SUN MYUNG MOON:A CRUCIAL test of a new religion is whether it transfers to the next generation after its founder's demise, and with the death of the Rev Sun Myung Moon, at 92, after suffering from pneumonia, the prospects for his Unification church – or "Moonies" – look poor.
More significant is the future of the other side of this self-proclaimed messiah: his international business empire and his secretive influence on US conservative politics.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, Moon was notorious for blessing mass marriages, and his disciples for spiriting away young men and women to isolated camps to be “brainwashed” into abandoning their families. The faithful endured 16-hour days of raising money and working for nothing for “Father”, as Moon styled himself.
As court cases mounted worldwide, and Moon lost a libel action against the Daily Mail in Britain in the early 1980s, the church abandoned such recruitment and adherents dwindled. By the 1990s his new religion was clearly failing and, with Bill Clinton in office, faced an unfriendly White House.
Moon declared the church closed, although a website and New York office remained. His business empire continued, though, despite heavy losses in the 1998 Asian financial crisis.
Considering Moon’s documented history of extreme right-wing theocratic politics, anti-Semitism, constant rumours of sexual improprieties, his US imprisonment in 1982 for tax evasion and, for Christians, an offensively blasphemous theology, it is difficult to understand how he was tolerated, even welcomed, by US presidents, politicians, clergymen and academics in America, Japan and Britain.
The answer might be hypocrisy – and Moon’s money.
Moon was born Yong Myung Mun in the impoverished village of Sangsa in what is now North Korea, but was then a Japanese colony. His family was Christian and Moon attended local schools. At 15 he claimed to have seen a vision of Jesus and agreed to his request to “take over my work”.
Moon studied engineering in Tokyo, graduating in 1943. He returned home and married his first wife, then aged 19, but unmentioned in church histories. (Moon is variously reported as having been married twice, three or four times and his children, including those allegedly out of wedlock, are put at anything from eight to 16.)
Following the Japanese surrender after the second World War, Moon lived in Seoul and attended a church where the pastor preached that Korea was the new Israel and would produce a messiah, a message Moon soon exploited.
He quit this church and, leaving his young family, went north, where Pyongyang seethed with evangelical fervour. Moon began preaching his own neo-Israel prophecy, which allegedly included stipulations that allowed him to have sex with female congregants.
In 1948 the communists charged him with preaching a messianic message and he was sentenced to five years in a labour camp, where he endured terrible privations. American bombers destroyed the camp in 1950, killing 275, but Moon escaped, headed south and began preaching again.
In 1954 he formed the Unification church and it grew quickly.
He sent his first missionary to America in 1960, the year he married Hak Ja Han. She was groomed to lead the church after his oldest son was enveloped in a drink, drugs and wife-beating scandal in the late-1990s.
Moon moved to America in 1972 and his right-wing views soon brought entry to Republican circles. He was feted at huge rallies and met Richard Nixon.
However his business practices aroused suspicions and in 1978, after the Korea-gate bribery scandal, the congressional subcommittee on international organisations issued a damning report on the Moon church, which it described as “a multinational corporation . . . a paramilitary organisation . . . and a tightly disciplined international political party”.
Its recommendation of further investigation of illegalities was dropped when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980.
Moon prospered under Reaganism. At this time he was backed by two Japanese tycoons that the US occupation had formerly imprisoned as war criminals.
During the 1980s, Moon expanded his worldwide business empire. At various times he owned or controlled a car plant in China; a titanium mine, weapons factory, and Tong Il Heavy Industries in South Korea; huge land tracts in South America; a smart hotel in New York; a fishery in Alaska; a golf course in California; a computer firm in Japan; a small arms company and a university in New England; newspapers in Korea, Argentina and Japan, and the conservative Washington Times, which he founded in 1982; a symphony orchestra and ballet company; a cable TV network; the UPI press agency; a New York publishing house; Insight magazine and countless restaurants and jewellery businesses. His home was a 30-room mansion in New Jersey.
After Moon’s release from a US prison – he served 13 months beginning in 1982 – he was still welcomed by the great and good. He met or received support from British prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and Edward Heath, former US presidents Gerald Ford and George Bush snr and high-profile US senators and public figures.
These connections survived Moon’s increasingly embarrassing activities – sermons dwelling on the “sexual organs”, his description of American women as descended from prostitutes, family scandals, condemnation for anti-Semitism and a vow to “conquer and subjugate the world”. Uncle Sam’s embrace of the crooked cleric continued when George W Bush became president in 2000.
In April 2008, Moon’s youngest son was named the church’s top religious director. Other sons and daughters were put in charge of the church’s business and charities in South Korea and abroad.
In 2009, Moon married 45,000 people in simultaneous ceremonies worldwide in his first mass wedding in years. He is survived by Hak Ja Han and 10 children.
Sun Myung Moon, church founder and businessman, born February 25th, 1920; died September 2nd, 2012