The Darker Side of Sun Moon

Ladies and gentlemen, if there is illness in your home, do you not need a doctor from outside? God has sent me to America in the role of a doctor, in the role of a fire fighter ... For the last three years, with my entire heart and soul I have been teaching American youth a new revelation from God.

The speaker was that sleek, self-anointed savior from Korea, Sun Myung Moon, 56, and his podium last week was in New York's Yankee Stadium. As the head of the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, Reverend Moon, whose country was once a target for Christian missionaries, is now three years into his program for turning the tables on the West and evangelizing it for his own (TIME, Nov. 10). He had forecast an overflow crowd of 200,000, perhaps even an absurd million, for his stadium extravaganza. In preparation, 1,500 of his relentlessly smiling young followers held brass-band rallies from Harlem to Wall Street, plastered every available wall with red-white-and-blue posters bearing Moon's smiling face, and handed out free tickets to the "God Bless America Festival." In a shrewd civic come-on, platoons of Moonies donned white jumpsuits, armed themselves with brooms and plastic bags and cheerfully worked from neighborhood to neighborhood tidying up city streets.

In the event, the stadium seating 54,000 was only about half full. Many who did come left long before the end of Moon's hour-long harangue, punched out in rough, guttural Korean and translated into English paragraph by paragraph. Outside the stadium, 50 groups of Moon's foes paraded and picketed with signs like A PROPHET FOR PROFIT, and NO SLAVE LABOR ALLOWED. Among the most vociferous of the demonstrators were parents of his disciples, who for the most part lose contact with their families upon joining Moon's religion.

The Unification Church is only one of dozens of religious cults that are drawing young Americans these days. Other notable ones are Hare Krishna, the Children of God, Brother Julius, Love Israel and the Divine Light Mission. But Moon's penchant for publicity and totalitarian trappings attracts the most attention and stirs the strongest emotions --not only in the U.S., where he claims 30,000 followers, but in South Korea, where he claims 300,000 and in Japan 200,000. His small following in Europe has grown rapidly in the past few years. There are 1,000 in France, 6,000 in West Germany.

Ginseng Tea. To some spectators in New York City in the weeks leading up to his rally, his cadres of shorthaired, fresh-faced youths marching and singing together were a reminder of early Nazi days. So are the anti-Semitic doctrines expressed in Moon's religious writings, though many of his followers are young Jews. Moon's wealth and his political connections and apparatus are also under increasing scrutiny. He never seems to lack funds with which to fly or bus squads of converts wherever he needs them. Strongly antiCommunist, Moon orates frequently about politics. An industrialist back home in South Korea, he is staunch in his support of President Park Chung Hee, and during the

Watergate crisis, met privately with Nixon and took out full-page ads supporting him.

Moon lives in baronial splendor with his second wife and eight of his nine children overlooking the Hudson River. In the past few years his church, or its satellite organizations, has invested at least $19 million in California and the New York City area. Latest purchase: Manhattan's Hotel New Yorker, for over $5 million.

Where does the money come from?

Although there have been rumors of large donations from industries in Japan and Korea, this is not the case. But Moon has interests in a number of businesses in many countries, among them South Korea's II Hwa pharmaceutical company, which exports ginseng tea, and Tong II Industries, which manufac tures air rifles. Moon exploits the talent and energy of his hard-core disciples, who go on the streets to sell flowers, candles, peanuts and ginseng tea. Their take is considerable--perhaps $10 million a year, and because his cult is legally a religion, all income is tax free. "They told us that our work bought the Hotel New Yorker," a Moonie street peddler said proudly last week. It is also Moonies who are remodeling the hotel to make it a Unification Church hostel and headquarters.

The Moonies are overeducated for their work. Drawn mostly from middle-class families, many were college students originally attracted to the movement by various idealistic-sounding causes. Fort Worth debutante Cynthia Slaughter was drawn by an ad seeking someone interested in the "betterment of mankind" (see box page 50). Others learn about the movement when they go to discussions of "ecology," "morality," and the spiritual salvation of the U.S.

Once seduced into their weird new world, converts are surrounded always by warm, supportive Brothers and Sisters and are reassured by smiles, friendly pats and handholding (called "love bombing"). Premarital sex, however, is banned, as are drugs, and the moralistic tone of the centers generally attracts those looking for discipline and order. The disciples sleep only five or six hours a day, eat simply and are assigned tasks such as domestic work, proselytizing or selling. In order to peddle their wares they may claim to be helping drug addicts, orphans, anybody--since such lies are merely "heavenly deceit."

Heretics' Insights. The Moonies become infused with the "Divine Principle," Moon's doctrine as spelled out in his book, the movement's bible. Many converts come to believe that Moon is a second Messiah who will exceed Jesus Christ in glory. They also learn Moon's law of indemnity. Both their sins and their ancestors' must be atoned for through nonstop exertion. Many of them turn over their bank accounts to the movement, and willingly cut themselves off from their own families. They honor, even pray to, Moon and his wife, as their "true parents."

Some observers are tolerant of the Moonies. "I just wonder why we can't get more motivation like the Moon motivation in our own churches," says the Rev. Dan Potter, director of the Council of Churches of the City of New York, which nevertheless has refused to admit the Unification Church to its membership. Adds Potter: "We are all a collection of groups grown out of the insights of so-called heretics." Religious orders have long sequestered their initiates from the world, and ceaseless work can be seen as beneficial.

Yet there is little evidence that the Moonies' efforts contribute to anything but Moon's coffers, and the glassy-eyed behavior of the youngsters has so alarmed many parents that they have resorted to illegal kidnapings and "deprogrammings" to retrieve their offspring. The best known of the deprogrammers is Ted Patrick, 45, an ex-middleweight fighter and onetime community relations aide for Governor Ronald Reagan in California. Patrick claims to have rescued 1,000 youths from the Unification Church and other cults. Mrs. Jenetta French of Greensboro, N.C., who has "lost" two daughters to Moon, described how Ronda, a former airline stewardess, behaved when Patrick was trying to deprogram her. "She was very childlike. In the car she would sing to drown out what you were saying to her. When Patrick tried to talk to her, she hummed, put her fingers in her ears, hid behind a piece of paper, anything to keep from listening." Eventually Ronda went back to Moon.

Parents in France, West Germany and other countries are also alarmed. After Mikio Goto, 19, dropped out of college and started peddling ginseng tea on Tokyo streets for Master Moon, his father formed an association of victims' parents, kidnaped his son, and "brainwashed him out of insanity."

Blood Cleansing. The Pied Piper of this international youth brigade was born into a Presbyterian family in Chongju-Gun, in northern Korea. He attended a pentecostal church, and on Easter Sunday of 1936, he reports, Jesus appeared and told him to carry out his unfinished task by completing man's salvation. Moon got married in 1944 but left his pregnant wife behind in Seoul to go to preach in the north. There, in 1948, he was imprisoned.

According to a former North Korean army officer who was in prison with him at the time, Moon received a seven-year sentence because he had contributed to "social disorder": he had been proclaiming the imminent coming of the second Messiah in Korea. When the Chinese pushed the U.N. troops out of North Korea in 1950, Moon fled to the south and later started a church in Seoul. In those days, say early members of the sect, ritual sex characterized the Moon communes. Since Moon was a pure man, sex with him ("blood cleansing") was supposed to purify both body and soul, and marriages of other cultists were in fact invalid until the wives slept with Moon. As the cult became bigger, the blood-cleansing rites were abandoned, but today Moon arranges his disciples' marriages, and after a mass wedding ceremony in Seoul in 1970 enjoined 1,500 newlyweds from sex for 40 days.

Over the years, beginning in the '50s, Moon wrote and rewrote the Divine Principle. According to him, Jesus was supposed to marry an ideal wife and begin the "perfect family." He failed in this endeavor because he was crucified by his own people. For this reason Jews suffer from "collective sin."

Since Jesus failed, a new Messiah must come to complete the task of building the "perfect family." According to Divine Principle, the time for this "Lord of the Second Advent" to be born was right after World War I, and the place, Korea.

Thinking Big. Moon's notoriety and success are causing him trouble. In February, Kansas Senator Robert Dole held a meeting of 400 people from 30 states to discuss the Unification Church before representatives of various federal agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Labor. Other Washington hearings on the cult's activities are being scheduled. Since some government officials believe there are extremely close ties between the Moonies, the Korean CIA and the Park regime, such investigations plus Moon's often unsavory publicity may build up enough resistance in Congress to be reflected in votes against aid to South Korea. As a result of the recent furor, there are indications that Moon's high-level support at home considers him a political liability.

Fervent Moon disciples merely compare their setbacks and the antagonism they encounter to the persecution of Christ, and their leaders are far from discouraged. Unfazed by the halfhearted turnout at Yankee Stadium, they plan another, even more ambitious Bicentennial rally in Washington, D.C. this fall, and as for real estate, they continue to think big. Last week the U.S. leader of the Unification Church, Neil Salonen, declared: "It is our view that the first and the best of things should be dedicated to God." Next major projected purchase: the Empire State Building.

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