicle for his mission with the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, which sponsors lectures and programs supporting moral and family values.

The central project of Restoration is the creation of God-centered families; as the True Parents, Moon and his wife initiate this new spiritual lineage through the blessing (marriage) ritual. There have been a succession of blessings in mass ceremonies, generally held at outdoor stadiums and broadcast worldwide. The most recent such ceremony was held in 1998; it involved 30,000 couples on-site and 3.5 million overall (most were non-Unificationists renewing their marriage vows). During the 1970s and 1980s, Unificationist membership involved intense, full-time commitment, with married couples pursuing movement projects independently. More recently Moon has emphasized the home church, which encourages families to return to their former faiths to create bridges between Unificationism and other denominations.

Controversy

The Unification Church has been embroiled in controversy since its inception. Moon was imprisoned briefly in the United States on tax-evasion charges; the church became the most prominent target of the anticult movement during the 1970s for allegedly brainwashing adherents and was the target of federal and state legislative investigations; conservative Christian groups have continued to denounce Moon's theology and messianic claims; and the National Council of Churches has denied the church membership. Most recently, two daughters and a daughter-in-law have distanced themselves from Moon, and the daughter-in-law has offered public accounts of abusive family relationships within the church.