Religion Mun kor

What draws people to a man who seems distinctly uncharismatic and speaks language that most of his American followers don’t understand? 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.

One evening in late spring, I was driving from Manhattan to Moon’s East Garden estate with several church members. I asked Betty Lancaster, one of the first Americans to join the Unification Church, how she had managed to stay with Moon for so long, given that he seemed to have achieved so little and was so isolated, with only a handful of followers. She mentioned the story of Noah, and said that Noah was mocked while building his ark and probably felt a bit lonely.

But what of Moon’s peculiarities – his bizarre ideas, such as building a highway around the world? (He has had brochures drawn up and routes outlined.) His loyalists say he tests their faith, just as God tested that of the Israelites in the Old Testament. Why, they ask, cannot the messiah be as temperamental and unpredictable as God? “Often, he says his life style doesn’t follow human logic or human thinking,” said Christian Lepelletier, a longtime church member, who is from France. “He is connected to God.”

There are, certainly, differing degrees of devotion among Moon’s followers; the fact that they bow at the right moment or shout “Mansei!” in unison doesn’t mean they believe everything Moon says, or do precisely what he commands. Even on important issues, like Moon’s claiming to be the messiah, there are church members whom I met, including a close aide to Moon, who demur. A religious leader whom they respect and whose theology they believe, yes; the messiah, perhaps not.

Although some critics view Moon’s movement as a continuing menace, a mellowing of sorts is under way, according to Larry Moffitt, a prominent American member. Moffit joined the church in 1974 and later married a Japanese woman chosen for him by Moon. The couple have five children and live in Buenos Aires, where Moffitt is an associate publisher of Tiempos del Mundo, a church-linked newspaper based in Buenos Aires and available in sixteen countries. Although Moon often predicts in his sermons that a breakthrough is near, Moffitt realizes that Moon may not come to be seen as the messiah in his lifetime. “You can’t look at it in a ten-year frame,” he said. “A new religion is a six-hundred-year start-up. Look at all the major faiths. It required four hundred years for Christianity to take over Rome.” That wasn’t the attitude two decades ago, or even a decade ago, when there was a greater sense of urgency in the church – a sense that victory was just around the corner.

On a windy day in April, with the accord of Moon’s advisers, I went to a marina near his estate and waited there with a dozen of his followers. At eight-thirty in the morning, he pulled up in a chauffeured sports utility vehicle. He was dressed casually, in green slacks and a baseball cap. He walked to the dock, and, after receiving quick bows from his followers, he boarded his fishing boat. His gear was already laid out on the craft, including a tackle box with the words “True Father’s” imprinted on it.

Three boats headed out with Moon’s, and I was on one of them, along with Tyler Hendricks and Takeru Kamiyama, who had been imprisoned with Moon at Danbury in the eighties. The weather was miserable: a strong wind kicked up choppy waves, and water splashed over the gunwales. Moon sat at the stern, watching his rods, which were held in place by brackets. He rarely spoke, and when he reeled in a line, an aide quickly handed him another rod, with fresh bait on its hook. Moon then cast the line into the Hudson, stuck the pole into a bracket, and waited.

The striped bass were not biting; the waters were too turbulent. But Moon stayed on the Hudson. At irregular intervals an order would come over the ship-to-ship radio, and suddenly we would speed off in a new direction, chasing after Moon’s boat. “We go! We go!” the Japanese pilot of my boat yelled, half in exultation, half in fear that we might lose Moon. The pilot had no idea where we were headed; we just followed Moon’s boat for miles up and down the Hudson. This went on for nine chilly hours. Moon has told followers that he meditates while he is fishing, and that his goal is not to catch fish but to get closer to God and, on days like this, pay “indemnity” for the sins of humankind. If the weather is foul and the fish aren’t biting, it’s because God wants it that way.

http://www.nytimes.com

October 15, 2009

At Time of Change for Rev. Moon Church, a Return to Tradition

By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL, South Korea – Thousands of couples from more than 100 countries traveled here to tie the knot Wednesday in what was seen as the last mass wedding officiated by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the controversial and enigmatic founder of the Unification Church.

The mass wedding – often involving the exchange of vows between partners selected by Mr. Moon himself – is perhaps the best-known and most controversial feature of Mr. Moon’s church. But for members of his flock, the weddings symbolize his teachings of “trans-religion, trans-national and trans-racial" love.

The confetti-filled 90-minute spectacle, broadcast live on the Internet in three languages, was the largest Mr. Moon had organized since 1999, when 21,000 couples filled Seoul’s Olympic Stadium. It came as the church has been struggling to revamp its image and increase its stagnant membership under Mr. Moon’s three sons, who have begun taking over day-to-day responsibilities for his religious and business empire.

The three sons, all U.S.-educated, are more media savvy than their reclusive father and have given a series of interviews in recent months. The church has also revamped its Web sites, which are filled with video clips of Mr. Moon and his sons.

Mr. Moon, who is 89, and his wife, Han Hak-ja, are known among his followers as the “true parents of all humankind.” Seated at an altar festooned with flowers and shaped like an ancient Korean royal throne, they smiled and nodded when 10,000 couples gathered at a lawn of the church’s Sun Moon University south of Seoul bowed to them on Wednesday.

Row after row of brides in white gowns or traditional wedding costumes of their countries stood holding hands with grooms mostly clad in black suits.

Half of them were married for the first time, with the rest renewing their wedding vows.

When Mr. Moon led three rounds of “Hurray” at the end of the ceremony, firecrackers exploded and confetti rained down from above.

Similar mass weddings, smaller but hooked up to the South Korean event via Web links, took place around the world – in Norway, Sweden, Japan, Venezuela, Honduras and the United States.

“The blessing you are receiving today is the most precious thing, one cannot exchange anything in the world,” the Rev. Moon Hyung-jin, the 30-year-old son of Mr. Moon, said as he opened the ceremony.

Mr. Moon began the group weddings in the 1960s, marrying a few dozen couples at a time. But they grabbed world attention when they grew in size.

Some 2,500 church couples exchanged or affirmed their vows in November 1997 in a ceremony at RFK Stadium in Washington. A crowd of nearly 40,000 turned out for that event.

The global mass weddings on Wednesday were to celebrate Mr. Moon’s upcoming 90th birthday in January, church officials say. In recent years, the ceremonies became smaller as Mr. Moon came under pressure amid accusations at home and abroad that he was brainwashing his followers into donating their life savings to his church and marrying partners selected by him.

Previously, most couples met their spouses for the first time at the wedding. He also arranged for South Korean church members, including some of his own grandchildren, to marry followers from Japan, the former colonial ruler of Korea, saying that the two nations could build love through marriages.

In recent media interviews, Moon Hyung-jin, who married a bride chosen by his father when he was 17, said that the church had modified the practice and that couples now met and dated well before their weddings.

He was designated last year to take over religious leadership of the church. Another son, Moon Kook-jin, 39, was put in charge of the church’s business ventures in South Korea, which include construction, newspapers, hospitals, schools, tourism, ski resorts, beverages and a professional soccer team. A third son, Moon Hyun-jin, 40, oversees international operations.

The church owns the Washington Times newspaper and the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan, as well as the New York-based gun manufacturer Kahr Arms. The senior Mr. Moon served 13 months in a U.S. prison on tax evasion charges in the 1980s.

Moon Hyung-jin studied theology at Harvard University, where he went about campus with a shaved head and dressed in a Buddhist robe. Today, with slicked-back hair, he leads a congregation in Seoul, where he plays rock-like gospel music and has vowed to undertake reforms like increasing transparency in fund-raising. But he said he “could never replace my father,” who church officials say will remain forever as the “Messiah.”

The elder Mr. Moon, born in what is now North Korea, said that when he was 15, Jesus appeared to him while he was praying on a mountaintop and asked him to complete his unfinished work. According to his official biography, he was persecuted by the Communists and fled to South Korea during the 1950-3 Korean War. He founded his church, officially named the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, in 1954.

In 1991, he traveled to North Korea to meet Kim Il-sung, the North Korean founder and president. His church now runs an auto company and a hotel in Pyongyang.

Mr. Moon claims his church has a presence in 193 countries. But it was never recognized by orthodox Christian churches in South Korea, which dominate religious life here, along with Buddhist sects.

Indeed, the mass wedding on Wednesday drew little attention here. South Korean media only carried brief dispatches on the event, but many of them focused on the fact that a daughter of the late military strongman Park Chung-hee renewed her wedding vows during the event, although she said she was not a church member.

Park Geun-ryeong, 55, a Roman Catholic, told the mass-circulation Dong-A daily: “I join in a trans-religious spirit. I like the Unification Church way of interpreting the Bible, incorporating the Koran and Buddhist scripts.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com

A Church in Flux Is Flush With Cash

By Marc Fisher and Jeff Leen, November 23, 1997

Even as the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church falters as a religion in the United States, it remains a robust, diverse business – especially in the Washington area, where the movement controls more than $300 million in commercial, political and cultural enterprises.

From rundown city storefronts to gleaming suburban office buildings, from ornately refurbished mansions to mundane tract housing, organizations owned or sponsored by Moon and his inner circle of Korean and American followers hold properties stretching from Prince George's to Fairfax counties, according to corporate, property and court records.

This vast and bewildering multinational could be called Moon Inc. It is a sprawling collection of churches, nonprofit foundations and for-profit holding companies whose global operations include computers and religious icons in Japan, seafood in Alaska, weapons and ginseng in Korea, huge tracts of land in South America, a university in Bridgeport, Conn., a recording studio and travel agency in Manhattan, a horse farm in Texas and a golf course in California.

In the Washington area, the Unification Church's investment is an important cog in a global machine that Moon uses to boost his credibility, spread his spiritual doctrine and win political influence, according to current and former church members.

As the Unification movement evolved from selling roses on street corners to acquiring control of a nationwide cable channel, the nation's capital became the epicenter of Moon's U.S. holdings. Those include the Washington Times newspaper, a video production firm and a stately old church, once the pride of the Mormons, along 16th Street NW. Washington-area property owned by the church, its affiliated companies or senior church officials is worth more than $200 million, according to property and corporate records.

Washington will be the focus of the worldwide Unification movement this week, as Moon-sponsored organizations hold a series of academic conferences and the World Sports and Culture Festival, culminating Saturday with a mass wedding at RFK Stadium. Here and at locations around the world, the church says it will marry or reaffirm wedding vows of 3.6 million couples.

At 77, Moon presides over a church in flux, an embattled religion that has found only a small following in this country despite nearly four decades of proselytizing. The South Korean self-declared Messiah has grown increasingly vehement in his denunciations of American society; earlier this year, he declared his intent to give up on his U.S. church. As the religion fades, even some loyal followers now fear that Moon's most enduring legacy will be his multibillion-dollar business empire.

Within the Unification movement, Moon's spiritual and business ventures are viewed as part of a unified whole. "Ideas without the money to back them up are just dreams," said Richard Rubenstein, president of the movement-controlled University of Bridgeport. In church parlance, a position at a church-related business is not a job, but a mission.

"The corporate section is understood to be the engine that funds the mission of the church," said Virginia Commonwealth University sociologist David Bromley, who has studied the church for more than 15 years. "The wealth base is fairly substantial. But if you were to compare it to the Mormon Church or the Catholic Church or other churches that have massive landholdings, this doesn't look on a global scale like a massive operation."

Since the 1970s, Moon has gained his highest profile in this country not with his church, but with the Times, the 100,000-circulation daily that competes with The Washington Post.

Moon said earlier this year that he has spent more than $1 billion in subsidies for the paper over 15 years. Church members say the publication has never come close to turning a profit, but the paper has become an established voice of conservative America, winning readers in the White House and praise for its professionalism and scoops on national and local stories.

Beyond the Times, Moon-affiliated entities are linked by a complex web of interlocking directorships and nurtured by a seemingly endless flow of cash from the Far East. That has enabled them to buy new businesses such as the Nostalgia Network cable channel and even help bail out the Rev. Jerry Falwell's foundering Liberty University.

Executives of Unification-related entities have acknowledged that money from Japan and Korea fuel U.S. operations, but the magnitude and mechanism of those payments, as well as their exact sources, have eluded investigators on three continents over the past three decades.

The rise of Moon's U.S. businesses and decline of his U.S. church – leaders say membership is stagnant, former members contend it is declining – may prove merely that it is easier to sell seafood or jewelry than a religion based on a unique merger of Western Christian theology and Eastern Confucian temperament. Bromley compares Unificationism to 19th century American communal religions such as the Oneidas, Shakers and Amanas, new faiths that began with a burst of energy, but settled into entropy dominated by their business interests.

"Membership plummeted, and what remained was the corporate structure," Bromley said.

Moon's businesses exist for several purposes, church leaders and critics agree: to employ members, to gain influence in industries Moon considers crucial to worldwide recognition of himself as Messiah, and to support Moon's spiritual and political agenda.

Sometimes, that support is direct, as when Moon's nonprofit organizations contribute to conservative political and social causes with financial donations, staff and publicity. And sometimes it is indirect, as when Moon-sponsored groups stage academic, religious and cultural conferences, inviting professors, clergy, media executives and other opinion-shapers to meetings, expenses paid.

"Of course, the whole thing is to buy respectability," said Marvin Borderlon, a Roman Catholic ex-priest who is president of the American Conference on Religious Movements, a Rockville-based group that fights discrimination against new religions. The group is funded by the Church of Scientology, the Hare Krishna organization, and most of all, by Unificationists, who give him $3,000 a month, Borderlon said.

"They'll have a conference on the essence of religious founders, like Buddha, Jesus and guess who," Borderlon said. "He gets a room full of academics to sit there while he pronounces himself the Messiah. He gets his picture taken with them. He gets credibility, they get to have their conference. It's all very messy."

Borderlon, like many people who have received some of Moon's generous bounty, has never been able to figure out the blizzard of organizations that make up Moon Inc. "My money is never from the church itself," he said. "It's always the International Something or Other."

Wide-Ranging Interests

On two floors of an office building in Falls Church – purchased by a church-owned property development company from conservative activist Richard Viguerie – the startling range of Moon's interests and activities is played out along hallways bare of art or decoration.

On one corridor, the International Coalition for Religious Freedom – the group that Borderlon said signs his checks these days – shares a suite with the Martial Arts Federation for World Peace and a company called Washington Times Aviation. The only person in the suite on a recent visit was a Korean man who spoke little English, saying only, "I am Martial Arts Federation. I work for Father," the term by which devotees of Unificationism refer to Moon.

Church officials have for years denied any direct control of the myriad businesses, saying its members run the companies and contribute to the church. But some members and internal publications indicate Moon is deeply involved in directing corporate activities.

A column in a Unification Church of Washington newsletter in 1990 informs members of "Father's Instructions": work on "economic, political, cultural whole system activity," recruit precisely 84 new members, and proceed with "national organization of the fish . . . video and electronic media . . . and jewelry businesses."

"Rev. Moon says many things," said Farley Jones, president of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, the most important nonprofit in Moon's network. "Sometimes you have to sort through it and select which activities to focus on."

Jones and a few other church leaders and members spoke to Post reporters, but most officials at church-connected organizations and businesses did not return repeated calls for comment over the past six weeks.

Moon's Washington enterprises range from a ballet academy to an architectural molding company on 14th Street NW to magazines such as Insight and the World & I.

"The idea was that we'd be like Disney, controlling all kinds of media, working on behalf of God," said Ron Paquette, who was president of Manhattan Center Studio, the church's New York recording facility, until he left the faith in 1994.

Paquette, whose job gave him access to financial information about several church-related businesses, said he believes virtually none of Unification's U.S. operations is profitable. "A lot of the stuff they do is for prestige, so they can show President Bush our dance academy and our newspaper," Paquette said. "The idea is to bring Bush in, use his name and picture, buy Moon credibility."

A 1978 congressional investigation into "the Moon organization" concluded that "the Unification Church and numerous other religious and secular organizations headed by Sun Myung Moon constitute essentially one international organization" that moved money freely among its entities.

In 1994, the Unification movement opened an unusual window onto that flow of money, as well as its willingness to suffer sustained losses, when its Concept Communications subsidiary paid $11.5 million for a controlling stake in the Nostalgia Network. It was the movement's first foray into a U.S. public company, forcing it to disclose detailed information to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The cable TV channel – featuring reruns such as "The Rockford Files," "Tony Orlando and Dawn" and "The Captain and Tennille" – has suffered sharp losses and dwindling access to cable households. The number of households that get Nostalgia has dropped from 12 million to 7 million in the three years since church-connected companies acquired control. Moon-related companies have spent more than $60 million to gain control of the network and keep it afloat, SEC filings show.

When the Moon subsidiaries – Concept, Crown Communications and Crown Capital – took over Nostalgia, they paid at least $2.30 a share, according to the companies' statements. Last week, Nostalgia was trading at 7 cents.

With numbers like that, said Bruce Leichtman, a cable TV analyst for the Yankee Group, "you have to fold. Unless, of course, you have an endless source of cash."

SEC filings show that the cash for Nostalgia comes through a chain of companies leading to the Unification Church International. It's a vertically integrated operation common in Moon's empire:

Nostalgia leases offices from the Unification-owned Washington Television Center, part of the $90 million office building at 650 Massachusetts Ave. NW, which is owned by U.S. Property Development Corp., which in turn is one of many Moon-connected companies under One Up Enterprises Inc., the main holding company for the movement's U.S. businesses.

Nostalgia's production facilities are in the Alexandria headquarters of Atlantic Video, a Moon-connected company that was one of the area's top video production firms in the late 1980s. Its billings have suffered recently, according to video industry figures.

Asked whether Moon-connected ventures operate in service of the church, Jonathan Park, a church member who until 1991 ran Atlantic and several other Moon-related businesses, said, "That's an interesting question. It's a worldwide organization. Specifically how they're all connected, I don't think is very clear."

What is clear is that the most important building for many local Unification ventures is the Falls Church office complex at 7777 Leesburg Pike, purchased for $10 million in 1987. This is headquarters of One Up, a primary conduit for overseas cash coming into Unificationism's U.S. operations, according to Paquette and other former church executives. One Up president Michael Runyon did not return calls from The Post. (One Up, like many Moon-related ventures, draws its name from Moon's spiritual teachings. His chinchilla farm is called One Mind Farms; the movie production company that made his epic flop about the Korean War, "Inchon," was called One Way Productions.)

One Up last year had estimated sales of $232.3 million and 2,000 employees in its subsidiaries, according to Dun & Bradstreet.