Rev. Moon's Unification Church empowers family
Published: Friday, September 07, 2012, 2:20 PM
Debbie Preece of Huntsville laughs about how young she and her husband, Rob, looked 30 years ago when they were married by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon in a massive ceremony with more than 2,000 other couples in Madison Square Garden. People have a lot of misconceptions about Moon’s Unification Church, Preece says. (The Huntsville Times/Kay Campbell)Preece dug out her scrapbook with theclippings and photographs from her wedding this weekend after news broke that the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church, had died at 92 in South Korea.
Preece and her husband, Rob Preece, joined more than 2,000 other couples in July 1982 to pass in rows between the crowned figures of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his wife, Hak Ja Han, and receive a blessing.
Their march down that red-carpeted aisle came more than three years after Moon had matched her and Rob during a meeting with dozens of other young adults.
After the matching, which Moon said was guided by the Holy Spirit, the two strangers corresponded to get to know each other, he from graduate school in California, she from her work in Washington, D.C., at the ballet school established by the Unification Church.
“So many things have been twisted about Rev. Moon, basically out of ignorance,” Preece said, looking at the framed photograph from the wedding, the young couple smiling as they stand stiffly, he in a blue suit, she in a simple white robe and bridal veil. “But many lives were changed for the good because of him, including my own.”
She pointed to photos of five other young couples, friends of theirs who were also married that day. Out of all those six couples, only one pair have divorced, she said, a success rate that easily outstrips national averages.
A good marriage and a loving home, according to the teachings of the church, are part of God’s plan for ideal human lives.
“His main teaching is that we have lost our relationship with God and we have lost our relationship with others,” Preece said. “The goal of faith is to restore those relationships.”
Power of family
The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church, second from left, stands with his wife Hak Ja Han Moon, second from right, his sons Hyung-jin Moon, left, and Kook Jin Moon during the closing ceremony of the 2012 Peace Cup Suwon at Suwon World Cup Stadium in Suwon, South Korea, July 22, 2012. The late Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who died Sept. 3 at 92, had 13 children with his wife, Hak Ja Han Moon, and one son with his first wife in a marriage that ended in divorce. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon, File)Preece came to the church at 20 from a rough childhood. She had been raised on the south side of Chicago in a violent, impoverished part of town.
Her own home life, with a stepfather she didn’t trust and a mother she didn’t connect with, had left her with a sense of a world in disarray. And her first couple years in college did nothing to amend that impression.
“Everybody I knew was messed up,” Preece said.
She left college and found her way south, looking for a place warm enough that she could just sleep outside. In New Orleans, one of the early American converts to Unification invited her to a meeting, and she ended up staying.
“I saw so many miracles,” Preece said. “It totally expanded my horizons. I met so many kinds of people, and learned to love all these different kinds of people.”
She stayed in the women’s part of the communal house, spending her days selling candy, gum, flowers or popcorn to raise money for the church.
There was no coercion from the leaders, no mind control, Preece said, just the wonderful unity of a family working hard together.
“I learned how, when you are really doing something with the right heart, working for something bigger than yourself, then the Spirit really will want to work with you,” Preece said.
People did not understand their dedication, she said. People said he was running a cult. They suspected Moon of working with South Korean intelligence to influence members of the U.S. Congress. In the late ‘70s, an intense investigation turned up the failure to report $150,000 in income over a two-year period, and Moon served a year in prison for tax fraud.
Moon and his followers believe the charges to have been trumped up.
“We were all young,” Preece said. “We didn’t know how to keep books.”
Couples from around the world participate in a mass wedding ceremony arranged by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church at Sun Moon University in Asan, south of Seoul, South Korea on Oct. 14, 2009. Moon, self-proclaimed messiah who founded the Unification Church, died at age 92 on Sept. 3, 2012. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)Human unity
There is a lot more to Moon’s theology than the grand weddings, Preece said.
Estimates of membership in the church today vary. At its height in the 1970s, the church claimed 3 million members, but religious watchers dispute that figure.
It’s certain that members of the movement are scarce in this part of the world. Preece, who attends a local Presbyterian congregation with her husband, says that they travel to Nashville to meet with a Unification Church there from time to time.
Moon’s “Exposition of the Divine Principle” retells the main stories in the Bible to show how the divine plan leads to the eventual second coming of Jesus and the reunification of all humankind. Jesus’ work, Moon maintains, was cut short by the crucifixion; Jesus had intended to get married and have children to begin a lineage of sinless people living in unity.
This belief in the ideal of unity meant that Moon often matched people from different races and nationalities for marriage. Moon also believed each person could act as a messiah to others. He called himself a messiah and, with his wife, the True Parents of a new and spiritually pure lineage.
“I think of him as a messiah, because he is the person who has helped me come close to God,” Preece said. “And because he set a high standard, living life totally for God, for making a difference in the world and for living for others,”
Moon’s experiences of torture and forced labor, when he was held in a North Korean prison camp for two years in the late 1950s for his religious teachings, made him a life-long anti-Communist. Newspapers and other media outlets around the world that the church owns, including theWashington Times, reliably support a conservative viewpoint.
The church has also built automobile factories in North Korea and China, shipyards, computer software companies, industrial machinery factories and other industries as diverse as a factory that packages ginseng tea and a ballet school.
Those industries grew out of Moon’s ability to see needs and move to meet them in practical ways, Preece said.
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