Unification Church (religious movement)

• Formation: 1954

• Founder: Sun Myung Moon

The Unification Church was founded in 1954 in South Korea as a Christian religious movement by Sun Myung Moon. Unification Church beliefs and practices are spelled out in a book called Exposition of Divine Principle, published in 1957. (An earlier, less complete version had come out in 1945.) Moon began preaching in the northern part of Korea following World War II, and the religion expanded rapidly through Korea, Japan, and East Asia. Moon moved to the United States in 1971 and found great success there. According to sociologist Eileen Barker, as quoted by Daniel Wakin in Moon’s obituary, the Unification Church rode "the great wave of new religious movements and alternative religiosity in the 1960s and 1970s in the West." Starting early in the 1990s, Moon’s church made large inroads in Eastern Europe and parts of the former Soviet Union. He died in 2012, but into the mid-2020s, the Unification Church remained active under the leadership of his widow, Hak Ja Han Moon. She was reportedly working on editing the religious texts Moon left behind; meanwhile, one of her sons, angered by disputes over who should have taken over the Unification Church from his father, began a new congregation called Sanctuary Church in Pennsylvania. The number of members remaining in the Unification Church was, as was common since its inception, not reliably reported but was expected to have declined.

Throughout the 1970s, the Unification Church was the subject of allegations that it functioned as a cult, brainwashing its members and holding them within the Church against their wishes. The American media began to refer derisively to members as Moonies, although this term came to be used in a humorous way by believers, including Moon himself. Charges of brainwashing have generally been dismissed over the years, both for their inaccuracy and for the imprecision of the term. In the early years of the twenty-first century, however, Church officials campaigned against the use of the term Moonie. The Church also achieved notoriety, especially in the United States, through spectacular mass wedding ceremonies presided over by Moon, one of the most notable being a wedding of 2500 couples in New York’s Madison Square Garden in 1982.

History

Sun Myung Moon was born in January 1920 in what is now North Korea. According to later writings, Jesus appeared to him on Easter Sunday in 1935 and explained that it was up to Moon to continue the work of humanity’s restoration that had been interrupted by the crucifixion of Jesus. Moon began preaching after World War II, although he was soon arrested by Communist authorities. His official biography claims that he was freed by UN forces in 1950 and that he soon thereafter built his first church using stacks of empty US Army ration boxes. Throughout his life, Moon was a staunch anticommunist and backer of Western anticommunist political figures. In 1982, near the height of his influence, Moon founded the Washington Times newspaper and built it into a powerful, conservative voice.

The political activism of the Unification Church has been a consistent source of controversy over the years. Moon was investigated in the United States for being involved with illegal attempts by South Korea to influence US foreign policy. Church members also believe that its political activism led to persecution as a result of its financial dealings for political reasons. In the early 1980s, Moon served a thirteen-month sentence in a federal penitentiary for a conviction on charges of tax evasion and criminal conspiracy. The case aroused widespread interest among those concerned about freedom of religion and free speech issues. Public figures as disparate as Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School, and Rev. Jerry Falwell spoke out in favor of Moon and the Unification Church. Moon stated at the time, "I would not be standing here today if my skin were white and my religion were Presbyterian. I am here today only because my skin is yellow and my religion is Unification Church."

During the 1990s and the first decade of the new century, the Unification Church dropped out of view in the United States, although it continued to be influential in South Korea and in some former Communist countries. The Unification Church claimed as many as three million members worldwide in the 1970s, although that number was considered by outside experts to be highly exaggerated.

The church, which changed its official name to the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification in 2015, has not been without controversy in the twenty-first century. The Japanese government cracked down on the Unification Church, filed a lawsuit to dissolve the church, held the church to stricter regulations, and ruled that the church had to return specific donations. A man who held a grudge against the church for the loss of his mother’s money was also believed to be involved in the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in July 2022. 

Beliefs and Practices

The work of the Unification Church centers on restoring humankind to the joyful status it had before an original fall from grace. Exposition of Divine Principle states that "all people, in all ages and places…have an original mind which inclines them to repel evil and seek goodness. …[Though] fallen human beings [are] incapable of leading a life of total goodness, ….the ultimate desire of the ages is to attain a world of goodness" (chap. 3, section 2.3).

Although the Unification Church holds itself to be a Christian movement, certain aspects of its theology have led mainstream Christians to question that self-identification. The two most controversial theological tenets of the Unification Church are the identification of Moon as a messiah and the idea of indemnity. Belief in Moon as a messiah was irregular and not fundamental to the work of the Unification Church until his public claim of the title in 1992. However, beginning in 1968 Moon and his wife were regarded by believers as so-called True Parents who represented a level of spiritual perfection beyond that which was ever attained by Jesus.

Exposition of the Divine Principle explains indemnity as a process by which those who have fallen from their original condition "must make some condition to be restored to it. The making of such conditions of restitution is called indemnity" (part II, sec. 1.1). The belief in restoration through indemnity has put the Unification Church at odds with the mainstream Christian belief in salvation through faith. Moon and the Church have also been accused of anti-Semitism for statements suggesting that the Holocaust was part of a process of indemnity for the Jews' role in the crucifixion of Jesus.

Bibliography

"About Us." Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, familyfed.org/about-us. Accessed 22 Jan. 2025.

Barker, Eileen. "Did the Moonies Really Brainwash Millions? Time to Dispel a Myth." The Guardian, 4 Sept. 2012, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/sep/04/moonies-brainwash-dispel-myth. Accessed 22 Jan. 2025.

Campbell, Charlie. “The Unification Church Infiltrated Japan’s Government. Now Its Sights Are Set on the U.S.” Time, 4 Apr. 2024, time.com/6961050/unification-church-ffwp-moonies-us-election. Accessed 22 Jan. 2025.

Daschke, Dereck, and W. Michael Ashcraft. New Religious Movements: A Documentary Reader. New York University Press, 2005.

Dunkel, Tom. "Locked and Loaded for the Lord." The Washington Post, 21 May 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/news/style/wp/2018/05/21/feature/two-sons-of-rev-moon-have-split-from-his-church-and-their-followers-are-armed. Accessed 22 Jan. 2025.

Moon, Sun Myung. Exposition of the Divine Principle. Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, 1996.

Wakin, Daniel. "Rev. Sun Myung Moon, Self-Proclaimed Messiah Who Built Religious Movement, Dies at 92." The New York Times, 2 Sept. 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/09/03/world/asia/rev-sun-myung-moon-founder-of-unification-church-dies-at-92.html. Accessed 22 Jan. 2025.