Background
Sun Myung Moon was born on January 6, 1920, in Jeong-ju in what is now North Korea, then under Japanese occupation.
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Sun Myung Moon was born on January 6, 1920, in Jeong-ju in what is now North Korea, then under Japanese occupation.
He entered college at age 19 in Seoul, studying electrical engineering, and graduated in that field from Waseda University in Japan in 1943.
He formulated his religious and theological ideas, which he began teaching seriously at the end of World War II.
In 1946 he went to North Korea, but stories soon spread that Moon was preaching heresy and spying for South Korea, and he landed in prison.
He was freed, rearrested, and finally freed during the Korean War in 1950.
The beginning of the Unification Church as a distinct organization is usually dated at 1951, by which time Moon was back in South Korea at Pusan.
He began to attract followers and to put his ideas into written form.
By 1958 a mission to Japan was established, and in 1959 a disciple, Young Oon Kim, left for the United States, where she established the first American outpost of Unificationism at Eugene, Oregon.
The movement at the time had only a modest success in the United States, but it was growing rapidly in Korea and Japan.
In that year and the following three years he undertook extensive speaking tours, and the movement grew, most of the new converts being college-age youth.
But opposition also grew.
Some opposition also arose to the group's fund-raising, done through begging or sales of merchandise on the streets and at airports. Meanwhile, a Methodist layman named Ted Patrick had, in 1971, developed a strategy called "deprogramming" for use against members of some religious movements seen as extreme.
In this process members of such movements were kidnapped and subjected to intensive and prolonged sessions of psychological bombardment in order to persuade them to abandon their new faith.
By the mid-19706 Patrick and other deprogrammers had expanded their efforts to oppose a wide range of new religions, among them the Unification Church.
The Unificationists resisted the attack, and charges and counter charges flew.
The most important such attempt was that of Jesus, but it, like others, failed, because Jesus was executed before he had a chance to complete his work.
Moon believed he had the opportunity to complete the work of Jesus.
Members openly spoke of problems coping with sexual desires and quenching them through a combination of frequent prayers and cold showers.
That Lord must come from Korea; although the movement officially teaches that he hasn't been identified, the consensus is that it will be Moon himself. Since the world must be prepared for the coming of the Lord of the Second Advent, Unificationists strive to make the world a better place.
(?Moonies in America? advances our understanding of social...)
(Combines a biography of the controversial Korean religiou...)
When Moon was 16 years old, he reportedly had a vision in which Jesus Christ said God had chosen Moon to restore the Kingdom of God on Earth.
Ten years later Moon began his ministry in North Korea and Japan.
Its proselytizing and indoctrination practices gave rise to charges that "Moonies" were brainwashed and dehumanized.
Many members were abducted and "deprogrammed" (deconverted in a coercive context).
Some former members sued the church.
In 1982 Moon was convicted of tax fraud; he served almost 12 months in jail in 1984-1985.
In the 1980's many converts defected and recruitment leveled off.
Although Moon's political conservatism and militant anti-Communism appealed to some persons, others began to cast him as a sinister abuser of his largely youthful followers.
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