SUN MYUNG MOON, 1920-2012
Messiah … Sun Myung Moon addresses a rally in New York in 2005. Photo: AP
During the 1970s and early '80s, Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, popularly known as ''the Moonies'', claimed more than 4 million members in 120 countries. Moon, a South Korean multimillionaire businessman, had discovered his vocation as the ''second Messiah'' in 1936, when he claimed to have met Jesus Christ on a Korean hillside, recognising Him from His picture.
Jesus informed Moon He had been unable to complete His mission on earth due to unforeseen circumstances, so Moon (Jesus went on) had been chosen to succeed Him and to establish the kingdom of heaven upon earth.
In 1954, Moon founded the Tong-il Kyo (the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity), teaching a hybrid of Christianity, Confucianism, Shamanism and anti-communism. From its base in Seoul, the cult spread to the West in the '60s and '70s.
In his personal manifesto, Divine Principle (1957), Moon argued that, had He lived, Jesus would have married the ideal wife and begotten the perfect ''pure'' family. Moon would complete the task with the aim of unifying all religions and societies under his personal rule, liberating them from the sinful condition caused, Moon claimed, by Eve's illicit sex with Satan. To this end, an early marriage was put aside, and in 1960, aged 40, he took a second bride, 17-year-old Hak Ja Han, with whom he ruled his flock in the manner of a mediaeval monarch.
Heaven on earth, Moon taught, could be established through individuals being spiritually transformed and creating god-centred family units. Marriage was of central importance, and Moon's followers were persuaded to take part in choreographed mass weddings to people they had never met, hand-picked for them by Moon from photographs. In 1988, Moon entered the Guinness Book of Records when, wearing a crown and robes of white and gold, he united 6516 couples at Seoul's Olympic Stadium, before sending them out to restore moral virtue to a godless world and fight communism.
Moon engendered widespread hostility among parents, alarmed at the changed personalities of their converted children. Some mounted lawsuits accusing Moon of practising brainwashing, and there were reports of cult members being kidnapped and de-programmed by ''cult-busters''.
Yet there was never any evidence the Moonies incarcerated people or used mind-altering drugs; and there were many examples of people who had left the church voluntarily. American civil liberties organisations regarded parental objections as unconstitutional interference with a person's rights of affiliation and freedom of religion.
By the late 1970s, Moon had become one of the most powerful religious leaders in the world - and also the richest. He built a vast international business empire of newspaper chains (including the right-wing The Washington Times), television stations, hotels, golf courses, universities, factories (including a Korean arms factory), vast tracts of real estate and even a ballet company. The source of Moon's original capital remained a mystery, but the fact the church's dedicated workers received no wages certainly contributed to his success. In 2008, one estimate put Moon's personal wealth at about $990 million.
Moon's mission began to become unstuck in 1982, when he was jailed for 18 months in America for tax evasion. The reputation of his church never really recovered from the scandal, and by the mid-1990s membership had plummeted.
The ''perfect family'' too was beginning to show signs of wear. There were allegations about Moon's relations with women in the early part of his ministry and a string of scandals involving the lavish lifestyles and unruly behaviour of his many children. In 1998 his eldest son, Hyo Jin, was denounced as a violent cocaine addict by his wife. He died of a heart attack in 2008, aged 45. Another of Moon's sons, Younjin Phillip Moon, committed suicide.
Moon promised his followers that he would one day reveal a ''much greater area of truth'' that he had received but was reserving for the future. Death intervened before he had found time to do so.
Moon was born Mun Yong-myeong on January 6, 1920, into a peasant family of eight children in what is now North Korea. When he was 10 years old, his parents joined the Presbyterian church.
Moon first glimpsed the importance of his mission while attending high school in Seoul. He followed up his meeting with Jesus Christ with conversations with God, Buddha and Moses.
In 1938, Moon went to Tokyo to study Engineering at Waseda University. Though there were claims he spent some time there in prison for subversion, his activities between 1938 and 1945 are obscure. Towards the end of the war he returned to Korea, and at about this time he married Choi Sun-kil; shortly afterwards, however, he left his pregnant wife in Seoul while he preached in the north. He divorced her in 1955 on the grounds she was ''unfamiliar with my religion''.
In 1946, Moon set up his first church, the Kang Hei (Broad Sea) church, in Pyongyang, and changed his name to Sun Myung Moon. In later years, early members of his church claimed Moon's early ministry focused on the belief that the human race had to be purified through sex. Followers, it was alleged, were taught that sex with Moon would cleanse body and soul and that marriages with other cultists were invalid until the wives had slept with Moon. Moon, though, always strenuously denied these charges.
In August 1946, he was arrested, and 15 months later rearrested. In October 1950, United Nations forces released him from prison and he fled south to Pusan, where he found employment as a dock worker.
In Pusan, Moon recruited a small band of believers and wrote an exposition of his views in Divine Principle, which was eventually published in 1957. At the same time he began to look for recruits abroad. At first progress was slow, but in 1969 the establishment in America of a right-wing arm of the church called the Freedom Leadership Foundation helped boost numbers and laid the foundations for the arrival in America of Moon in 1971.
Moon moved to Tarrytown, New York, where he established his world headquarters. Initiatives to spread his message included an abortive collaboration with Elvis Presley to film the life of Christ and an expensive but unsuccessful film, Inchon, about the Korean War.
By the late 1970s, as founder and chief shareholder of the Unification Church, Moon controlled a fortune estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars and had his finger in businesses making anything from cars to canned fish. Church membership boomed on the back of world tours built around the establishment of ''holy grounds'', mass weddings and vigorous recruitment drives.
From 1995 the focus of Moon's activities shifted to a remote region on Brazil's sparsely populated frontier with Paraguay and Bolivia, where he set about building the Garden of Eden at New Hope Ranch, a 300-square-kilometre campus for spiritual development complete with a school, university and research centre. In 2002, however, the Brazilian authorities were reported to be investigating the church for possible tax evasion and illegal currency transactions.
As Moon's flock dwindled, his claims of global influence became more and more bizarre. In 2004 he told an audience on Capitol Hill that emperors, kings and presidents - including Hitler and Stalin ''from beyond the grave'' - had ''declared to all heaven and earth that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is none other than humanity's saviour, messiah, returning Lord and true parent''.
In 2009, Moon handed over the reins of his church to his youngest son, the Reverend Hyung Jin Moon.
Sun Myung Moon and his wife Hak Ja Han had 14 children. He also had a son by his first wife.
Telegraph, London
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