Sun Myung Moon
Sun Myung Moon was a Korean religious leader and the founder of the Unification Church, born in present-day North Korea in 1920. He experienced a significant religious awakening in 1935, claiming to have received revelations from God, which he believed tasked him with completing the work of salvation initiated by Jesus. Moon established the Unification Church in 1954 in South Korea, promoting a blend of Christian teachings, Eastern mysticism, and a strong anti-communist stance. His teachings, encapsulated in the "Divine Principle," emphasize the importance of perfect marriages and the belief in a "Lord of the Second Advent."
Throughout his life, Moon's ministry was marked by controversy, including allegations of cult-like practices and financial misconduct. He became well-known for conducting mass wedding ceremonies, sometimes uniting thousands of couples at once, often with minimal prior acquaintance. Despite establishing a significant following in Korea and Japan, his influence in the West remained limited, with membership in the United States estimated at under ten thousand. Moon's death in 2012 led to challenges within the church, including family disputes and questions about its future direction, especially under the leadership of his widow, Hak Ja Han Moon.
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Sun Myung Moon
Korean religious leader
- Born: January 6, 1920
- Birthplace: Kwangju Sangsa Ri, Pyungan Bukedo Province, Korea (now in North Korea)
- Died: September 3, 2012
Moon founded the Unification Church with the mission of uniting Christians worldwide. The church, however, has been plagued by controversy in the United States since the 1970s, and it achieved a high profile after it was accused of cultlike practices in seeking potential converts. Moon and his church have been active supporters of conservative politics and politicians, raising the concerns of proponents of the separation of church and state.
Early Life
Sun Myung Moon (suhn myuhng mewn) was born to Moon Kyung-yoo and Kim Kyung-gye in Korea (now North Korea), which was, at the time, ruled by Japan. Moon’s family held traditional Confucian beliefs, and Moon studied at a Confucian school, but the family became Presbyterian when Moon was ten years old.
Moon’s religious experiences date back to April 17, 1935, when he claimed to have received his first major revelation from God. He reported having a vision in which Jesus told him to complete the salvation of humans that was started two thousand years earlier. Later, Moon claimed to have other visionary talks with Moses, Buddha, and other spiritual luminaries. Moon attended high school in Seoul (now in South Korea), and during World War II, he studied electrical engineering in Japan.
Moon married in 1944, but he soon left his wife and began preaching in northern Korea. It was here that he founded his own public religion in 1946, establishing the Broad Sea Church in Pyongyang. Soon, however, he was arrested and jailed by Communist authorities who charged him with disturbing the social order. After being released that same year he resumed his preaching, only to be arrested again and sentenced to five years in prison. On October 14, 1950, Moon was freed by United Nations troops. Church members recognize this date as a day for all members of the Unification Church around the world to profess their faith. Following his release from prison, Moon went to Pusan, South Korea, where he worked as a harbor laborer. He built his first church here out of discarded boxes. On May 1, 1954, in Seoul, Moon founded the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, better known as the Unification Church.
Life’s Work
Moon created controversy during the formative years of the church in Korea. Along with some of his followers, he was jailed for a short time on charges ranging from military draft evasion, to promiscuity. Charges were later dropped, however.
Moon’s Divine Principle (1957, 1966; English translation, 1973), the sacred text of the Unification Church, is based on what he called his revelations from God. This text and speeches by Moon are considered the authorities on Unification practice. The major components of the beliefs combine Christianity, Eastern mysticism, and anticommunism. According to the Divine Principle, God is the union of male and female forces. The purpose of creation was to establish a kingdom of God on Earth, in which these forces would be mirrored in marriages of perfect men and women. God intended Adam and Eve to marry and to have perfect children, but Satan, embodied in the snake, seduced Eve, who passed her impurity on to Adam, thus bringing the Fall of Man. God then sent Jesus to redeem humankind from sin by marrying and producing a perfect race, but Jesus failed by dying before he married.
The Divine Principle also states that the physical salvation of humans will be accomplished by the Lord of the Second Advent. This second Christ will be born on Earth to accomplish the physical salvation of humanity. The Lord of the Second Advent will arrive two thousand years after the time of Jesus. According to Moon’s followers, Moon was the new Messiah. Moon related to his followers that he communicated with God daily and was told by God to save the world from moral corruption, division within Christianity, and communism.
Moon’s church grew in South Korea in the 1950s. By 1957, churches were established in thirty Korean cities and towns. In 1958, the first Unification missionary went to Japan, and in 1959, the first missionary to the United States, Young Oon Kim, settled originally in Eugene, Oregon, where she was a student at the University of Oregon. Kim also began to proselytize, and she translated the Divine Principle into English by 1973. Later, she and a few followers moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where they sought converts. Other missionaries soon followed, each gathering their own followers and emphasizing their own brand of Unificationism.
In 1960, Moon married his second wife, Hak Ja Han, in a ceremony called the Holy Marriage. To church followers this marked the beginning of the restoration of humankind back into God’s lineage. Moon first came to the United States in 1965 to prevent the fractionalization of the various Unification Church groups. He moved to an estate north of New York City in 1971, and brought the disparate groups together to form a single, unified entity. Controversy followed Moon and the Unification Church to the United States.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Unification Church, by this time considered by many to be a cult, was accused of brainwashing potential converts so that they would join the movement. Once converted, these so-called Moonies raised funds for the Church, spending long hours selling flowers and candles in the streets. Parents would hire anticultists to remove their children from the church and deprogram them. The Unification Church also became well known for its mass weddings. Many of the couples married people handpicked for them by Reverend Moon and his wife. In some cases soon-to-be couples had met just days before the ceremony, and some did not even share the same language. In 1982, Moon blessed 2,100 couples in a ceremony at Madison Square Garden in New York. In 1997, he blessed 28,000 couples in Washington, DC. In 1999, 40,000 couples participated in a blessing ceremony in Seoul, South Korea.
The Unification Church also has generated controversy over its financial practices. It purchased numerous parcels of real estate in the United States and developed a vast financial empire of at least 335 closely affiliated companies worldwide, 280 of those companies in the United States. In 1983, Moon was convicted of income-tax evasion by the US government, and was sentenced to eighteen months in a federal correctional institution in Danbury, Connecticut.
The church has spent hundreds of millions of dollars reaching out to political conservatives in the United States. It has given funds to conservative political organizations, and has created a number of political groups, including the American Freedom Coalition, CAUSA United States and CAUSA International (named for the Latin causa, or cause), and the American Leadership Conference. It also acquired a vast media empire, with holdings that included the Washington Times, the New York City Tribune, Insight magazine, the World Media Association, and News World Communication. It also has managing control of the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Moon died on September 3, 2012, in Gapyeong, South Korea of complications from pneumonia. He was ninety two.
Significance
While Moon created the Unification Church with the stated mission of uniting Christians worldwide, it is a church whose members are mostly in Korea and Japan. With hundreds of thousands of followers in the Far East, it is a success for Moon in Asia, but Moon did not generate a significant following in the Western world. Membership in the United States is estimated to be less than ten thousand persons. What the organization lacks in members, it makes up for in publicity and political influence. In the 2000s, the Unification Church's presence in America began to crumble amid Moon family infighting and revelations of drug use, marital infidelity, and financial irresponsibility among the Moon children. Moon's death in 2012—and reports of an illegitimate child fathered by Moon during his first trip to America—further threatened the church's stability. In the time since his death, Moon's wife has assumed control over much of the church's Korean operations, dismissing her late husband's efforts in America.
Bibliography
Abend, Lisa, Cleo Brock-Abraham, and Andrew Katz. "The Mysterious Provider of Sushi." Time 18 Nov. 2013: 68. Print.
Blake, Marian. "The Fall of the House of Moon." New Republic 25 Nov. 2013: 28–37. Print.
Daschke, Dereck, and W. Michael Ashcraft, eds. New Religious Movements: A Documentary Reader. New York: New York UP, 2005. Print. An excellent resource for primary-source documents that serves as a history of religious bodies, including the Unification Church.
Hong, Nansook. In the Shadow of the Moons: My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Family. New York: Little, 1998. Print. A critical biography of Moon and the Unification Church written by a woman who married Moon’s oldest son when she was fifteen years old. She was an abused wife and privileged member of the church for fourteen years.
Lewis, James R., and Jesper Aagaard Petersen, eds. Controversial New Religions. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. Print. Places the Unification Church in the context of other new religions, some considered cults, that are deemed controversial. Includes the chapter “Spirit Revelation and the Unification Church.”
Neufeld, K. Gordon. Heartbreak and Rage Ten Years Under Sun Myung Moon: A Cult-Survivor’s Memoir. College Station: Virtualbookworm.com, 2002. Print. A negative portrayal of the Unification Church written by a former member who rose to the position of leader-in-training at the Unification Theological Seminary.
Sontag, Frederick. Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church. Nashville: Abington, 1977. Print. One of the earliest works on the Unification Church, this volume discusses the origins, beliefs, and goals of the church and discusses the work of its founder.
Stodelhofer, Shirley. New Truth in the Last Days: My Thirty-Six Years in the Unification Church. Lincoln: Iuniverse, 2006. Print. A pro-Unification Church account written by a church member who taught a course on Reverend Moon’s teachings at the Unification Theological Seminary.
Wakin, Daniel J. "Rev. Sun Myung Moon, Self-Proclaimed Messiah Who Built Religious Movement, Dies at 92." New York Times. New York Times Company, 2 Sept. 2012. Web. 11 Dec. 2013.
Yamamoto, J. Isamu. Unification Church. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995. Print. A short study of the church that also discusses the church’s ideology and the differences between biblical Christianity and Unificationism.