Sun Myung Moon

Sun Myung Moon, born in 1920, founder of the Unification Church, officially known as the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity. Moon was born in the rural P'yôngan province of Korea (now part of North Korea). When he was ten years old, his family converted to a Pentecostal form of Presbyterianism that encouraged visions and other practices thought to stem from spiritual gifts (see Pentecostal Churches). In 1936, at the age of 16, he claimed to have a vision in which Jesus Christ announced that Moon had been chosen by God to complete the restoration of the Kingdom of God on earth. However, Moon did not begin publicly preaching and spreading the news of his ongoing revelations until 1946.

After graduating from high school in Seoul, South Korea, Moon continued his studies in Japan at Tokyo’s Waseda University. Moon did not graduate and after World War II ended with Japan’s defeat in 1945, he returned to Korea. From 1948 to 1950 he was imprisoned by North Korean Communists. Moon founded his church in 1954 amid the poverty and the political and social instability that followed the Korean War (1950-1953). By 1959 the first missionaries from the church arrived on the West Coast of the United States, although the Unificationist movement saw significant growth in America only after Moon came to the country to lead it in the 1970s. Meanwhile, Moon had become a wealthy industrialist by employing members of his church at his factories in South Korea and Japan, which manufactured products such as arms for the Korean military, ginseng extract, and porcelain vases.

Moon’s theology mixes Judeo-Christian ideas with Korean folk religion. According to Unificationist beliefs, the Romans killed Jesus Christ before he could form a sinless, perfect family for the world to imitate. Moreover, Jesus was only one in a succession of biblical figures who have attempted to establish the Kingdom of God on earth, beginning with Adam and Eve and continuing to the present day. During the 1970s Moon’s followers hinted that he was the Lord of the Second Advent—that is, the new messiah elected to carry on where Jesus had failed. Today the church openly acknowledges Moon as Jesus’ successor.

The Unification Church’s high-pressure recruitment methods and continual fundraising, which enjoys the tax-exempt status granted to religious groups, have made the movement extremely controversial. In 1982 Moon began an 18-month prison sentence for income tax evasion. Beginning in the mid-1980s Moon, who is an ardent anti-Communist, began to gain allies among conservative political groups in the United States by making financial contributions to them. He also founded The Washington Times, a newspaper that promotes conservative causes. His political activities have earned him a respectability he never enjoyed during the 1970s, when a host of parents’ groups and former members of Moon’s church denounced him in the media for using brainwashing techniques to recruit members.