Based on his personal vision for the rejuvenation and reunification of Christianity, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon founded the Unification Church and Unificationism, which blends Confucianism and Christianity. Moon’s move to the United States in 1974 was followed by controversy about the church’s political and business involvements.
In 1920, Sun Myung Moon was born as the fifth of eight children in Cheong-Ju, a village situated in what is now North Korea. When Moon was sixteen years old (he was known as Yong Myung Moon until he was twenty-five years old), he claimed that Christ appeared to him in a vision. At age eighteen, the young Moon left his native village to attend universities in Seoul and then in Tokyo. With the end of Japanese rule of Korea, Moon returned to his homeland. He was promptly imprisoned and tortured for preaching religion in a communist country. His prison camp was liberated by United Nations and U.S. forces in 1950 on the morning he was scheduled for execution.
In 1952, Moon published his major religious work, Divine Principle,
The Unification Church (whose adherents are known as Unificationists and popularly called Moonies), part of the so-called New Religious Movement
The Unification Church’s political involvement has distinguished it from mainstream religions. In 1982, Moon founded the Washington Times
Also controversial is the Unification Church’s history of collecting money from and funding several hundred businesses and a variety of artistic groups such as the Little Angels Ballet. The artistic groups and businesses were regarded by opponents as front organizations for the church. Moon systematically countered all charges concerning mingling politics with religion by saying that whereas religious donations were used solely for church activities, the money used for media, cultural, or political events came from the church’s business ventures and its investments.
During the early and mid-1990’s, the church shifted the emphasis of its programs from the United States to Latin America. By 1994, Moon reorganized the Unification Church because he said that it had completed its doctrinal phase and was to concentrate on social programs, especially those dealing with the family. He renamed the church and created the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification. Beginning with the reelection of George W. Bush in 2004, the renamed church donated money to the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives to help fund literacy, sexual abstinence, and substance-abuse prevention programs.
The increased emphasis on the family led the church to further develop the mass public marriages that were always a feature of its missionary work. In 1992 the Unificationist marriage ceremony celebrated the union of thirty thousand couples, twenty thousand in Seoul and ten thousand in other countries. Seventy percent of the couples had already been married in another religious faith and were reconsecrating their marriage. Such weddings (called “blessings”) culminated in a 1998 ceremony in Madison Square Garden in New York City in which 120 million couples were joined worldwide.
The Unification Church was the only new church to have made its founder and family the centerpiece of its theology. Despite, or because of, its uniqueness, the church remains one of the most successful of the New Religious Movement organizations, having lasted more than fifty years; it has branches in Korea, the United States, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. It is also a religion that demands much dedication from its members. The degree to which Unificationists participate is unique in a secular, “anticultist” society.
The church’s participation in business ventures and politics remains controversial, and the church has long sought to clarify the relationship between its religious and political activities. The 1994 inauguration of the Family Federation of World Peace and Unification and the church’s foregrounding of “family values” might be confusing even more the issue of the church’s place in a democratic society. Consequently, unanswered questions about the meshing of religion and politics might well be the most lasting legacy of the Unification Church.
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Chryssides, George D. The Advent of Sun Myung Moon. London: Macmillan, 1991. Approaches the Unification Church as one religious body among many in the New Religious Movement. Includes photographs, a map of Korea, and a glossary of Unification terms. -
Daschke, Dereck, and W. Michael Ashcraft, eds. New Religious Movements: A Documentary Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2005. An excellent resource of primary source documents that serves as a history of religious bodies, including the Unification Church, within the New Religious Movement. -
Edwards, Christopher. Crazy for God. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1979. A firsthand account by a former member of the Unification Church. -
Lewis, James R., and Jesper Aagaard Petersen, eds. Controversial New Religions. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 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.”
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