In The Shadow of the Moons

I first read Nansook Hong's In the Shadow of the Moons - My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Family (Little, Brown and Company, 1998) a few years ago.

Even though details surrounding the Moonies - a religious, though many call it a cult, movement - were eye-opening and shocking, I saw the depictions merely as the outcome of a group of disturbed people who had deliberately twisted the teachings of Christianity to suit their own purposes.

But when I picked up the book again this week, I began to wonder if the Korean backgrounds of the Moons might have contributed to the blind obedience to the teachings of the Unification Church. Of course I have to concur that that there are all kinds of cult groups in the world from all cultural backgrounds. But still, I wondered if the pecularities of the Unification Church had its grounding in at least some elements of Korean culture.

Unification church head Reverend Sun Myung Moon claimed he had been chosen by God to complete Jesus' mission in restoring the Garden of Eden, and that he was the Second Coming. Marriage is at the center of the Church's doctrine. Moon held that because Jesus was crucified before he could marry and sire sinless children, the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth had not been opened to mankind. It is therefore Moon's role as Lord of the Second Advent to complete the work Jesus left undone. With his wife, Moon sired "the first sinless True Family of God by producing children born free of original sin." The rest of humankind can become part of this sinless legacy only by receiving marriage blessings from the Church.

As Moon's former daughter-in-law Hong wrote: "Those beliefs, isolated from the theology in which they are embedded and the culture from which they sprang, admittedly sound bizarre. But what of the miracles of Jesus? Or the parting of the Red Sea? Are Bible stories of virgin births and resurrection not equally fantastic? All belief is a matter of faith."

The Church forbade followers from smoking, drinking, gambling and sex outside of marriage. Yet the First Family were said to have violated those very same rules. Followers had to love their True Parents more than themselves, their spouses, and their children. Followers also had to contribute to a fund known as "indemnity fund". The payment symbolizes the Church's teaching that all of humanity shares in the debt owed for the betrayal of Jesus, and that everyone must all pay for this collective sin.

Moon and his family moved to the United States in 1971 on the pretext that he was directed by God to do so as the US was said to be on the verge of a moral collapse similar to that which destroyed Rome in the first century.

Moon taught that Korean is the universal language of the Kingdom of Heaven, but yet his youngest children reportedly did not even speak the language. Moon taught that gambling is a sin, yet as Lord of the Second Advent, he claimed it was his duty to "mingle with sinners in order to save them," and that he had to understand their sin in order to dissuade them from it. Moon even reportedly match-made Jesus to an elderly Korean woman because the Unification Church teaches that only married couples can enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and that "Jesus needed the intervention to move through those gates."

In a defence of the Church, Hong noted that there was an innocence and gentleness about the Church's beliefs that is seldom reflected in the denunciations of its members as "cultist". "We may have been seduced into a cult, but most of us were not cultists; we were idealists."

The True Family was said to have treated the staff like indentured servants. The kitchen sitters and baby-sitters slept six to a room in the attic. They were given a small stipend but no real salary. The situation was little better for security guards, gardeners and handymen. The Moons' attitude was that church members were privileged to live in such close proximity to the True Family. In exchange for that honor, they were ordered around by even the youngest of the Moons. The Church also taught that wives are subservient to their husbands, just as children are subservient to their parents. Moon even noted that "wives should be struck every now and then to keep them humble."

Moon reportedly taught his children that they were little princes and princesses, and they acted accordingly.

"It was embarrassing to watch and amazing to see how accepting the staff were of the verbal abuse meted out by the Moon children. Like me, they believed the True Family was faultless. If any of the Moons had complaints with us, it must reflect not on their expectations but on our own unworthiness."

Hong was match-made to Moon's eldest son Hyo Jin when she was merely 15, a move she did not hesitate as "this was every Unification girl's dream." "To be Hyo Jin Moon's wife meant I would one day be the Mother of the Church. I felt humbled and honored. That Hyo Jin himself was no girl's idea of Prince Charming did not even occur to me. A blessing was the uniting of two souls, not just the union of two human beings."

Shortly after marriage, Hyo Jin reportedly went to his mother to complain about Hong's "lack of sexual maturity."

"She called me to her one day to discuss my wifely duties. It was very awkward. I had trouble following her euphemisms about being a lady during the day and a woman at night. We must be friends to our husbands in the day but fulfil their fantasies at night, she said; otherwise they will stray. If a husband does stray, it reflects a wife's failure to satisfy him. I must try harder to be the kind of woman Hyo Jin wants. I was confused. Hadn't Sun Myung Moon chosen me for my innocence? Was I now expected to be a temptress? At fifteen?"

After years of abuse at the hands of her husband and the growing awakening to the absurdities of the Church's teaching, Hong decided to pack her bags, take her children ("the only thing holy about my marriage"), leave and "reclaim her life."

"Accepting the Reverend Moon for the fraud I now know him to be was a slow and painful process. It was only possible because that realization, in the end, did not shake my faith in God. Moon had failed God, as he has failed me and all his idealistic and trusting followers. But God had not failed me ... It was God alone who comforted me, a woman-child in the hands of a husband who treated me either as a toy for his sexual pleasure or as an outlet for his violent rages." As Hong concluded: "The evil at the heart of the Unification Church is the hypocrisy and deceit of the Moons, a family that is all too human in its incredible level of dysfunction. To continue to promote the myth that the Moons are spiritually superior to the idealistic young people who are drawn to the church is a shameful deceit."