00:00:00.000So, Adrienne, today we are diving into a group that I think is really fascinating,
00:00:21.340even though they are in some ways eerily normal and in some ways like true freaks.0.64
00:00:27.740So I'm going to ask you, just to start off, what do you know about the Moonies?0.62
00:00:33.540So when you proposed this topic, it made immediate sense because, I mean, they're most famous for like mass weddings, which let's say is somewhat more right wing coded in our public discourse.
00:00:46.380So I was like, yeah, like it seems like if we got in bed with the Moonies, we'd be getting in bed with the right.
00:00:51.140I remember hearing a lot more about them in the 80s,
00:00:53.720and I kind of feel like I heard about them in the 80s
00:00:56.040in the way I would hear about things that were actually 70s phenomena.
00:00:59.180In a way, that made me think, oh, Amora's going back to her favorite decade.
00:01:02.840Am I right to think that the Moonies are, like, it feels like a throwback.
00:01:07.600I'm sure they're still around. These things always kick around still.
00:01:10.280But I haven't heard about the Moonies in a long, long time.
00:01:13.940But there was a time when they were really quite present,
00:01:16.520and it seemed also quite well connected, and especially U.S. politics.
00:01:21.000Given that it's like, I know it comes from Korea.
00:01:23.120It's started by, it's named after Sun Myung Moon.
00:01:26.500It would stand to reason that part of the reason why people got in bed with the Moonies was anti-communism.
00:01:44.460So his wife is running one faction and she has secured control of most of their remaining properties.
00:01:52.960Part of this is a story about real estate.
00:01:56.460Honestly, they own a ton of real estate and land and businesses.
00:02:00.260And then two of his surviving sons, who in the U.S. go by Sean and Justin Moon, have split off and formed their own sacks called the Ministry of the Heavenly Rod, I believe.
00:02:13.960which is a AR-15, like, assault rifle-based religion.
00:02:30.260So, you know, there's some interesting continued integration of the Moonies into modern conservatism
00:02:37.560and into, like, sort of like the post-2016 versions of the right wing.
00:02:43.100But they are really very diminished, both in terms of their numbers and in terms of their, like, monetary strength since the death of Dear Leader in 2012.
00:02:54.460So, like, I became interested in the Moonies when I'm in college.
00:02:58.480And I'm going to tell a personal story.
00:03:00.640I went to college at Bard College, which is embarrassing enough on its own.
00:03:05.000But it's in upstate New York in the Hudson Valley, which now is like a place where your friend wants to have her bachelorette weekend, but at the time was this kind of like economically depressed rural area.0.78
00:03:15.800And like a lot of women, I experimented in college with heterosexuality.
00:03:20.320And like one night in college, I picked up this guy and I brought him home.
00:03:24.960And we're like fooling around and he starts like really freaking out.
00:03:30.120And I'm like, whoa, are you all right?
00:04:49.240but read the books we give you up here.
00:04:53.540But yeah, the Unification Theological Seminary,
00:04:55.840The place where they trained their ministers was just down the road from Bard.
00:05:00.340And in fact, they had these flyers up all over campus like, hey, we're trying to, you know, generate some income for our failing cult.
00:05:06.440Come rent a room, like a really cheap below market room in our big seminary and commute to Bard.
00:05:13.600And people would warn you not to do it because they were a cult.
00:05:16.120Of course, both organizations might end up with members marrying each other.0.93
00:05:18.920Well, the other thing about the Moonies is that they produced in the U.S. by design, and we're going to get into this, like a large group of like mixed race, half Asian people because of their arranged marriage and because of their like mandated procreation.0.88
00:05:38.080And because of the population of the Moonies, which are much bigger in Korea and in Japan than they are in the U.S., a lot of these sort of deliberately interracial cross-cultural marriages happened, unifying Korean and Japanese Moonies with like white American followers.0.88
00:05:57.300So there's also like really interesting race politics around Sun Yung-moon and his mixture of gung-ho, like benignly stupid version of multiculturalism with like pretty direct like Korean racial chauvinism, which I think we're also going to have a chance to get into because he's a weird guy.
00:06:16.780In some ways, this is like a very standard cult story, right?0.57
00:06:20.100It's the 1970s and a charismatic leader recruits a lot of lost, vulnerable, searching kind of young people.
00:06:30.360And he initiates them into weird sex stuff and takes all their money, right?
00:06:40.940But in other ways, this is an unusual cult story because, you know, I think of cults, the sort of like standard late 60s, early 70s American cult story as something that is a product of like the excesses of the countercultural left of that era, right?
00:06:56.860They did too many drugs. They didn't think critically enough and they couldn't really handle a life without structure the way they thought they could. And that's why they fell under the sway of a Charlie Manson who lured them in with rock and roll or like a Jim Jones who lured them in with like all these world peace promises. Right.
00:07:12.660Right. The other way to put that is that cults on the American right tend to just be within organized religion.
00:07:19.040Yeah. And tend to be tax exempt. Whereas if like left wingers get together and like do weird religious and sex shit, it doesn't get church recognition.
00:07:26.760It's a cult, which is to defend exactly neither of these two enterprises.0.97
00:07:30.180I'm just saying I know there's a homology and yet different treatment. So, yeah, this is unusual.
00:07:35.100Yeah. The other thing that we're going to wind up talking about is like how different are the Moonies really from other religions?
00:07:40.220Right. Because some of the stuff seems very strange, but I think it's really just kind of standard issue forms of conservatism in a new package.
00:07:48.920But the Moonies really did emerge pretty solidly from the political right and were always on the political right.
00:07:57.580And they also are sort of fusion of what I like to think of as like religious and secular kinds of cults.
00:08:04.340Like we talked in our episode with the brilliant Bridget Reed about her book on MLMs, Little Bosses Everywhere, about the sort of like psychological enticements and like quasi-spiritual ambitions in the multi-level marketing scheme, which is like one form of a cult.
00:08:20.800And the Moonies merged both this like messianic religious message with a kind of prosperity gospel style message about hard work and entrepreneurship and specifically anti-communism.
00:08:34.520Because we're not just talking about the Unification Church itself, the actual religious organization, when we talk about the Moonies, we're also talking about this vast network of real estate holdings and businesses and fisheries and media companies that are collectively called the Moon Organization, some of which are extremely successful, a lot of which are contracted to national governments.
00:08:59.960He actually wound up owning a lot of arms manufacturers, weirdly, which is how you get to his sons with the guns.
00:09:07.720The big thing you would definitely know about is the New Yorker Hotel is owned by the Moonies.0.86
00:09:14.060It is a site of a lot of Mooney activities.1.00
00:09:16.660He owns a lot of ballets in Japan and Korea.
00:09:21.140A lot of like children's ballet schools was kind of a weird thing.
00:09:25.880I mean, that checks out because that's definitely a cult.
00:09:27.600He owns something called News World Communications, which is like a big media conglomerate that owns a whole lot of newspapers, including like newspapers in Japan and South Korea, but also in like Egypt and South Africa.
00:09:43.840Most prominently for our listeners, they owned until 2010 something called The Washington Times, which is sort of a right wing D.C. newspaper.
00:09:53.180Yeah, they also own a tremendous amount of fisheries.
00:09:57.880This is something that Moon got into because he bought a lot of property in Gloucester, Massachusetts, which is not on but very close to Cape Cod.
00:10:42.440So part of how he was able to do this is because he had a ton of tithing done by his followers who were encouraged to make large donations, often in like kind of a like an indulgent style way, like give us a lot of money and we can buy your ancestors out of purgatory.
00:11:01.260Right. He was merging Korean indigenous ancestor worship of the kind that he would have known from his upbringing with like pre-Reformation style indulgences.0.54
00:11:12.560Martin Luther is over there like, what the fuck am I delivering?0.79
00:11:17.000And the notion was that like the more you give, the more of your ancestors you can buy out of purgatory and release into heaven.1.00
00:11:23.380What if they were assholes, though? You're like, I want to exempt great aunt Hortense.0.99
00:11:35.120And something we're going to talk about is American Moonies who joined the church during what is called the first generation, like basically boomers.
00:11:42.320Often they were recruited from college and encouraged to drop out and devote themselves full time to the church and its ministries.
00:11:49.580And that meant that they were often not really qualified for renumerative jobs.
00:11:54.180Like, you need a college degree in the U.S. to get a middle-class job in a lot of cases.
00:11:59.540And so a lot of them wound up permanently working for Mooney businesses and then tithing back those large portions of those salaries back into the Mooney organization.
00:12:09.100And it was a font for, allegedly, or according to the federal government, a lot of money laundering.
00:12:16.980So we're going to get into all of that good stuff.
00:12:20.100But there's like a merger of like cumulative capitalism and messianic religious preaching that fused a lot of different strands within 20th century American conservatism, right?
00:12:33.960And this is like something you see a lot with American commentators looking at Korea.
00:12:38.720They're like, it's like America in a funhouse mirror where we get to see ourselves more clearly by seeing it like through the contrast of this like supposed cultural difference, right?
00:12:49.020So Moon really merged right-wing reactions to the 60s counterculture, John Birch-style conspiratorial anti-communism, labor exploitation, arms and humans trafficking.
00:13:03.200He was really into like Ronald Reagan-style charismatic conservatism.
00:13:08.320And then he also, I think, tapped in pretty successfully to various anxieties about race, heritage, lineage, and really above all, the family.
00:13:17.840So the broad stroke story of the Moonies goes like this. So Sun Myung Moon, who is a charismatic preacher with a theology based in but significantly diverging from Christianity, founded his church in Seoul in 1954, where it quickly spread.
00:13:35.600And his doctrine preached this, like, millenarian notion of humanity's divinely guided effort towards perfection and towards the repayment for past sins.
00:13:47.880So, 54 in Seoul, so that's immediately after the Korean War.
00:13:52.180I don't think you get Sung Myung-moon without the very specific crucible of, like, anti-communism and, like, Japanese imperialism that was Korea in the 20th century, right?
00:14:05.120So over the course of his career, he becomes increasingly explicit and avowed in his claim to be the second coming of Christ.
00:14:13.920For a lot of his career, he did this Trump style, like many people are saying, that I am the Messiah.
00:14:20.840There's this like really funny late night talk show interview he did soon after he moved to the U.S. in 1971,
00:14:28.720where it's not Johnny Carson, but it's a Johnny Carson type goes,
00:14:32.040are you really the second coming of Christ? Are you really the Messiah? And Moon, through a
00:14:36.540translator, he puts this kind of smirk on his face, and he's like, I didn't say I'm the Messiah,
00:14:41.960but perhaps you had a divine revelation that I am. And the whole crowd laughs.
00:14:46.000At present, Mr. Moon is regarded as a Messiah by many devout and very attractive followers.
00:14:55.160There are some in the audience tonight, and he's regarded as a Messiah. Now, there are
00:15:02.000by my researchers 27 working messiahs roaming the world right now and that doesn't include
00:15:08.740john yoko and lemon or john lennon and yoko i get my messiahs all mixed up now what i
00:15:17.180would like to know is are the other 26 messiahs fakes and is mr moon the only true one
00:15:32.000He's a charmer. He's a guy with some serious charisma, right?
00:15:47.620So he slowly starts hinting, and then eventually in 1992, he will formally crown himself the
00:15:54.400Messiah. But he's always explicit about this notion that it is his special divinely ordained
00:16:00.140job to restore humanity to a blessed and sinless state. So his church that he founded in Seoul in
00:16:06.9801954 expands rapidly throughout Asia in the 1950s and 60s. It's particularly successful and is
00:16:12.980particularly politically connected in Korea and Japan. It eventually becomes very embedded within
00:16:19.120the ruling governments of what becomes South Korea and Japan and very intimately connected
00:16:24.060to the assassination of Shinzo Abe eventually, which I hope we can get to. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
00:16:28.040Moon moves to the U.S. in 1971 to expand his reach there.
00:16:32.560His church recruited really heavily from college campuses, mostly, though, of course, not exclusively among white kids.
00:16:40.000And the Moonies, like people who are recruited to the Moonies and then left and some observers at the time, talk about the Moonies as being really appealing to a certain kind of college student who was maybe like temperamentally and politically more conservative, but very drawn to the communes of the counterculture, right?
00:16:59.280There's a utopian element to these more left-wing or countercultural experiments in collective living that they're witnessing around them for other people in the early 70s.
00:17:11.240But maybe they're afraid of drugs or they've got like more conservative sexual politics.0.89
00:17:16.140Those are the people that the Moonies are really, really successful with.
00:17:19.240I feel like this is something that I haven't seen explored that much in the United States.
00:17:21.760But there's a couple of very good books about this in the case of Germany, which is that the vibe shift, for lack of a better term, although I hate that word, in the 1960s does reach conservatives as well.
00:17:34.500And that in some ways they want a version of that, except, as you say, without the changes to the structure of power and the order of business that it would entail.
00:17:45.140And there is this, what's our rock and roll going to be?
00:17:47.540What's our kind of youth culture going to be like?
00:17:50.320And it would make perfect sense that these kind of charismatic cults would be part of that too.
00:17:55.500Yeah, it's like that meme where the youth pastor like spins around the chair to sit backwards in it.
00:17:59.780It's like, you know who else had long hair and lived with a bunch of his friends, you know?
00:18:04.900Something about the countercultural era makes a lot of different people with a whole bunch of different ideological commitments
00:18:12.440see an opportunity to seize on this zeitgeist and the sexiness of this new cultural milieu to try and push their own agenda.
00:18:20.320Moon has the exotic frisson for his white American followers of being foreign and particularly of being Asian in this way that I think the milieu of the moment was also encouraging them to exoticize.
00:18:30.800When you say college students, do we know the gender breakdown of this?
00:18:34.460Because that is what sets a lot of these cults apart, right?
00:18:37.040That like some of them seem to very heavily drawn on women, right?
00:18:47.540I mean, I guess the weddings would suggest you kind of got to work for parody unless he wants to officiate some gay weddings, which I'm going to guess he didn't want to.
00:18:54.920Why no? Yeah. You know, the Moonies, they're taking who they can get.
00:18:59.840But a lot of people who were in the group and later left talk about being recruited by like cute people.
00:19:07.620Right. So like one guy who is now a cult deprogrammer and a psychologist is like, yeah, they came to my college campus at Suwannee.
00:19:17.340in Tennessee. Yeah, University of the South. And there were a lot of cute girls and they were
00:19:22.480telling me to come and hang out with them at this seminar. And they said it wasn't religious,
00:19:29.320which was a lie. And then I followed them because I wanted to follow the girls
00:19:33.720and wound up in this place where I didn't know how to get home and they wouldn't let me sleep.
00:19:38.320And they kept me up all night and made me throw out my book of poetry. You know, like people's0.96
00:19:42.500grievances against the way that they were recruited are varied, but they frequently
00:19:47.500center on what's called like a honeypot kind of solicitation.
00:20:06.140Something else that happened in post-war Korea is that sun preference led to a massive gender disparity in the Korean population.
00:20:17.000One reason that Korea doesn't work as a panicked example of where the U.S. is heading is that a lot of what is happening in Korea with, like, their decreased birth rate and so on is the result of their massive imbalance in gender because of their sun preference, which is, like, not true in the United States.
00:21:32.720With just 10,000 of our closest friends and strangers.
00:21:35.640And like their parents will be up in the stands and then they'll be down on the football field and they're all in matching outfits.
00:21:41.060So like every woman wears the same wedding dress, every man wears the same tux, etc.
00:21:45.980And they all say the same vows, which are very particular vows.
00:21:48.820And then they became known not just for these mass weddings, but also for the distress of the recruits' parents.
00:21:57.100So the parents of these young people who were recruited into the Moonies in the 1970s felt that their children had been brainwashed and they went to dramatic, controversial, sometimes like frankly violent and highly publicized lengths to retrieve their children from Moon's organization and deprogram them and restore them to their previous worldview, right?
00:22:20.060So on the one hand, you have these massed weddings with arranged marriages.
00:22:24.300And on the other hand, you have like parents funding, like really just a kidnapping and deprogramming of their cult-recruited kids.
00:22:32.900And both of these are just like news media bait, right?
00:22:36.120Like you said, the exoticism of Moon being Korean may have helped draw white American teenagers to his operation.
00:22:43.680Of course, the idea that an Asian man took my child is also a very old racist trope in American media.
00:22:52.660And I could imagine that it's very easy to activate that, even if your child made what might, by all accounts, be a poor choice, but a free choice to join this group and hitch themselves to this person that they just met.
00:23:04.680So there is also this foreign exotic operation that's recruiting our teenagers.0.75
00:23:09.140It almost is a kind of Orientalist conspiracy theory.
00:23:12.540And by the way, it backfires pretty spectacularly, right? Like the notion that they could be kidnapped and dragged away from this community had the effect of making some people much more invested in their connections to Moon.
00:23:26.280So you have these like stories of people like leaving unification church buildings like with sometimes literally bags over their head so that the deprogrammers who are waiting outside to snatch them can't tell who it is.
00:23:39.840So this is like something that doesn't it doesn't totally work to oppose your kids like new interest if they are in potentially like a rebellious phase with this kind of like passionate antagonism.
00:23:52.120Throughout all this, while he's both mass marrying people and people are getting dragged out of his mass ceremonies by irate parents, he has this other side, right?
00:24:04.000Like he's this spectacle on the one hand, but this is also the moment when the Moonies really start attaining cultural and political dominance is maybe too strong a word, but they're getting connected with the upper echelons of American business and politics, right?
00:24:15.800Yeah, Moon makes a pitch to the American right in pretty explicit terms. He's like, listen, you might think these weddings are kind of wacky, but we have a lot in common. For one thing, I am extremely opposed to homosexuality. This is one of the more passionate and repeated concerns of Moon's preaching.
00:24:35.560He's a guy who makes the subtext of a lot of like right wing Christianity text. He is like completely sexually obsessed. Sexuality is the center of his theology, which we'll get into. And sexual chastity, aside from obedience, is like the one like really overarching command of his worldview. Right.0.56
00:24:54.100So his opposition to the rising gay rights movement at this time is really passionate and he pitches that to the Christian right as one means of potential cooperation.
00:25:06.200He also pitches himself even more strongly as an anti-communist.
00:25:10.560He says that he views the Cold War between Soviet communism and American capitalism as a war between good and evil and that he sees Korea as the front line of this battle between God and Satan, right?
00:25:25.480And so he pitches himself as somebody who is not just a committed anti-communist but a credentialed anti-communist, partly because of his history of persecution and imprisonment by communist forces in North Korea and also because of his, you know, intimate relation with this area that he understands as a divinely ordained site of contest between these ideologies.
00:25:51.820Yeah. And this link between anti-communism and religious cults would have been unusual for the U.S. foreign policy establishment to entertain at the time. But their anti-communist allies, for instance, in South America, right, if you think of Pinochet and Colonia Dignidad in Chile, the idea that like in beating back communism, we have to make common cause with these religious nuts to like murder communists, like it was very much accepted, even among realists in the foreign policy space, I would think.
00:26:20.240Yeah, I mean, one of Moon's big American projects, one of his more successful fundraising efforts, was for the Nicaraguan Contras.
00:26:29.840One of the reasons he called his religious organization the Unification Church was because he had this big emphasis on uniting all the disparate forces across the world that he saw as being in the service of God.
00:26:41.520Which makes it kind of an interesting cult.
00:26:43.120I feel like cults do thrive normally on cutting you off from everyone else and saying everyone else is doing it wrong.
00:26:50.000And Moon is saying a lot of people are doing it right, but we're doing it better and we should be building more of a unified front with these people.0.79
00:26:58.180I can see why they network themselves sort of into American life a lot better than, you know, your branch Davidians or something like that.
00:27:05.700Yeah, I mean, he has very different pitches to those within his church and those without it, right?0.72
00:27:10.300So to those in the church, he says, everybody who is not a Mooney is a disciple of Satan.0.99
00:27:14.920And therefore, you should not be associating or have intimate relationships with people who aren't Moonies.0.99
00:27:20.460Your kids should mostly only be hanging out with Moonies.0.99
00:27:23.300You really shouldn't be dating or marrying any non-Moonies.0.99
00:27:26.280However, to those on the outside, he's saying we can make common cause.
00:27:29.980And so on the one hand, Moon is establishing these series of businesses and institutions that really allow members of his church to be completely ensconced in his organization throughout their whole lives.
00:27:44.260right? Like there's Mooney Collective Child Care. There's Mooney like high schools and grammar
00:27:50.360schools in parts of the country, particularly D.C. There's a Mooney University. They bought
00:27:55.020the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut. Oh, really? Yeah. After like the longest academic
00:28:00.040faculty strike in history, the university just sold itself to the Mooneys. So now they own a0.82
00:28:06.360credentialed institution in Bridgeport and you can go get a four-year degree from a Mooney school.
00:28:11.740You can get your theological degree in upstate New York, just down the road from Bard, and you can work for Mooney companies for your entire career.
00:28:20.140But on the other hand, the church and its institutions are becoming more and more integrated into the fabric of ordinary American life throughout the 1980s and 1990s, right?
00:28:30.040So these young people who dropped out of church and for a while were like living in missionary centers and communes, they now live independently with their moon-issued spouses and they're raising kids in the suburbs.
00:28:42.420So this is a path of integration and normalcy that a lot of new religious movements take.0.86
00:28:47.540It's not that different from what happened with like the Mormons.0.85
00:28:50.640And as the Moonies age, they have more and more institutions, but lighter and lighter ties of a lot of Moonies to the institutions, if that makes sense.0.79
00:30:27.460Yeah, he's a guy who is preaching absolute sexual chastity to his followers
00:30:32.200as a matter of their souls, right?0.81
00:30:34.740And himself is philandering pretty aggressively.
00:30:37.440And Sung Young Moon's sons, I think it was Sean Moon that this author was married to, are also exposed to have cocaine and prostitute habits.
00:30:47.220His oldest son with his wife, his current wife, his current widow, Hak, who became what was called the true mother of the church, died of a functionary drug overdose.
00:31:00.260They're trust fund kids. They're messy.
00:31:02.200Yeah, right. The failed sons of the Messiah.
00:31:04.220It is also happening in a context where these children born to these Mooney unions are being raised in incredible, strict, no drugs, no drinking, no sexuality kinds of environments.0.88
00:31:18.720And the hypocrisy was pretty startling.0.70
00:31:20.740And also this daughter-in-law alleged both that she was beaten by her former husband and that she went to Moon for help and that he told her basically to kick rocks.1.00
00:31:36.120He was 92 years old and he died in Korea.
00:31:39.260And this led to a schism over the church's leadership between his wife and two of his sons, which further damaged the organization.
00:31:45.940As a non-religious person, one thing I understand about religion that it's always schism o'clock in religion land.
00:31:52.820You know, when you claim that you're the Messiah, that raises the stakes somewhat.0.66
00:31:56.160This is now a group that has dwindled, and I think that its rise and fall and the generational timing of its rise and fall means that the story of the Moonies in the U.S. is in many ways like the story of the boomers, right?0.68
00:32:12.440It is one about the historical forces that led this age cohort first into the counterculture and then onto the political right.0.58
00:32:20.620And like the Mooney Boomers are narrated overwhelmingly by the two generations that sandwich them.0.95
00:32:26.780So on the one hand, in the 70s, you have all these testimonies from their greatest generation parents who tried to retrieve their children from Moon's groups.0.96
00:32:35.780And then on the other hand, you have their kids, these millennials, right?
00:32:41.160The Mooney baby boom that happened in the 80s and 90s of the so-called blessed children, which is a group's name for babies who were born to marriages arranged by Moon, who became adults and reflected on their childhoods within the group.
00:32:55.000So there's these two genres of Mooney media, right?
00:32:57.760Which is these freaks stole my child on the one hand and these freaks stole my childhood on the other hand.
00:33:03.460And the other way to tell the story is, OK, it's an imperial chicken coming home to roost because Sun Myung Moon was in many ways a product of American foreign policy who then came to America and exerted his own influence on American domestic life.
00:33:19.560Sun Myung Moon was born on January 26, 1920, in a small village in what is now North Korea, which was at the time under Japanese imperial rule.
00:33:29.100He was the fifth of eight children born to a farmer.
00:34:04.420And they start doing these shamanic rituals, which are not working, right?
00:34:10.340Moon's dad starts to think, okay, so our ancestors are either mad at us or they're actually helpless and not as powerful as I thought they were.
00:34:20.040And what they do is they turn to a local Christian healer.
00:34:23.680And that guy persuades them to convert to Presbyterianism.
00:37:18.480And Christians, whose numbers have really been rising in Korea, are instructed to collapse all their denominations into one organization, which can then be registered with and monitored by the Japanese authorities.0.85
00:37:31.400As you said, it's always schism o'clock.0.89
00:37:33.760In religion, and particularly in Korean Christianity in the 20th century, it is always schism o'clock.
00:37:39.720They've got a lot of charismatic preachers who are sort of like rivals for attention.0.78
00:37:45.240Meanwhile, girls and women of like really exactly Moon's age, like teenagers and young 20-somethings,
00:37:52.040are being abducted en masse by the Japanese authorities and trafficked to the front lines of the war
00:37:58.080to serve as a quote-unquote comfort women, like military sex slaves, to Japanese soldiers.
00:38:03.020It's not a good time to be a young Korean person.0.85
00:38:06.780And Moon has been educated in Tokyo.0.91
00:38:10.040Like, he could have theoretically stayed there, but he doesn't.
00:38:13.420He returns to Seoul in 1943, and he seeks out a matchmaker who contracts him in an arranged marriage with his first wife, Seok Il-shoy.
00:38:22.480But pretty soon after his return to Korea, he's arrested by the authorities in the South on suspicion of cooperation with the communists.
00:38:31.640A big part of the Japanese crackdown in Korea at this time was this, like, kind of paranoia about the possible presence of, like, Soviet allies or Soviet spies among the Korean population.
00:38:42.260So Moon is tortured and beaten on suspicion of communist sympathies for 60 days.
00:38:48.320And this is the beginning of, like, a wartime and post-war, like, jailbird period for Moon.
00:38:54.220So at the time, he's traveling frequently like up and down the Korean peninsula between the North and the South, preaching and looking for acolytes without a ton of success, right?
00:39:05.720So this pattern emerges in this era of his life where he will move to Pyongyang and he'll accumulate like a modest interest in his teachings there, but then he'll get arrested.
00:39:15.240And then he'll get out of jail and move to Seoul and the same thing will happen over again, right?
00:39:20.800So he's ping-ponging back and forth between North and South Korean prisons.
00:39:24.680Meanwhile, his wife, who he impregnated and then, like, immediately abandoned, is following him around up and down the country, trying to convince him to be her husband and support her and their son.
00:39:46.640So he has this idea that, like, after the Japanese surrender in 1945, he's like, okay, this is great.0.96
00:39:53.440This is going to make it easier for me to preach and to recruit followers.
00:39:57.400But there's a really uneasy post-war peace in Korea, and this makes it tough.
00:40:02.260So in the north, which is controlled by Soviet allied communists, he's frequently accused of being a spy for the Americans and thrown in jail.
00:40:09.680And in the South, which is controlled by American allied conservatives, he's frequently accused of being a spy for the Soviets and then thrown in jail.
00:40:17.100And this is partly because authorities in both places are responding to pressure from the newly liberated Christian movements to crack down on these preachers.
00:40:29.140So you could see this experience of his going either way, right?
00:40:33.480He is a colonial subject of extremely humble origins, who's educated in the metropole and persecuted by occupying forces.
00:40:41.960Like this sounds to me like the start of a biography of like a post-colonial intellectual, right?
00:40:46.720But even though he was attacked by both sides of the burgeoning Cold War in Korea, Moon does not feel torn or ambivalent at all about who the bad guy is, seemingly.
00:40:56.980He does not seem to resent the Americans, who will soon bomb the north of Korea where he grew up, like really two smithereens.
00:41:02.920He does not seem to resent the Japanese, who have oppressed his people and his religion for decades.
00:41:08.520He resents the Soviets, who he blames for basically all of his early suffering and becomes this committed, almost obsessive anti-communist.
00:41:17.880And this might be because his primary commitment has always really been to religion and he sees the communists as godless.
00:41:24.640It might also be because his own accounts of his arrest in the South are contested.
00:41:31.880So there is sort of two histories of Moon's early life in Korea, right?
00:41:36.820He says that when he was in Seoul, he was being arrested for suspicion regarding his political activity.
00:41:42.240But other sources say that he was being arrested in the South because he was doing weird ritual sex stuff.
00:41:50.080and that the, like, Korean government and, like, establishment Korean Christians
00:41:56.480really were trying to stamp out these, like, ritual sex practices that he was engaged in.
00:42:01.740Have you ever heard of a practice called pecarium?
00:42:26.440And for the record, Moon always denied ever participating in this in his early church life.
00:42:32.940Kind of a lot of women disagree and say that he was in fact doing something like this even after he came to the U.S.0.97
00:42:40.100This was a practice engaged in by a series of these Korean charismatic preachers at the time in mid-century Korea, which is, you know, it's ritual fucking.0.86
00:42:55.160It is heterosexual intercourse with a blessed man that is supposed to be a purification ritual for the woman who engages in it that then absolves her of original sin and allows her to therefore, like, sexually transmit this purity she has received now to her husband.0.99
00:43:16.640It is fucking three times, usually over the course of three days, and it has to have a witness.0.99
00:43:53.200So like one of the things he says, his followers are like, father, you're lying.
00:43:57.020Like when you tell us to go out and recruit horny teenage boys at a college campus and say that this seminar we want them to come to is not religious, that's a lie.0.77
00:44:08.320And he says it's not a lie if it's done for the sake of God or a lie is not sinful if it's done for the sake of God because Satan deceives and therefore we must deceive to defeat Satan.
00:44:18.380Satan operates through sexuality and therefore we need to have this like purification sexuality
00:44:23.640to defeat Satan. He says he never did this. A lot of women say he did. I tend to be a little
00:44:30.340more inclined towards their side. And it makes a lot of logical sense when you follow his
00:44:36.180absolutely illogical batshit theology. It's like, oh, of course he's, of course he was doing this.
00:44:40.560So like this might also be a good moment to pause and consider the role of Christianity
00:44:45.480in Korea in, like, the late 40s and 1950s.
00:50:12.460which is that it wasn't an apple, it was fucking, right?0.99
00:50:15.340Moon says that Adam and Eve were supposed to conceive children sinlessly who would worship and glorify God in the state of perpetual spiritual perfection, right?0.99
00:50:27.400But that before they matured into spiritually perfect beings, Lucifer, in the guise of the snake, sexually seduced Eve, right?0.98
00:50:36.360So the apple is a metaphor for fucking in Genesis.0.99
00:50:41.740A lot of people have had that kind of impulse about it before.
00:50:44.920Okay, now it's ringing a bell. But this then is like a Gnostic idea. There are some of the Gnostic Gospels that essentially seem to propose perfect celibacy, that Christians should just not have sex at all and should not procreate. But that's clearly not what's going on here.
00:51:09.560What is going on is that Moon, like a lot of right-wing religious people,
00:51:15.060has very strong normative ideas about sex
00:51:17.220and is very, very invested in lots of the right kind of sex happening,
00:51:21.500which means that there's a lot of sex you're not allowed to have
00:51:24.140and then there's a lot of sex you have to have, whether you like it or not.0.51
00:51:26.820So his rewriting of Genesis is that Lucifer in the guise of a snake sexually seduces Eve, who then similarly initiates Adam into sinful sexuality, right?0.88
00:51:39.820And the resulting children are thus cursed with original sin, what Moon and his followers called the bloody lineage.
00:51:46.760And they went on to therefore propagate this contaminated influence of Satan throughout human history.
00:51:52.400So this is implicit in a lot of Christian thought, but it's most often explicitly rejected.
00:51:59.340But what's really different and what is actually like a new innovation, I think, by Moon is what he says happened next, which is that Moon alleges that God has been trying and failing.
00:52:09.640Crucially, like God is not exactly omnipotent in Moon's theology to bring mankind back into a sinless state of unification with him throughout history.
00:52:19.300And that you can look at human history as a product of mankind's efforts to repay the debt incurred by past sin and to perfect itself into a sinless state on the one hand, and then this sort of divine principles confrontation with the pervasive influence of sinfulness and Satan on the other hand.
00:52:39.780Yeah, I mean, it's like banging is the source of all sin, right? There's various ways you can undo or repay the divine debt created by that sin. Some of them is with like other kinds of ritually pure banging. Some of it's with money. Some of it's with proselytization, right? Like it's not just that you have to fuck the main guy. You also get to pay the main guy.
00:54:47.340It is his job as the quote-unquote third Adam and returned Messiah to complete Christ's mission by having sinless children and enabling others to have sinless children, thereby creating a new lineage of mankind that will unite, hence unification, different religious and like national groups in a state of sinlessness and defeat what Moon calls the forces of satanic godlessness, which are mostly just communism.
00:55:13.960I have to say that to lose one Adam may be regarded as a misfortune.
00:55:18.680To lose two seems like carelessness.0.99
00:55:21.200And once you're on the third Adam, you're just done fucked up.0.99
01:00:48.520He hosted these matching ceremony events where a large group of Moonies would assemble in a big room with men on one side and women on the other.
01:01:12.480And he would match people like from different countries and who spoke different languages on the theory that this would like unify their nations and promote world peace.0.56
01:01:21.720So for a while, he was like, oh, I'm going to match all of my Korean followers in marriages to my Japanese followers.
01:01:27.540And this will promote like post-war reconciliation and healing.
01:01:34.080There is this really strong strand in, oh, we can fuck away racism, right?
01:01:38.880Like, this is something that a lot of people believe, and it's not just on the far right.
01:01:42.460This idea that, oh, if only they date each other, if only they have children together, these kind of hierarchies that structure our societies are going to go away.
01:01:50.760If only we offer women as tribute across racial lines.
01:01:55.740This led to a lot of unhappy marriages.
01:01:58.600Like, it seems like people did generally overcome the language barriers eventually.
01:02:03.980To tell each other how much they hated each other?1.00
01:02:05.860It's like, how do you say in Japanese, fuck off?0.99
01:02:10.280There's a really interesting series of testimonials by like a millennial person.0.99
01:02:14.600I think we're like exactly the same age.
01:02:16.700Hiteo Hikashi Baba, who grew up in the Moonies and was the product of a random union between a Japanese man and a white American woman.0.99
01:02:25.880And they're like, yeah, my parents are fucking miserable.0.98
01:02:28.780They're absolutely hating each other.0.99
01:02:30.940There's no divorce in Mooney marriage, and they are prohibited from using birth control or abortion, obviously, in service to Moon's vision, which seems to be in part that he's going to bring about the heavenly kingdom just by having his followers breed as much as possible and create as many of these children from these blessed unions who are, you know, believed to be without original sin, right?
01:02:56.340who then can, like, outpopulate the sinful, satanic population.
01:03:01.160So, you know, a couple days after being matched,
01:03:03.680couples are then married in these mass wedding ceremonies.
01:03:07.180So men and women are issued standard clothing,
01:03:26.340Okay, so the first vow is to become a true man or woman who practices sexual purity and lives for the sake of others.
01:03:34.680To become a true husband or wife who respects true parents' example and establishes an eternal family which brings joy to God.
01:03:42.120Number three, to become a parent who educates his or her children to follow the tradition of true love for the sake of the family and world.
01:03:48.840And number four, to create an ideal family which contributes to world peace.
01:03:53.360Honestly, this would not be out of place in either a Miss America contest or, honestly, in just regular writing vows.
01:06:48.520You can find the instructions online, which I decided not to inflict on you.
01:06:53.540But, like, it's real step-by-step stuff, including, like, specific prayers and then specific positions and then specific ritual cleansing before and after.
01:07:05.400It's really involved and it kind of takes the spontaneity out of it.
01:07:11.460There's not a lot of room for, like, improvisation.
01:07:14.760There's something really interesting here about privacy and publicity, right?
01:07:17.360So, for one thing, like, marriage is an interesting thing because it's about a very, very private thing that two people are doing.
01:07:21.680but it does obviously have this huge public dimension.
01:07:23.740That's why we had the big fights over gay marriage in the United States.
01:07:26.860At the same time, the specificity of these vows and of this ritual0.88
01:07:31.580feels like it's just kind of one dude's kink that he turned into a religion,
01:07:35.840which makes it feel like, oh, you're kind of oversharing, man.0.99
01:07:40.640But on the other hand, it is also, of course, a moment where people's private lives
01:07:45.900and their own preferences get regimented in this way that I'm sure,
01:07:49.400I realize I'm probably sounding a little conservative here myself, but like who wants0.98
01:07:53.660their marriage to be fucked around in that way, right? Where it's like, oh, you must do it this0.98
01:07:58.220way. You must do it that way. It takes the one thing in your life that's supposed to be your own
01:08:02.000to shape and to structure. Like, oh, we make it work for ourselves. Like, no, no, no, no. Three
01:08:07.360slaps with a spoon. It's got to be three slaps, right? And you're like, I don't know, man, like
01:08:11.500this really feels like it's taking like, there's a weird involution of the private and the public
01:08:16.320here it seems to me right and this is also something that you know about everybody in
01:08:20.200your community oh yeah and that everybody in your community knows about you everybody you know0.99
01:08:25.520knows exactly the way that you fuck because it's prescribed by the messiah there's something about1.00
01:08:32.680this imposition of meaning that i think speaks to like sexist centrality in the conservative0.99
01:08:41.080imagination, right? There's a way in which sex cannot mean anything else, right? It can either
01:08:47.680be sinful or pure, right? Yeah. There's no right of sexual refusal for women in these marriages
01:08:53.260also. That's, like, very explicit. Sin or restoration from sin. There's nothing in between.
01:08:58.720Right. And that's it. There's no room for, like, the humanity of the people involved. And I think
01:09:04.440it's, like, also useful to talk about the way that Moon has talked about non-ritually purified sex.1.00
01:09:10.380Because, like, Moon has said that gay people are like dogs who eat their own shit.1.00
01:09:16.200He has said that, like, gay male followers of his who have a problem with homosexuality should cut their dicks off and mail them to him.1.00
01:09:25.680And that, like, women should fill their vaginas with concrete, which I got to say is something I considered doing after reading the instructions for the ritual sex.1.00
01:09:36.440There's this intense maximalism about it, right?0.97
01:09:39.580And on the one hand, I think I kind of backed almost, and this is something I might regret saying, like Moon's insistence that like everything we do in our lives has meaning.
01:09:49.560That's something about religion that I think has an appeal to it.
01:09:52.160I can see the appeal, but the intense prescriptiveness, the intense like foreclosure of different possibilities for what those meanings might be is I think just like really oppressive.
01:10:02.940You did start by making the point that there's something a little bit unusual in this kind of right wing cult. And part of it is that the Moonies clearly have this kind of family values rhetoric, but that ultimately cults are hostile to the family because the family does create a kind of private space that is not pervious to dear leaders' dictates.
01:10:24.920Right. And that is something that in Jonestown, you could justify that with this kind of social justice language or with this language of liberation.
01:10:35.220That's much harder for the Moonies to do.
01:10:37.160They kind of have to just pretend that these two things are not in contradiction with each other.
01:10:42.180Yeah. And like they didn't really resolve that.
01:10:44.780Right. So for all of his theological emphasis on matrimony and on childbearing and on the creation of this blessed population with all these babies,
01:10:54.920There is actually not a lot of valuation of family life itself in the Mooney organization.
01:11:01.660So young Mooneys, including women, including new parents, are expected to obey church orders, which frequently included assignments to missionary or commercial work far from their families, right?0.73
01:11:13.020Like if Dear Leader or one of his representatives tells you that you have to go work on a fishery or that you have to go do abstinence-only sex education in one of the public schools that contracted with the Moonies to provide this, which is another fun story.0.92
01:11:26.440Yeah. One of the things that they did was like create this abstinence-only sex ed programming that they would then like license out to schools and often Moonies would be the instructors.
01:11:34.860If you would get assigned to one of those missions, you don't really have the chance to say no.
01:11:43.200And often people who were new parents were quite deliberately assigned far away from their kids.
01:11:48.400One of these things that could be kind of utopian is that the Moonies wound up establishing these communal child care groups where children as young as 100 days could go to live to be collectively raised.
01:12:01.800This is a feature of a lot of like millennial Mooney childhoods, the childhoods of what are called like BCs or blessed children, right?
01:12:08.920They often wouldn't be retrieved by their parents for like years or the parents would come to visit like once every couple of weeks or something like that.0.97
01:12:16.840So a lot of these kids were collectively raised by like Mooney women.1.00
01:12:21.600This is something that a lot of them note as being in contradiction because they're instructed to have these children and then pretty deliberately kept away from them, right?1.00
01:12:35.740So what happened is that these blessed children grew up.
01:12:40.040There's a lot of reasons why the Moonies declined and sort of fell apart in the 21st century.
01:12:45.700There was, like, a lot of financial mismanagement.
01:12:48.480There was Moon's prosecution and imprisonment for his financial malfeasance.0.59
01:12:53.140But part of it, I think, is that these kids grew up and that raising these children and trying to be parents to them created, like, rival demands on the loyalty of a lot of these Moonies.0.59
01:13:07.180Like, there's two ways a cult can go.0.97
01:13:17.060The demands of being parents, of getting older, of no longer having the needfulness or, like, the insecurity that I think characterizes a lot of people in their early youth when they're, like, college age and searching.
01:13:31.960You know, that's something that people sort of shed.
01:13:34.700And as their lives got bigger, you know, Moon sort of took on a smaller and smaller place of it.
01:13:41.540And so they lost people a lot through these scandals.
01:13:44.240But they also lost people a lot through, I think, like the attrition of life, right?
01:14:59.160They opened them up to like non-Mooney couples.0.97
01:15:02.420So like Al Sharpton, like did a vow renewal at a mass Mooney marriage, I think in like Madison Square Garden, like more recently than you would think he did.1.00
01:15:12.520Their integration into like broader conservative worlds meant that they were having just a kind of harder time recruiting and they were less interested.
01:15:21.420Moon really became more interested in making money than in recruiting people to his, like, messianic cult.
01:15:26.760And when he died, you know, for a while, his wife was trying to do matching ceremonies.
01:15:32.180There was this one anecdote where she would be like, okay, I'm doing it different than my husband did.
01:15:36.440And it's like, well, your husband was doing it basically at random.
01:15:38.820But she's like, I want everybody to hold their hands up in a prayer position.
01:15:43.020And then I want the women to go find the men who are holding their hands the same way that they are.0.89
01:16:04.740It's denial of the like ambiguity, particularly I think of like sexuality makes it unsustainable.
01:16:10.160You can get an arranged moony marriage through these apps.0.61
01:16:13.180But a lot of the kids are just being like, hey, my friend from church and I want to get married.0.96
01:16:18.160I don't care not to have sex for 40 days after my marriage or like at all before marriage or like to operate in this worldview anymore. Right. Yeah. You cannot engineer children to believe in the same things that their parents believed in when they were in their 20s.
01:16:34.120And the right never ceases to rage against that fact. Why is this child born living decades after when I was that age, not exactly like me when I was that age?
01:16:45.620And so I think there's something interesting about the boomers here, right?0.57
01:16:47.920Because when they were young, they were doing something that their parents disapproved of in joining Sung Young Moon.0.65
01:16:53.540And then these, like, second-generation kids are also like, yeah, I don't really like my parents' values either.0.54