PART 3

THE UNIFICATION CHURCH

Their History

On July 1, 1982, some 2,000 couples gathered together in Madison Square Gardens for a mass marriage. The facilities were rented by the Unification Church, and the couples where all matched up by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

In a similar ceremony, just three months later, on October 14, Moon surpassed this record by joining together 5,837 couples in Seoul, Korea.

The Unification Church, formally known as the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, and commonly referred to as "Moonies," was founded by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon in 1954. Moon was born on January 6, 1920, in a small North Korean village. His parents where Presbyterians and originally named him, Young Myung Moon which means, "Dragon Shining Moon." As a teenager, Moon attended a Pentecostal church school. It was during this time in 1936, on Easter Sunday, at the age of 16, he claimed to have had a vision. In recalling what he saw in the vision, Moon says that Jesus appeared to him and commissioned him to fulfill what He (Jesus) had failed to do when He was here on earth. During World War II, Moon attended Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan, where he earned a degree in electronic engineering. Although he has a secular education, Moon has never received a formal education in theology, and has never been ordained by any church or religious organization. When asked about his ordination, he simply replies, "I was ordained by God . . . . There is no better ordination than that one." In 1944, Moon married his first wife named Sung Kil Choi, and already had a substantial following.

In 1946, he established the "Broad Sea Church" and shortly afterwards was imprisoned in North Korea. While Moon proclaims his innocence by saying he was incarcerated because of his anticommunistic activities, others claim it was because of his ritual sex practices with members in his communes. According to testimonies from those who knew him at the time, Moon had sexual intercourse with women followers in order to purify them. Because of these activities, he was excommunicated from the Presbyterian Church in 1948. In 1954, ten years after his first marriage, Moon's first wife divorced him. Over the years there has been much controversy concerning how many times Moon has been married. While he admits to two wives, many say that he has been married as many as four times. His second wife was named Miss Kim, his third wife was Myung Hee Kim, and then in March 1960, he married his fourth whose name was Hak Ja Han, an eighteen year old high school graduate. Moon pronounced this marriage the "Marriage of the Lamb." Today they have thirteen children. On January 1, 1972, Moon said that God told him to go to America. Today there are over 40,000 Moonies within the United States, and more than two million throughout the world. The vast majority of these followers are young college students from middle-class families. Many between the ages of 20 to 40 years old, and many who are Jews. Over the years, the Unification Church has worked very hard to earn public acceptance. Through their public campaigns, Moon has received letters of endorsement from more than 200 governors and mayors, including former President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, former governor of Alabama, George Wallace, and Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley. Moonies work very hard to associate with well known and respected celebrities trying to earn public acceptance.

They have quoted Senator Jesse Helms as praising Moon as "a Christian in our increasingly secular society." Some of the ways Moonies try to attract new converts is through their literature and publications. In 1985, the Unification Church financed a mass mailing to 300,000 pastors and other church leaders throughout the United States at an estimated cost