The Unification Church of the United States is the branch of the Unification Church in the United States. It began in the late 1950s and early 1960s when missionaries from South Korea were sent to America by the international Unification Church's founder and leader Sun Myung Moon. It expanded in the 1970s and then became involved in controversy due to its theology, its political activism, and the lifestyle of its members. Since then, it has been involved in many areas of American society and has established businesses, news media, projects in education and the arts, as well as taking part in political and social activism, and has itself gone through substantial changes.
History in the United States
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, missionaries from the Unification Church of South Korea came to the United States. Among them were Young Oon Kim, Sang Ik-Choi, Bo Hi Pak, David S. C. Kim, and Yun Soo Lim. Missionary work took place in seven Mid-Atlantic states (including New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey), and Washington D.C., three Midwestern states (including Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan), and three West Coast states (including California, Oregon, and Washington).A History of the Unification Church in America, 1959–1974: Emergence of a National Movement, Michael L. Mickler, 1987, New York: Garland, . In 1965, Moon visited the United States and established what he called "holy grounds" in each of the 48 contiguous states.Church finds ‘holy ground’ in Sin City, Las Vegas Review-Journal, June 25, 2014
The Unification Church first came to public notice in the United States after sociology student John Lofland studied Young Oon Kim's group and published his findings as a doctoral thesis entitled: The World Savers: A Field Study of Cult Processes, which was published in 1966 in book form by Prentice-Hall as Doomsday Cult: A Study of Conversion, Proselytization, and Maintenance of Faith. This book is considered to be one of the most important and widely cited studies of the process of religious conversion, and one of the first modern sociological studies of a new religious movement.Introduction to New and Alternative Religions in America: African diaspora traditions and other American innovations, Volume 5, Unification Church, Introduction to New and Alternative Religions in America, W. Michael Ashcraft, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006, , page 180Exploring New Religions, Issues in contemporary religion, George D. Chryssides, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001 , page 1Conversion , Unification Church , Encyclopedia of Religion and Society, Hartford Institute for Religion Research, Hartford Seminary
By 1971, the Unification Church of the United States had about 500 members. By the end of the 1970s it had expanded to about 5,000 members, with most of them being in their early 20s. In the 1980s and 1990s membership remained at about the same number.Melton, J. Gordon & Moore, Robert L. The Cult Experience: Responding to the New Religious Pluralism. New York: The Pilgrim Press (1984 [3rd printing; 1st printing 1982]); pg. 8. "...audiences are surprised to learn that the Unification Church has less than 5,000 members in the U.S., because the press often gives the impression of far larger numbers." Melton is a leading expert on new religious movements and the Unification Church. Finke, Roger & Stark, Rodney. The Churching of America, 1776–1990. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press (1992; 3rd printing 1997); pg. 241. "...after more than thirty years of missionizing, it is estimated that there have never been more than 5,000 followers of the Unification Church... in the United States, some of whom are from abroad."The Market for Martyrs, Laurence Iannaccone, George Mason University, 2006, "One of the most comprehensive and influential studies was The Making of a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing? by Eileen Barker (1984). Barker could find no evidence that Moonie recruits were ever kidnapped, confined, or coerced. Participants at Moonie retreats were not deprived of sleep; the lectures were not "trance-inducing"; and there was not much chanting, no drugs or alcohol, and little that could be termed "frenzy" or "ecstatic" experience. People were free to leave, and leave they did. Barker's extensive enumerations showed that among the recruits who went so far as to attend two-day retreats (claimed to be the Moonie's most effective means of "brainwashing"), fewer than 25% joined the group formore than a week and only 5% remained full-time members one year later. And, of course, most contacts dropped out before attending a retreat. Of all those who visited a Moonie centre at least once, not one in two-hundred remained in the movement two years later. With failure rates exceeding 99.5%, it comes as no surprise that full-time Moonie membership in the U.S. never exceeded a few thousand. And this was one of the most successful New Religious Movements of the era!" Scholars have attributed the Unification Church's relative success in the United States, as compared to other Western nations, to its support of patriotism, international, and capitalist values, and to its multi-racial membership.Regulating Religion: Case Studies from Around the Globe (Google eBook), James T. Richardson, page 57New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America, Mary Farrell Bednarowski, Indiana University Press, 1989, pages 101-105Introvigne, Massimo, 2000, The Unification Church Studies in Contemporary Religion, Signature Books, Salt Lake City, Utah, , excerpt . page 12Korean Moon: Waxing of Waning? , Leo Sandon Jr., Theology Today, Vol 35, No 2, July 1978, "Thousands of young American adults (probably 3,000-5,000) have joined the Unification Church. Many of these members are attractive, well-educated graduates from some of our finest colleges and universities. Their membership in the movement should remind us that for the young adult (18–25 years of age) conversion has a highly ideological and vocational dimension." Some commentators have also noted that this period of Unification Church growth in the United States took place just as the "hippie" era of the late 1960s and early 1970s was ending, when many American young people were looking for a sense of higher purpose or community in their lives.Moon at Twilight , The New Yorker September 14, 1998, "David Bromley, a professor of sociology and religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, who has co-written a book about the Unification Church, believes that the bulk of Moon's remaining followers were recruited in the seventies, when both the establishment and the counterculture were falling apart. Bromley says that the sense of joining a close, purposeful community was crucial, and that it is no coincidence that church members refer to each other as "brother" and "sister" or that Moon is called Father."Irving Louis Horowitz, Science, Sin, and Society: The Politics of Reverend Moon and the Unification Church , 1980, MIT PressFinding and Seeking; Born in affluence, the baby-boomers were driven to ask Big Questions about fulfillment and the meaning of life. How their legacy has changed us., Jerry Adler & Julie Scelfo, Newsweek, September 18, 2006In 1980, Craig Sheffer, before becoming a Hollywood actor, under some inconvenient circumstances in his life, "slept under the marble staircase in Grand Central Terminal for weeks while living off Unification Church spaghetti dinners." Up and coming Craig Sheffer off the streets into the movies, New York Times, October 10, 1992 Among the converts were many who had been active in leftist causes.From Slogans to Mantras: Social Protest and Religious Conversion in the Late Vietnam War Era, Stephen A. Kent, Syracuse University Press, 2001, page 116
In 1971, Moon decided to move to the United States. He then asked the American Unification Church members to help him in a series of outreach campaigns in which he spoke to public audiences in all 50 states, ending with a 1976 rally in Washington, D.C., in which he spoke on the grounds of the Washington Monument to around 300,000 people.Introvigne 2000 pages 13–16 During this time many Unification Church members left school and careers to devote their full-time to church work. "Mobile fundraising teams" (often called MFT) were set up to raise money for church projects, sometimes giving candy or flowers in exchange for donations.Moon-struck, Time, October 15, 1973, "The core members—most in their 20s, many of them converts from other spiritual, psychological or political trips—display a dogged devotion that makes even Jehovah's Witnesses look like backsliders. They are enthusiastic capitalists who rise at dawn to hit the streets with wares to exchange for "donations": flowers, votive light candles, even peanuts. Last year, when Master Moon moved his international headquarters to Tarrytown, New York, members sold candles across the U.S. for seven weeks to meet the down payment of $300,000 on an $850,000 estate." Members considered fund raising to be a source of both spiritual and practical training for future activities.Miller, David Oran, My Rocky Road, 2020, , page 42
Moon also brought Unification Church members from Europe to work in the U.S. Church buildings were purchased around the nation, including the Belvedere Estate, the Unification Theological Seminary, and the New Yorker Hotel in New York state. The national headquarters of the Unification Church was established in the New Yorker Hotel in New York City. In Washington, D.C., the Unification Church purchased a church building from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.Friends Forever gather to remember the Washington Ward, Deseret News, November 27, 2011 In Seattle, it purchased the historic Rolland Denny mansion.A Seattle jewel shines again, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 22, 2007Architect Data Base
Political involvement
Moon had long been an advocate for anti-communism. He was born in what is now North Korea and had been imprisoned by the North Korean communist government during the Korean War, and believed that the defeat of communism by democracy was a necessary step in the Divine Providence to establish the Kingdom of God on earth. Divine Principle, Introduction. "Nonetheless, one final and inescapable conflict remains before us, the war between democracy and communism. Although each side has equipped itself with fearsome weapons and is pitted against the other in readiness for battle, the core of their conflict is internal and ideological. Which side will triumph in this final ideological conflict? Anyone who believes in the reality of God will surely answer that democracy will win."Beyond the Dark Side of the Moonies, Andrew Brown, The Independent, November 2, 1995, "The Moonies were - and remain - intent on halting communism. Moon founded the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity in Korea in 1954. The first missionaries were sent out in the Fifties, but only after Moon moved to the US in the Seventies did the movement start to become visible in the West. Moon's followers believe he is the Messiah who can lead the way to establishing the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. Their beliefs are set out in the Divine Principle, which contains interpretations of the Old and New Testaments with further revelations from Moon himself. Devotees believe God's victory over Satan requires the defeat of atheistic communism. To this end they have sponsored large numbers of conferences for journalists, theologians, academics, politicians and anyone else they think might contribute to establishing a God-centred world."