Covering the Sun, the Moon and the Korean Messiah

On an evening in Berkeley nearly half a century ago, I watched with amazement as an agent of Korean sect leader Sun Myung Moon worked a crowd of anxious parents. It was the height of the cult wars.

One year later, in November of 1978, the followers of another messianic madman, the Rev. Jim Jones of San Francisco, would lead 918 members of his Peoples Temple in a horrific ritual of mass murder and suicide at a remote jungle compound in South America.

Yes, those notorious victims of group think “drank the Kool-Aid,” even though that cyanide-laced communion was actually prepared with Flavor Aid, a cheaper off-brand powder. While many willingly drank the beverage, some were injected and others were gunned down as they tried to flee. Mothers squirted poison down their baby’s throats. So “mass suicide” doesn’t quite do justice to the horror. This is especially true if you believe that people who join cults are “brainwashed” victims of mind control.

Jonestown forever changed the way Americans look at cults, or as some insist on calling them, “new religious movements.” It also changed my journalist career path, inspiring the editors of the newspapers I worked for to revive the moribund religion beat at the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle. People forget that for much of his career Jim Jones was seen as a progressive Protestant minister in a mutual assistance pact with Democratic Party politicians and some key players in the news media.

So was the Rev. Moon, except the politics were right-wing and the political party was the GOP.

On that night in Berkeley in 1977, I was a 23-year-old general assignment reporter, recently hired to churn out news and features stories about the East Bay. For some reason, I was always drawn to cults, not so much as a spiritual seeker but as a curious observer. I’d just graduated from UC Berkeley with an undergraduate degree in sociology, where I was particularly interested in the sociology of the family and the sociology of religion.

Many of the “Moonies,” as the followers of the Rev. Moon were called, were idealistic young people looking for new forms of family and community. They, like I, were baby boomers who came of age in turbulent decade of the 1960s, an era of rising secularism, skyrocketing divorce rates and social protest movements.

Here’s how one Moonie recruit from New York, snatched from Powell and Market Streets as an 18-year-old visitor to San Francisco, explained her conversion to me. “What makes me want to invest my life in something like this is my understanding of God, spiritual reality and my quest for an ideal,” Brenna Steinberg told me. “Rev. Moon is the founder of the church and the first person who came to understand God in the way he’s taught everyone else. The reason I say he is the ‘messiah’ is because he is capable of unifying people of all races, backgrounds and religions.”

Looking back on my yellowed newspaper clippings, it appears that the first religion story I wrote for those two San Francisco newspapers was about that night in Berkeley. That’s where one of Moon’s top lieutenants, Mose Durst, worked a crowd of worried parents. Angry moms and dad and brothers and sisters had started kidnapping adult children who’d joined the Moonies, subjecting them to extended sessions of forced “de-programming.”

Brenna Steinberg had been kidnapped by her parents twice, but escaped and returned to the church each time.

At the Moonie headquarters in Berkeley, Durst fed the concerned parents a fried chicken dinner and a persuasive argument. We watched as wide-eyed converts sang parents happy songs to try to ease their worried minds. “When Gov. (Jerry) Brown starts at a blank wall and meditates, they say good things about him,” Durst said. When we sing ‘You Are My Sunshine,’ they curse us.”

Yes, he told the parents, these converts devote long hours and entire salaries to the growing Moon empire. “Often the commitment makes people look crazy,” Durst told them. “They smile a lot and work hard.”

One of my main criteria for putting a religious and/or political movement in the “cult” category is whether or not they use deceptive recruitment tactics. The Unification Church was notorious for setting up front groups that would initially conceal their connection to their messianic, authoritarian leader. Back in the seventies, the “Oakland family” of the church called itself the “Creative Community Project.”

Their messianic, authoritarian leader was born Mun Yong-myong on January 6, 1920 in a village in what is now Communist North Korea. His parents converted to the Presbyterian Church when the young boy was ten years old. He changed his name to “Sun Myung Moon” when he was twenty-five years of age.

By then, he’d apparently convinced himself that he was as important as the sun and the moon.

In July 1946, following the tumult of Japanese occupation and World War II, Moon founded his own charismatic church called Kwang-ya. In the early 1950s, his fledgling movement allegedly practiced a ritual sometimes called pikareum (“change of blood lineage”), in which sexual intercourse with Moon or designated “clean” men was seen as a way to purify women of hereditary “original sin.” Moon was swept up in a sex scandal involving the “Six Marys,” named for a group of married women who testified that they were subjected to this practice.

This was around the time Moon founded his Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity. He taught that Jesus failed in his earthly mission because he did not have children. A new world messiah would — conveniently — be born in Korea sometime between 1917 and 1930. He and his wife would become the “True Parents” and bless the marriages of true believers to purify the blood line of original sin.

They would send missionaries around the world and save humanity from itself.

It wasn’t until the summer of 1990 that Moon publicly anointed himself to his divinely inspired role. I was in the room where it happened.

Surrounding himself with an eclectic collection of swamis, scholars, lamas and imams, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon yesterday declared himself the new world messiah.

Moon, the controversial Korean founder of the Unification Church, made his pronouncement at the opening session of his Assembly of the World’s Religions, a lavish, all-expenses-paid conference Moon is bankrolling at the San Francisco Airport Hyatt Regency.

Speaking almost unintelligible English before 500 conference participants, Moon said the world needs to find its “true parent” and free itself from Satan’s influence.

“This person is the messiah,” said Moon. “To help fulfill this very purpose, I have been called upon by God . . . I have suffered persecution and confronted death with only one purpose in mind, so that I can live with the heart of true parents to love races of all colors in the world.”

According to Unification Church doctrine, Jesus failed in his mission and must be supplanted by a second, Korean-born messiah. Longtime church members said yesterday’s speech was Moon’s most direct public pronouncement that he sees himself as that messiah.

Christian participants at the meeting rejected Moon’s message.

“Heresy,” muttered an Anglican priest, covering up his name tag and scurrying out of the room.

“For us, the only messiah is Jesus Christ,” said the Rev. Eugenia Araya, a Lutheran minister from Chile…

A search on newspapers.com reminds me that my story, first published on page one of the San Francisco Chronicle, was picked up by wire services and published in numerous other newspapers across the country that week.

So, you’re welcome, Rev. Moon. I almost feel like John the Baptist for announcing your arrival.

Moon died in 2012. His second wife, Hak Ja Han, now 83, leads the church. Next week, we’ll look at their children — at how the purification of the blood line through their union and thousands of church-blessed marriages worked out in the real world.

Reader warning: This episode will involve stories of suicide, cocaine addiction, vicious familial infighting, arms trafficking and troubling political ties to the Me-Me-Me Messiah himself — Donald J. Trump.