Religion: Sun Myung Moon’s Goodwill Blitz

During the past four months, 300,000 ministers have received a box by mail bearing these words: A GIFT FOR YOU FROM SOME FOLKS WHO CARE. Inside are pamphlets, two books and six hours of doctrinal lectures on videocassettes. The 5-lb. gift packs are part of an extravagant p.r. effort by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s controversial, 45,000-member Unification Church of America.

The $4.5 million mail blitz is only the latest tactic in a $30 million cosmetic campaign being waged by the Moon movement. The church was founded in South Korea in 1954 and now claims 3 million followers worldwide, a figure that some outside researchers consider inflated. The propaganda program has been taking place while Moon, 65, is serving an 18-month term in the Danbury, Conn., federal prison for income tax fraud; he is due for release Aug. 20.

The campaign is designed to explain Unification doctrine, polish the sect’s tarnished image and achieve mainstream respectability. In the past year, for example, 7,000 clergy have been courted at all-expenses-paid Unification seminars in the Caribbean, Europe and Asia, as well as at U.S. sites. Moon- related scientific conferences have tried to win prestige by signing up Nobel scholars, while a Unification-backed anti-Communist agency seeks allies among fundamentalists. Capitalizing on its ownership of the daily Washington Times and New York Tribune, the Moon movement has run junkets for hundreds of journalists to soften media hostility.

Unificationism needs all the friends it can get. The theology commission of the National Council of Churches has ruled that the organization “is not a Christian church.” Indeed, Moon proclaims that Christ failed to achieve complete salvation for humanity and that a Korean messiah will appear in this century. Hundreds of parents have charged that their brainwashed children often ended up on the streets selling flowers for Moon while he lived in luxury at a 25-room estate. Mose Durst, a convert from Judaism who is president of the Unification Church of America, candidly admits that “the image of us is that we have four-year-olds locked in iceboxes in the basement.”

Whatever mainstream church leaders think of Unificationism as a faith, many have voiced their objection to Moon’s imprisonment. He has protested that his conviction amounts to selective persecution of an unpopular religion. A wide variety of religious leaders agree, including the National Council, Moral Majority Founder Jerry Falwell, and Roman Catholic Bishop Ernest Unterkoefler of Charleston, S.C.

Toleration does not, however, translate into esteem, though there seems to be much less hysteria about Moon now than there was in the 1970s. California Cult Foe Lowell D. Streiker thinks Moon’s imprisonment may strengthen the loyalties of disciples, “but it doesn’t help in recruitment or in image building.” An even stronger view is taken by Anson Shupe of the University of Texas at Arlington, an expert on the movement. He sees a loss of momentum in the Moon cult, viewing it as an organization in disarray, pouring “millions of dollars down the drain” and unable to hold on to recruits. Says he: “What the Moonies do is ludicrous. Most people who go through that experience with them walk away later.”