Sun Myung Moon
The Reverend Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification church, died on September 3rd, aged 92
Sep 8th 2012 | from the print edition
THRUSTING his small strong arm into the firewood piles where they nested, Sun Myung Moon as a boy would flush out sparrows into a net. Usually they were cooked for his siblings; peasant families in North Pyongan province ate what they could get. But he once put two birds in a cage to hear them sing and to watch them mate. It pleased him, he said, to see them express their love for each other.
Critics suspected he got much the same pleasure, many years later, when he presided over the famous mass weddings of his Unification church. Dozens, even hundreds, of couples, in off-the-peg white dresses and dark suits, would parade before him, across lurid carpets and through banks of gladioli, to be soberly scattered with confetti by their high-crowned True Father and their equally unsmiling True Mother, Hak Ja Han. Mr Moon arranged these marriages himself, by pairing photographs. Like the sparrows, many of the candidates had never met before.
Yet this was no whim, he said. It was the most important work that could possibly be imagined. As he wrote in his book, “Explanation of the Divine Principle”, soon after he had founded his church in 1954, he was engaged on restoring mankind to the purity God had intended before Adam fell. When the first parents had sex illicitly, after eating the fruit in Eden, they broke God’s heart. Jesus, when he came, was meant to marry and restore a perfect, united humanity through his children, but he was killed first. Both Jesus and God had appealed to Mr Moon personally (Jesus on a hillside near his village, God in a suffering roar of waves and mountains) to finish the work that had been left undone. An ever-increasing series of pure marriages across races and cultures would remake the relationship between man and God, for whom Mr Moon was now spokesman.
He therefore wasn’t just going his own way, he said, when he built up his church from a cardboard shack in a South Korean refugee camp to a billion-dollar worldwide enterprise encompassing luxury hotels, fishing fleets, ski resorts, gun-manufacturing, theWashington Times, vast estates in Uruguay and the only car-making factory in North Korea. He needed to remake the world for purified humanity: his own many children and grandchildren, the children of the couples he had married, and the church members whose True Parent he had now become. Hence the blessing of “holy ground” all over the world, including a patch on Capitol Hill; the floating of vaporous giant projects, such as an International Peace Highway from Tokyo to London; and his pushing of acolytes to keep raising money, so that ever more property could be added to the sacred pile.
Mr Moon knew he was mocked, but smiled blandly through it; it was the fate of every new religion to be attacked, and his was more revolutionary than most. He was accused of brainwashing church members and breaking up families, but beat off most such charges except the Daily Mail’s. In America, to which he moved in 1971, he was wounded like Jesus—though, unlike Jesus, he eventually had the IRS on his tail for unpaid taxes on a Chase Manhattan account known as “Father’s money”, from which he paid school fees and bought gold watches. Officials of his large church branch in Japan, too, would bring into America bags of cash from the sale of holy trinkets to prop up his American enterprises. It could all be explained away as God’s business, though for 13 months in 1982-83 he ran his church from a federal prison in Connecticut.
Tea in Pyongyang
He had picked America in order to fight communism, an enemy from long before. As a Presbyterian preacher in North Korea in the late 1940s he had twice been jailed by the new red regime, once for “disturbing society”. He had staggered to the South on an ice floe across the Imjin river in 1950, stripped of all except the clothes he stood in. Later he fought communism with the ironclad conservatism of the Washington Times, the daily reading of Ronald Reagan’s White House, and with “God Bless America” rallies in Washington and at Yankee Stadium, mirroring his huge anti-communist rallies in South Korea.
Despite 30 years in America, however, he never spoke English. Korean was God’s language. Some thought he was an agent of South Korea, or perhaps the Korean CIA. He laughed that off, and put out mediating feelers to the North as well. Kim Il Sung, the founder, treated him as an old friend. Kim Jong Il, the strange son, sent him presents of roses and wild ginseng root, to make the honeyed tea that kept him going through a day of sermons after two hours’ sleep.
He discussed reunification with both of them. The reason he desired it, though, was that Korea was God’s chosen nation, the new Israel, the suffering land where heaven’s work would be accomplished. Mr Moon once proposed himself as supreme chairman of the reunited country, with a central ideology of “Godism”.
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