Chapter 131. Messiahs of the Cold War and the Jesus Revolution: The Unification Church and the Children of God

Two of the best-known new religious movements of the post-war decades took shape at opposite ends of the Pacific world and in very different registers. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church came out of the divided Korea of the 1950s. It joined a messianic reinterpretation of the Bible to a militant anticommunism, and its critics describe it as a political and business network as much as a church. David Berg’s Children of God arose in the hippie communities of late-1960s California. It turned the Jesus Movement’s countercultural Christianity into an apocalyptic, anti-American sect whose sexual teachings became its defining controversy. Both centred on a leader who claimed an exceptional role in the end-time drama. Both drew recruits from the same generation of young Westerners. Both met organised opposition from parents, ex-members and governments. This chapter sets out what the library’s sources report about each, including an ex-member’s insider account, congressional findings, journalists’ and encyclopedists’ surveys, and scholars who reject the “brainwashing” model. It closes by setting both against Mehran Keshe’s claim that the age of messiahs is ending.

The Lord of the Second Advent: Moon’s vision and the Divine Principle

The sources differ slightly over the founding vision. Sylvia Browne gives the legend as follows: “one day in 1936, on a Korean mountainside, Jesus Christ appeared to a sixteen-year-old boy and gave him the news that he’d been chosen by God to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth”. Moon “proclaimed himself the messiah, the Second Coming, and/or the Lord of the Second Advent, and, in 1954, established” the church [Browne, End of Days, #42246, “The Unification Church: Sun Myung Moon”]. Jim Willis, following Moon’s official biography, dates the vision to “sometime around Easter of 1935”. He records that Moon was born in January 1920, joined the Presbyterian Church at ten, studied electrical engineering at Waseda University in Japan from 1941, and founded the Kwang-Ya Church in Pyongyang in 1946. Communist authorities imprisoned him there. According to the official account, UN forces freed him in 1950, after which he walked about 320 miles to Pusan and later founded the Unification Church in Seoul [Willis, American Cults, #63203, “Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church”]. Willis adds that Moon put off the formal announcement of his messiahship until 1992, when he and his wife Hak Ja Han, whom he had married in 1960, proclaimed themselves the “True Parents” [Willis, American Cults, #63203].

Browne reports that by 1957 Moon had written the 536-page Divine Principle, which “he claimed was directly communicated to him by Jesus Christ” and which followers regard as “the third testament of the Bible”. Her summary of its Christology is blunt: “Jesus Christ, according to Divine Principle/Sun Myung Moon, was not the son of God or the result of a virgin birth. Jesus’s intended purpose was to father perfect children through an approved marriage, but he was crucified before he could accomplish that purpose. Rather than symbolizing redemption for Christians, the cross is actually a symbol of failure, and Jesus never experienced a physical resurrection” [Browne, End of Days, #42246]. She also quotes Moon on himself: “Master here … is more than any of those people and greater than Jesus himself … I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end” [Browne, End of Days, #42246].

Willis reconstructs the underlying cosmology. Adam and Eve were to pass through stages of “responsibility” and “perfection” before marrying. Lucifer, jealous, “sexually seduced Eve, who then coerced Adam into premarital sex”, so that every later generation inherited a “fallen nature”. In Divine Principle’s account, John the Baptist failed to proclaim Jesus clearly, and Jesus “was murdered on the cross before he could get married”. Numerological parallels then placed the birth of the Lord of the Second Advent in Korea between 1917 and 1930, and Moon was born in 1920 [Willis, American Cults, #63203]. The ritual consequence was the Blessing. The reference shelf describes it as a mass wedding or rededication through which members believe a couple is “removed from the lineage of sinful humanity and engrafted into God’s sinless lineage”. The first was held for 36 couples in Seoul in 1961, the first large one outside Korea at Madison Square Garden in 1982, and in 1988 a ceremony matched 2,500 Korean with Japanese members. Many partners met only on the day [Wikipedia: Blessing ceremony of the Unification Church]. Willis notes that ten thousand couples took part at one Seoul event in 2009, and that from the 1990s the Blessing was extended to non-members and even to the dead, among them Confucius, Jesus, Muhammad, Hitler, Stalin and Kim Il Sung [Willis, American Cults, #63203].

Recruitment by concealment: Hassan and Levine

Steven Hassan’s Combatting Cult Mind Control is the library’s main insider source. Hassan was recruited through the “One World Crusade”, a front group, and spent two and a half years in the movement as a leader. He describes a 1974 seven-day fast in front of the United Nations during the vote on withdrawing troops from South Korea: “We were personally instructed by Sun Myung Moon not to tell anyone that we were members of the Unification Church or had any political motivation. We established a front group called The American Committee f[or]…” [Hassan, Combatting Cult Mind Control, #64506, ch. 2 “My Life in the Unification Church”]. He also records Moon’s failed timetables: the old world was to end and the movement take over in 1960 and then 1967, and World War III was predicted for 1977. “When that didn’t happen, all eyes were on 1981 … When 1981 produced nothing more dramatic for the Unification Church than President Ronald Reagan’s inauguration (which Sun Myung Moon himself inexplicably attended), talk had already turned to dates farther ahead” [Hassan, #64506, ch. 5 “Changes in Time Orientation”].

The social psychologist Robert Levine, who calls the church “one of the most successful cults (or progressive religious movements, depending on your point of view)”, describes the same concealment from the recruit’s side. Of the groups that approached young people, “They didn’t say it was the Unification Church of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. They didn’t even say it was a religious group” [Levine, The Power of Persuasion, #60339, “reciprocity of liking”]. He argues that joining “had little to do with Moon’s ideology, or even religion at all”. Former members described a sequence “more like a seduction”: “the pickup, the first date, and the love bomb”. He quotes a recruiter who boasted of a staff of “the best ‘love-bombers’ in the whole world” [Levine, #60339]. Levine places this under the “reciprocity of liking” rule of persuasion.

The political network: KCIA, Kodama and the Fraser Report

Hassan’s central charge is that the church “is not only a body of believers but also a political organization with an active political agenda”. He relies on the Fraser Report of 31 October 1978, issued by the House Subcommittee on International Organizations under Rep. Donald Fraser. He quotes its account of four English-speaking Korean army officers drawn to Moon in the late 1950s, among them Bo Hi Pak and men later tied to the KCIA. He also quotes “a February 1963 unevaluated CIA report” stating “that Kim Jong Pil had ‘organized’ the Unification Church while he was KCIA director and has been using the Unification Church as a ‘political tool'”. Through Fred Clarkson, he adds the Report’s caveat that “organized” is not to be confused with “founded” [Hassan, #64506, ch. 1 “The Many Faces of the Unification Church”]. Hassan writes that had he known of the KCIA connection “or that in 1967 Moon had forged an organizational link with Yoshi Kodama, a leader of the Yakuza, the Japanese organized crime network, I would have never become involved” [Hassan, #64506, ch. 1].

According to Hassan, the Report’s eighty-page section on the Moonies found that the organisation “systematically violated U.S. tax, immigration, banking, currency, and Foreign Agents Registration Act laws, as well as state and local laws relating to charity fraud”. It “called for an interagency task force to continue to gather evidence and to prosecute Moon and other Unification Church leaders” [Hassan, #64506, ch. 2]. Hassan says he gave the subcommittee Master Speaks, Moon’s private speeches. One of them, from 1973, reads: “we must have an automatic theocracy to rule the world. So we cannot separate the political field from the religious … Separation between religion and politics is what Satan likes most” [Hassan, #64506, ch. 1].

Hassan lists the wider empire: enterprises “ranging from ginseng exportation to the manufacture of M-16 rifles”; The Washington Times, which he says President Reagan called his favourite newspaper; and CAUSA, founded in 1980, whose antidote to communism, “Godism”, Clarkson calls “the Unification Church philosophy without Moonist mythology”. Citing a Knight-Ridder report, Hassan also mentions Japanese door-to-door sales of talismans that took in “at least $165 million between 1980 and 1987” [Hassan, #64506, ch. 1]. Willis adds the 1974 Watergate fasts for Nixon, the $42 million film Inchon, newspapers on several continents, the 2000 purchase of UPI, more than $1 billion in subsidies to the Washington Times, and the 2004 Dirksen Building ceremony at which Moon was crowned “humanity’s savior” [Willis, #63203]. The tax case followed. Moon was indicted on 15 October 1981, convicted in 1982 on false-return and conspiracy counts, and served 13 months of an 18-month sentence at FCI Danbury. Supporters, including Jerry Falwell, Joseph Lowery and a Senate subcommittee under Orrin Hatch, argued that the prosecution was politically motivated and discriminatory [Wikipedia: United States v. Sun Myung Moon].

Lifton’s criteria, deprogramming, and the counter-case

Hassan left after a van accident: “After two and a half years as a member of that cult, I was deprogrammed after suffering a serious injury in a van accident” [Hassan, #64506, ch. 2 “Deprogramming: How I Found My Way Back to Myself”]. Reading Robert Lifton, he concluded that “the Moon organization uses all eight of those elements: milieu control, mystical manipulation or planned spontaneity”, and the rest [Hassan, #64506, ch. 4 “Understanding Mind Control”]. He later developed non-coercive “exit-counseling” as an alternative to forcible deprogramming, while insisting he knew of no deprogramming “that involved any physical abuse such as beating or rape” [Hassan, #64506, ch. 7].

The opposing scholarly view is represented by Eileen Barker’s The Making of a Moonie (1984), based on nearly seven years of fieldwork. Barker rejected brainwashing because it explains neither the many who attended and did not join nor voluntary departures: “Moonies are no more likely to stagnate into mindless robots than are their peers who travel to the city on the 8.23 each morning.” Laurence Iannaccone summarises her figures. Of recruits who attended two-day retreats, fewer than 25% joined for more than a week and only 5% remained full-time a year later. “Of all those who visited a Moonie centre at least once, not one in two-hundred remained in the movement two years later” [Wikipedia: The Making of a Moonie]. Willis records the church’s side as well: Moon “fought ‘deprogrammers’ who … kidnapped a number of” his followers [Willis, #63203].

David Berg: from Teens for Christ to “grown-up cult”

Willis titles his section “David Berg and the Family International: From Teens for Christ to Grown-up Cult”. He describes a ministry begun in the late 1960s among hippies in Huntington Beach, California, “part of the Jesus People movement”. In 1969 the group left California because Berg believed an earthquake was coming. Berg took the name Moses David, and members “dressed in sackcloth and conducted demonstrations across the country, declaring that America had abandoned God” [Willis, #63203]. Goldwag lists the movement’s many names, among them Children of God, Jesus Children, Jesus Movement, Revolutionaries for Jesus, Teens for Christ, The Family, The Family of Love and The Family International. He calls Berg “Pentecostalist and premillennialist” and says his teachings on sex “departed radically from his fellow fundamentalists'”. He quotes a Mo Letter: “The Devil hates sex! … True sex, honest sex, Godly sex…. If you hate sex you are one of the Devil’s crowd!” [Goldwag, Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies, #73961, “The Family International”]. The reference shelf adds that Berg wrote nearly 3,000 Mo Letters over 24 years, called himself “King” and “The Last Endtime Prophet”, and called the outside world “The System”. By the mid-1970s the movement had colonies in an estimated 70 countries [Wikipedia: The Family International].

Flirty Fishing and the abuse allegations

Willis says that FREECOG, “the very first anticult organization in the United States”, alleged child abuse and sexual recruitment. Both charges stemmed from “flirty fishing”: Berg “encouraged female members of his following to use sex to entice lonely men into the fold”. Willis adds that “the sexual freedom he preached drew a number of pedophiles to the group, who preyed upon members’ children”. In his account, child-protection rules came in by 1983 and Flirty Fishing ended in 1987, and in the 1990s “a series of investigations … discovered no cases of abuse” [Willis, #63203]. The reference shelf dates the practice to about 1974 to 1987, taking its name from Matthew 4:19. Researcher Bill Bainbridge obtained TFI data giving 223,989 sexual contacts. The Family defended the practice as “bearing witness”, while critics such as Susan Raine described its imagery (“HOOKER FOR JESUS”) as “saturated with the rhetoric of prostitution”. James Chancellor wrote that it became “a primary source of financial support and political protection” [Wikipedia: Flirty Fishing]. A 1994–95 British judgment by Lord Justice Ward found past “abusive sexual practices involving minors” but judged the group safe by 1995 [Wikipedia: The Family International]. Rick Ross offers the harshest assessment: destructive cults “deliberately mandate harm”, and he names “the Children of God and polygamist groups, in which minor children have been sexually abused as part of their group beliefs and practice”. He reports witnesses calling Berg “a pedophile and voracious sexual predator” and notes that “The Family leadership has never officially denounced David Berg publicly” [Ross, Cults Inside Out, #62875, chs. 1, 4].

On Berg’s death in 1994 his widow Karen Zerby (“Maria”) succeeded him and introduced the Love Charter in 1995. The group took the name The Family International in 2004 [Willis, #63203; Wikipedia: The Family International]. Goldwag records the end of Zerby’s son Ricky Rodriguez: in 2005 he killed a former caregiver and then himself, leaving a videotape that spoke of “a need for revenge” [Goldwag, #73961].

Comparative politics, and Keshe’s counter-messianism

The two movements took opposite sides in Cold War politics. Moon put his church at the service of the anticommunist West, which by his account would weaken and fall if it did not fight “the satanic forces of materialistic Communism” [Hassan, #64506, ch. 1]. Berg called on his followers to abandon a doomed America. Mehran Keshe rejects messianic leadership of either kind. In KSW 303 he predicts that religious leaders will “walk out of these bigger statues called, the churches and mosques”, leaving “empty structures” kept “as a relic for man to understand how he was abused”, and that there will be “no Vatican, Mecca, or Jerusalem” as objects of worship. The same session summary says that “every individual is their own Messiah” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 303, #378015, “Soul Elevation and the End of Religious Structures”]. In KSW 618 he puts it directly: “We are all Messiahs … every one of us is Messiah of our own Soul” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 618, #378330].

Key points

• Browne dates Moon’s vision to 1936 and Willis to Easter 1935. Both record the 1954 founding and Moon’s claim to be the Lord of the Second Advent [Browne, #42246; Willis, #63203].
• According to Browne’s summary of Divine Principle, Jesus was neither virgin-born nor physically resurrected. His mission was to father perfect children, and the cross is “a symbol of failure”. The Blessing mass weddings are meant to graft couples into a sinless lineage [Browne, #42246; Wikipedia: Blessing ceremony of the Unification Church].
• Hassan says Moon personally instructed members to hide their church membership and political motives. Levine reports that recruiters did not even say they were a religious group [Hassan, #64506; Levine, #60339].
• Through the Fraser Report, Hassan alleges KCIA ties, a 1967 link with Yakuza leader Yoshio Kodama, and systematic violations of U.S. law. Moon was convicted of tax offences in 1982, and his supporters called the prosecution political [Hassan, #64506; Wikipedia: United States v. Sun Myung Moon].
• Hassan applies Lifton’s eight criteria to the movement. Barker’s figures, with fewer than 1 in 200 visitors remaining after two years, are the main counter-argument [Hassan, #64506; Wikipedia: The Making of a Moonie].
• Berg’s Children of God went through many names. It is known above all for Flirty Fishing (about 1974–87) and for child-abuse allegations, which Ross places among practices that “deliberately mandate harm” [Goldwag, #73961; Willis, #63203; Ross, #62875].
• Karen Zerby succeeded Berg in 1994, and the movement became The Family International in 2004 [Willis, #63203; Wikipedia: The Family International].
• Keshe rejects messianic leadership outright: churches and mosques will become empty relics, and “every one of us is Messiah of our own Soul” [Keshe, #378015; #378330].