Shine On, Sun Myung Moon

...The new bank, which aims to appeal to an Oriental clientele, listed among its founders investigative columnist Jack Anderson, CBS News reporter Connie Chung, and a weU-known Washington karate school operator, Jhoon Rhee...

...Sun Myung Moon, known to his devoted followers as Lord of the Second Advent...

...But they will have to be answered if the death of socialism is not simply to mean a general disintegration into political pseudo-socialist forms whose only common element is a repudiation, in the name of "equality," of individual liberty as a prime political value...

...Over the next nine years, with the advice and assistance of such luminaries as Moses, Buddha, and Jesus, and with a direct line of communication with God, Moon received and synthesized the revelation later to be published as/~'vtne Priuciple...

...In Minneapolis, Dorothy Percic, a Unification Church member, is suing her parents and two brothers for damages, charging they held her captive for 26 days while trying to break her ties with the sect...

...Eddy's spiritual heirs would acquire the prosperous bourgeois paunch they wear today...

...Time and again God is shown pained and anxious, an exiled monarch waiting for a Cid to drive out the usurpers and restore His reign...

...We'd sell the candles to the church at cost, and the church would sell them at 300 or 400 percent profit door-to-door...

...Witnesses pointed to enforced lack of sleep, a poor diet, restricted communication between members and their families, and insistence on the part of church superiors that efforts by parents to lead their children away were ' ' satanic...

...For Sun Myung Moon ;t has been a long and determined journey to this eccentric setting beneath Washington's obelisk...

...Fra.ncis Elmo, associate professor of religious education, remains a priest of the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, but has been given a leave of absence by Cardinal Cooke...

...His intellectual thirst led him from undergraduate work at Abilene Christian College on the arid plains of west Texas to advanced studies at the (Catholic) Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto, to Harvard Divinity School, and finally, to Germany and the University of Tuebingen, where he took his doctorate from the Protestant faculty...

...And the messiah...

...It should come as no surprise, then, if the Republic endures, to see Sun Moon's successor 100 years from now, hailing the Tercentenary and imminently awaiting the Millennium...

...Lewis shows a keen imagination in his choice of historical examples...

...And Dr...

...There were only about 120 members in the United States at that time," Wood recalls...

...This was already determined at the time of Jesus' crucifixion," he reports and goes on to explain with dumbfounding simplicity: "The thief crucified on Jesus' right side foreshadowed the democratic world, and the thief crucified on Jesus' left side represented the Communist world...

...others are plainly bewildered...

...The tactic is not always successful...

...I think that Moon is the Joe Smith of the twentieth century...

...When word of Moon's other controversial activities was circulated among participants, economist Kenneth Boulding and sociologist Amitai Etzioni withdrew as "section chairmen...

...In the beginning, God created Adam and Eve sinless and ordained that they procreate to establish a perfect race...

...This summer a subcommittee of the House Committee on International Relations asked federal agents to investigate reports that Sun Myung Moon had secrr gained control of the bank...

...Employment opportunities were also attractive enough to bring three Catholic priests, a rabbi, a minister of the Reformed Church of America, and a Greek Orthodox communicant---a!l with doctorates from prominent institutions--to the Unification faculty...

...They've been very co-operative in bringing out hundreds of clean-cut young people for responsible anti-Communist activities," remarked a former organizer for the Young Republican National Federation...

...When I was 12 years old," he recalls, "I started praying for extraordinary things...

...But his God does appear as a curiously limited being, susceptible to the current Weltsdsmerz, alienation...

...And, even more important, what can a liberal capitalist society do about the decline of religious beliefs and traditional values--a decline organically rooted in liberal capitalism's conception of this realm as an essentially "private affair" neither needing nor meriting public sanction...

...Rhee, a popular figure on Capitol Hill whose karate students include Representatives J ames W. Symington and Richard H. Ichord of Missouri and Sen...

...In Moon's heaven the Christian trinitarian God gives way to an Oriental dualistic Godhead...

...Sure, he's a heretic...

...At last the time arrives for the main event--a fiery chastening delivered in ringing Korean and translated, paragraph-by-paragraph, into the halting English of a retired Korean army officer...

...the women are garbed in ankle-length white dresses...

...What does the future hold for this remarkable movement, Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church...

...Other problems indigenous to a liberal capitalist society are still virgin territory so far as constructive theory is concerned...

...Thus, despite its exotic origins, the Unification Church measures up to many of the marks of a homegrown American civil religion: the unabashed patriotism, the militant anti-Communism, and--especially appealing to the Yankee Puritan tradition--the notion of America as the new Israel...

...Nine months ago, a federal charter was granted to establish the Diplomat National Bank in Washington, D.C...

...And even if millennial expectations go unfulfilled, the Moonies can rely on the salutary forgetfulness of the Americans...

...Joseph P. DHgga Os, Myra& Moou Korccm i~d, stri~is:, imprerawio, and umrdd-br Massif, S u Mym, g Moo* ~ploys ati.CoaHu~, old.f~shio~d reviualism, ad d power~ p.blic, re/4tio.s mschi~ to h,Ji/d . bizarrc--#~ bis r The scene is the Washington Monument...

...Raymond de Jaegher denounced Moon's activities as subversive of the family, and he warned of the incompatibility of Moon' s teachings with Christian doctrine...

...The dead idea of socialism is now putrifying both the world's mind and the world's body...

...That would be the whole gloomy story had not God announced to Sun Myung Moon that Christ was not his only son...

...At subcommittee hearings in June, chairman Rep...

...Typically, a disoriented young person responds to the warm invitation of the Moonie proselyte and accepts the embrace of the communal "family...

...And who would have thought the same of Joe Smith's bedraggled Mormon followers...

...Jehovah's Witnesses), for instance, has thrived now for nearly 60 years with the slogan, "Millions Now Living Will Never Die...

...And I'm at open war with the Hitchcock Presbyterian Church in White Plains...

...The New Hope Singers perform, swelling with bland energy reminiscent of "Up With People...

...These and other questions will continue to make any "counter-reformation" on the part of liberal capitalism an exceedingly fragile enterprise...

...Practically all of the truly popular and widespread support for a "welfare state" would be satisfied by a mixture of voluntary and compulsory insurance schemes--old-age insurance, disability insurance, unemployment insurance, medical insurance--that are reason...

...Moon's dogmatic literature withholds his name, but on close examination it reveals that he was born in Korea airca 1920...

...He likens, for instance, Moon's blend of Oriental philosophy and millennialism to Augustine's synthesis of neo-platonism and Christian doctrine...

...Last fall, Lewis accepted an appointment to teach church history at the newlyopened Unification Theological Seminary at Barrytown, New York...

...FLF publishes a well-produced fortnightly, The Rising Tide, reprinting anti-Communist articles from social-democrat groups such as the Youth Institute for Peace in the Middle East and conservative organizations such as the American Security Council...

...As Cardinal Newman once observed, it is not too hard to show the flaws in any system of thought, religious or political, but an erroneous idea can be expelled from the mind only by the active presence of another idea...

...In 1972 and 1973, Wood estimates, his commune produced candles worth $1.3 million to the church...

...Wood joined the Unification Church in 1969 at Berkeley, California, after leaving school at Sewanee, Tennessee, and hitchhiking in what he described as a "spiritual search...

...Asked about the FLF, leaders of some conservative and antiCommunist groups acknowledged co-operative activities and seemed untroubled that nearly all of the FLF members were at the same time "Moonies...

...As honorary chairman, Nobel laureate Robert Mulliken headed an impressive organizing committee...

...Wood and the other members of the Maryland commune, by January 1974 quite skeptical of the Unification doctrine, left the church...

...Moon's newly.proclaimed revelations incurred him excommunication by the Presbyterian Church, and in 1954 he launched the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity-better known to Koreans as the Unification Cult, or to Americans by the more dignified "Unification Church...

...That's the temptation of all millennialist movements...

...The date, September 18...

...By 1965 Moon was prepared to journey to America, or as he calls it, the new Promised Land...

...What brought Warren Lewis to Barrytown and the stormy center of the Unification Church...

...A gawking throng gathers between the sweeping arcs of flags and bunting...

...In its order, the Taiwanese Executive Yuan (Cabinet) cited the church for "offending good customs and social stability, [being] detrimental to the health of thepeople's body and mind, and opposing seriously the Chinese traditional ethics...

...God's chief antagonist, according to Moon, is Leftism, especially its more virulent strain, Communism...

...The problem, at the moment, is to persuade the business community and the "conservative" (i.e., anti-socialis0 political parties of their practicality...

...But so were Luther and Zwingli...

...But Christ renounced an earthly kingdom and died on a cross without ever marrying and founding the perfect race...

...Theirs is a serious movement...

...Another tax-exempt foundation established by Moon is the International Cultural Foundation...

...2) that the movement will not last long after the passing of Moon and the disbursement of his estate...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1976 9 also gives a great deal of coverage to the anti-Communist statements of Sun Myung Moon...

...All they want to talk about is the Moon thing...

...In Taiwan, for instance, the Kuomintang government last year banned all activities of the Unification Churchgremarkably in spite of Moon's vigorous anti-Communism...

...The event, the "Bicentennial God Bless America Festival...

...Like the New Hope Singers, Sunburst's men wear ruffled shirts and butterfly-bow ties, holding neutral ground between formal and hip...

...Born to a Presbyterian family in northern Korea in 1920, Moon showed early aspirations for saintly celebrity...

...at first, Moon agreed to the solem0a task...

...It has to be removed and buried--with appropriate honors if that will help...

...To understand how America attains most-favored.nation status in Moon's economy of salvation, it is necessary to rehearse the whole of biblical and secular history as revised and amended in Divine Principle...

...His heart is broken...

...Asked for his views on Moon and his .'eachings, Warren Lewis speaks candidly and with a relaxed historical perspective...

...Donald M. Fraser of Minnesota sought evidence establishing a link between Moon's activities and the confusing web of alleged espionage in this country on the part of the South Korean Central Intelligence Agency, but the testimony was inconclusive...

...I received a revelation through which I learned that God's grief is great," declares Moon...

...Moon is a neo-mediaeval in that he wishes to reunite science and faith, religion and politics," Lewis says...

...Why do we call the democratic faction in politics 'right,' and the Communist faction 'left?' " muses Moon...

...What, for instance, shall we do about the government of those most peculiar capitalist institutions, the large corperations--bureaucratic (and, in a sense, "collectivist") versions of capitalist enterprise that Adam Smith would surely have detested...

...The program continues with Sunburst, described as a "folk-gospel" group...

...Martin Marty of the University of Chicago reports that the Unification seminary's prospectus offered starting salaries up to $20,000-quite a bit above scale in today's depressed academic marke...

...White Plains, New York is the headquarters of one of the national parents' organizations opposing Moon...

...the Watchtower Society (a.k.a...

...Last November the ICF spent t400,000 to attract eminent natural and social scientists to the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences, held at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York...

...But the real danger in the Unification Church is that it really absorbs the best in the person who joins...

...He needs His champion to succeed in [His] work...

...10 The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1976...

...The Unification Church conducts its missionary work almost exclusively among young people--the average age of a "Moonie" is 24...

...On Easter morning of 1936, he claims, Jesus appeared to him and asked him to establish God's kingdom on earth...

...Indeed it is...

...Wood rose quickly in the hierarchy, and by early 1971 he was assigned to organize a commune at the University of Maryland...

...Parents of young Moomes have formed at least two national organizations seeking recourse against what they charge is coerced estrangement from their children...

...One such convert was Allen Tate Wood...

...As it happens, says Moon, a new messiah is abroad in the land at this very hour, preparing to set up God's kingdom on earth--a peacefill world-family, commingling East and West...

...some church spokesmen claim as many as 30,000--and it is caught amid a swirl of legal controversy...

...If we get the decision we anticipate, we will ask Boslooper to leave [the Unification seminary] and he will leave...

...But Nobelist Eugene Wigner of Princeton University and Morton Kaplan of the Universi W of Chicago, among others, remained on as "section chairmen," and the 350odd participants deemed the conference a moderate success without undue intrusion of ideology or Unification dogma...

...A folk ballet follows, then fireworks...

...The essential thing about the Unification moverrrtent," he claims, "is that whatever it does, it does to gain power or money and to exalt Moon--whether it's by anti-Communism or ecology...

...I asked for wisdom greater than Solomon's, for faith greatfr than the Apostle Paul's and for love greater than the love Jesus had...

...ably (if not perfectly) compatible with a liberal capitalist society...

...Thomas Boslooper, professor of bibilical studies, an ordained minister in the Reformed Church of America, is now under investigation by his denomination's National Theological Commission...

...My special area of interest in church history has been that of heretical sectarian movements," he remarks, "and when I first came to Barrytown I told Mr...

...They seemed clean-cut, refreshing," said the head of a Catholic anti-Communi~,t organization...

...When young Thomas Aquinas, against the wishes of his parents, joined the Dominican friars, his brothers abducted him, locked him up in a castle, and even offered the voluptuous allures of a courtesan as inducement to renounce his religious "folly...

...The "polarity of God" (to use Moon's expression) sets opposing forces of male and female within the same divine person...

...Theprimum mobile around which all this hubbub spins is the Rev...

...Not an easy mission, but not in principle an intractable one...

...During the following decade, as Moon's missionary zeal won converts to the new sect, his business acumen built for him a sizable industrial fortune-the sale of manufactured goods ranging from munitions to ginseng tea yielding an estimated $15 million annually...

...Over the past quarter century, a host of "conservative" and "neo-conservative" economists and social critics have showed us how such mechanisms could and would work, and their intellectual victory over earlier "Fabian" conceptions of social reform has been decisive...

...The nation chosen 8 The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1976 to wage the expected battle with the powers of darkness is America...

...Satan foiled the plan by seducing Eve, thus polluting the human bloodline...

...While the battle continues between angered parents and the Unification Church, Sun Myung Moon moves on to other projects, equipped with seemingly endless resources of money and audacity...

...The bad publicity in connection with Moon is not to our liking," says Earl Winters, secretary of the Reformed Church's New Jersey Synod...

...perhaps he reckons the male-female personage a sticky wicket...

...The Freedom Leadership Foundation of Washington, D.C...

...Who would have imagined, back in the lean years, that Mrs...

...The catalogue of far-fetched exegeses could go on and on...

...The people of Israel were next chosen to pave the way for the coming of God's son, Jesus Christ...

...In some countries without that protection, the church has not fared so well...

...is a tax-exempt educational organization" dedicated to developing the standards of leadership necessary to advance the cause of freedom in the struggle against Communism...

...moreover, its masthead lists Moon as founder and Nell A Salonen as president of the FLF...

...Rev...

...Meanwhile some American parents have taken a more drastic course--abducting their children from Unification Church centers and having them "deprogrammed" by Ted Patrick, who has devised a counter-approach to the alleged "brainwashing...

...Moon's coy claim to the messiah's throne has placed him in suspicion by the more orthodox churchmen, but for sheer innovation in theology, he deserves the envy of trendy divines...

...But Moon and his movement have encountered some opposition on the Right...

...But there is Moon's movement to consider, and there are his followers--and ex-followers...

...I ruin every party I go to these days," says Lewis...

...Moon, of course, is also the fo,mder of the Unification Church, and Saloner~ its president...

...Like any other sect in America, the Unification Church enjoys the Constitutional guarantee to free exercise...

...The novice then agrees to attend a session of intense "training" at Barrytown, New York, or one of several other regional centers...

...Today Wood is completing studies in clinical psychology at Rutgers University...

...Norman Cousins and Buckminster Fuller also asked to be dropped from the program...

...The crowd reacts with ambivalence: some stand reverently, awe-struck...

...Moon anthropomorphizes his God sparingly...

...The third option seems the most likely to prevail, for notwithstanding-and perhaps in jaded reaction to--the rise of secularism, America remains fertile soil for new and ever more improbable cults...

...A year later, we bought a big house out in the country at Upper Marlboro," he recalls, "and we started a candle factory...

...or (3) that the cult will be co-opted as a "respectable" American denomination...

...The pay is good...

...Writing in the conservative Catholic weekly, The Wanderer, Rev...

...Apparently the heat of controversy surrounding Moon's church has already given his new seminary faculty a hot foot or two...

...Moon, 'You are the outstanding heretical sectarian of our time.' " But Lewis hastens to add, "These people [Moon and his associates] are no fools...

...Well," he drawls, "it was a mighty fine offer of a job...

...Warren Lewis is, by his own account, a communicant in the "right-wing branch of the Disciples of Christ," the Church of Christ...

...Ironically, only liberal capitalism can perform that funereal task...

...The public scorn and government harassment confronting the Unification Church is trifling compared with that which the Mormons faced and overcame...

...Since 1974 the Unification Church has grown remarkably--a conservative estimate of the membership is 5,000...

...Said Margaret Finger, of Lamed, Kansas, after Ted Patrick's treatment, "He made me think for myself again...

...As a full-fledged member, or "Pioneer," he returns to an austere communal life with a rigorous work schedule--up to 16 hours a day proselytizing and selling candy or flowers to benefit the church...

...But The Rising Tide "While "deprogramming" may be a relatively new addition to our vocabulary, the practice isnot without historical antecedent...

...Apparently it was not long, then, before God took notice of young Moon and accorded him the divine appointment he had so avidly sought...

...Quentin Burdick of North Dakota, apparently sold his interest in the bank to Moon and a number of top church leaders...

...His well-promoted activities have brought him into alliances with leading anti-Communists in and out of government, with respected academics from Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish theological faculties, and even with Nobel laureates...

...At that meeting a common accusation from the parents and ex-Moonies was that the rigors of Unification initiates' training amount to "brainwashing...

...Robert Dole of Kansas made available the Senate Caucus Room and presided over an informal meeting for concerned parents last February 18...

...Yet among those successfully deprogrammed, there are expressions of gratitude for regained freedom...

...After you've been through something like this, it's very difficult to resume an active spiritual life...

...The subject of one attempted ydeprogramming," Wendy Helender of 'Guilford, Connecticut, slipped back into the Unification fold...

...When her parents sued the church to regain custody of their daughter, a District of Columbia Superior Court dismissed the case, finding insufficient evidence that the church had employed "any techniques substantially different from those which are used by other organizations for purposes of converting or proselytizing...

...Hesitant Joseph P. Duggan, who graduated this year from the University of Dallas, is assistant managing editor of The Alternative...

...There are, it seems, three scenarios: (1) that Moon's prophecies and messianic claims are true and that the last days are upon us--a consideration surely as stunning as a hail of brimstone...