Sun Myung Moon (Korean: 문선명; Hanja: 文鮮明; born Moon Yong-myeong; 6 January 1920 – 3 September 2012) was a Korean religious leader, also known for his business ventures and support for conservative political causes. A messiah claimant, he was the founder of the Unification Church, whose members, popularly known as "Moonies", consider him and his wife, Hak Ja Han, to be their "True Parents". The church is widely noted for its "Blessing" or mass wedding ceremonies.
Moon was the author of his Unification Church's religious scripture, Divine Principle, and was an anti-communist as well as an advocate for Korean reunification, for which he was recognized by the governments of both North and South Korea. Businesses he promoted included News World Communications, an international news media corporation known for its American subsidiary The Washington Times, and Tongil Group, a South Korean business group (chaebol), as well as other related organizations.
Moon was born in what is now North Korea. When he was a child, his family converted to Christianity. In the 1940s and 1950s, he was imprisoned multiple times by the North and South Korean governments during his early new religious ministries, formally founding the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, simply known as the Unification Church, in Seoul, South Korea, in 1954.
In 1971, Moon moved to the United States and became well known after giving a series of public speeches on his beliefs. In the 1982 case United States v. Sun Myung Moon, he was found guilty of willfully filing false federal income tax returns and sentenced to 18 months in federal prison. His case generated protests from clergy and civil libertarians, who said that the trial was biased against him.
His wedding ceremonies drew criticism, specifically after members of other churches took part, including the excommunicated Roman Catholic archbishop Emmanuel Milingo. Moon was also criticized for his relationships with political and religious figures, including US presidents Richard Nixon, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush; Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev; North Korean president Kim Il Sung; and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
Sun Myung Moon was born Yong Myung Moon on 6 January 1920 in modern-day North P'yŏng'an Province, North Korea, at a time when Korea was under Japanese rule. He was the second son in a farming family of thirteen children, eight of whom survived. Moon's family followed Confucianist beliefs until he was around 10 years old. Then they converted to Christianity and joined the Presbyterian Church. Moon claims that he experienced a religious vision of Jesus at age 16 that laid out his life's mission.
In 1941, Moon began studying electrical engineering at Waseda University in Japan. During this time, he cooperated with Communist Party members in the Korean independence movement against the Empire of Japan. In 1943, he returned to Seoul and, in 1944, married his first wife, Sun-kil Choi (최선길; 崔先吉; Choe Seon-gil). They had a son, Sung Jin Moon (문성진; 文聖進; Mun Seong-jin). In the 1940s, Sun Myung Moon attended a church led by Kim Baek-moon, who influentially taught that he had been given by Jesus the mission to spread the message of a "new Israel" throughout the world. Around this time, Moon changed his given name to Sun Myung in an effort to quell the increased resentment of other Christians against him, as he gradually began gathering his own group of followers.
Following World War II, Korea was divided (South and North) along the 38th parallel into two trusteeships: the United States and the Soviet Union. Pyongyang (the eventual capital of North Korea) was the center of Christian activity in Korea until 1945. From the late 1940s, hundreds of Korean Christian religious figures were killed or disappeared in concentration camps, including Francis Hong Yong-ho, Catholic bishop of Pyongyang, and all monks of Tokwon Abbey. When Moon started his own movement (an early version of the Unification Church) in Pyongyang in 1946, the Soviet-controlled North Korean government imprisoned and, he claims, tortured him. Sources vary on the motivation behind his arrest: religious persecution, or a charge of espionage or polygamy. His religious practices during this time may have included unorthodox sexual rituals with multiple women, a claim the Unification Church denies and some scholars have doubted.
Arrested again in 1948, he was sentenced to five years at Hungnam labor camp, though in 1950, during the Korean War, he was liberated by United Nations troops and allegedly traveled by foot to Busan, (South) Korea. Moon emerged from his years in the labor camp as a staunch anti-communist. His teachings viewed the Cold War between capitalism and communism as the final conflict between God and Satan, with divided Korea as its primary front line.
In the 1950s, after years of being separated from his wife and child before reuniting, Moon and Choi divorced. Moon moved to Seoul once again and, continuing his ministry, was arrested two more times: once on suspicion of religious orgies and once for draft evasion; both charges were overturned.
In 1954, Moon formally founded the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity in Seoul and fathered an illegitimate child (who died in 1969). In the 1950s, Moon quickly drew young acolytes who helped to build the foundations of Unification-affiliated business and cultural organizations. In his new church, he preached a conservative, family-oriented value system and his interpretation of the Bible. A follower whose family joined Moon's movement in the early 1950s claims that she and Moon engaged in various religious sexual rituals, including with several other women, and that she remained Moon's mistress (through his second marriage) until 1964, bearing Moon another son, in secret, in 1965.
Second marriage and Blessing ceremonies
Moon married his second wife, Hak Ja Han (who was 17 at the time) on 11 April 1960, soon after Moon turned 40 years old, in a ceremony called the Holy Marriage. Han is called "Mother" or "True Mother". She and Moon together are referred to as the "True Parents" by members of the Unification Church and their family as the "True Family".
Although they initially lived communally, his followers gradually returned to the traditional Christian family form (monogamy). Blessing ceremonies have attracted attention in the press and in the public imagination, often being labeled "mass weddings". People who have never met, from completely different countries, were married by the Messiah of the Unification Church by "matching". They were informed that a certain person, specially chosen for him/her by the Messiah, would become their husband/wife. Some of them did not see their future partner until the day of the "marriage". Public mass blessing ceremonies followed. Some couples are already married, and those that are engaged are later legally married according to the laws of their own countries. Meant to highlight the church's emphasis on traditional morality, they brought Moon both fame and controversy.
36 couples participated in the first ceremony in 1961 for members of the early church in Seoul. The ceremonies continued to grow in scale; over 2,000 couples participated in the 1982 one at New York's Madison Square Garden, the first outside South Korea. In 1992, about 30,000 couples took part in a ceremony and a record 360,000 couples in Seoul took part three years later.
Moon said that he matched couples from differing races and nationalities because of his belief that all of humanity should be united: "International and intercultural marriages are the quickest way to bring about an ideal world of peace. People should marry across national and cultural boundaries with people from countries they consider to be their enemies so that the world of peace can come that much more quickly."
Establishing beliefs of the Unification movement
Moon said that when he was 16 years old, Jesus appeared to him, anointing him to carry out his unfinished work by becoming a parent to all of humanity. The Divine Principle , or Exposition of the Divine Principle (Korean: 원리강론; Hanja: 原理講論; RR: Wolli Gangnon), is the main theological textbook of the Unification movement. It was co-written by Moon and early disciple Hyo Won Eu and first published in 1966. A translation entitled Divine Principle was published in English in 1973. The book lays out the core of Unification theology and is held to have the status of scripture by believers. Following the format of systematic theology, it includes (1) God's purpose in creating human beings, (2) the fall of man, and (3) restoration—the process through history by which God is working to remove the ill effects of the fall and restore humanity back to the relationship and position that God originally intended.