Episode 85: The Moonies

Hello, I'm Adrienne Daw.

And I'm Moira Donnegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So, Adrian, today we are diving into a group that I think is really fascinating, even though they are in some ways eerily normal and in some ways like true freaks.

So, I'm going to ask you, just to start off, what do you know about the Moonies?

So 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.

So 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.

I remember hearing a lot more about them in the 80s, and I kind of feel like I heard about them in the 80s in the way I would hear about things that were actually 70s phenomena.

In a way that made me me think, oh, Maura's going back to her favorite decade.

Am I right to think that the Moonies are like, it feels like a throwback.

I'm sure they're still around.

These things always kick around still, but I haven't heard about the Moonies in a long, long time.

But there was a time when they were really quite present and it seemed also quite well connected and especially US politics.

Given that it's like, I know it comes from Korea, it's started by, it's named after Sun Myung Moon.

It would stand to reason that part of the reason why people got in bed with the Moonies was anti-communism.

And so, yeah, that's all I know.

You know, you've got a lot of it.

The Moonies are still around, although since the death of Sun Myung-moon in 2012, they have split into rival factions.

Oh, of course.

So his wife is running one faction, and she has secured control of most of their remaining properties.

Part of this is a story about real estate, honestly.

They own a ton of real estate and land and businesses.

And then two of his surviving sons, who in the U.S.

go by Sean and Justin Moon, have split off and formed their own sects called the Ministry of the Heavenly Rod, I believe, which is a

AR-15, like assault rifle-based religion.

Oh.

They wear crowns made of bullets.

I thought it was going to be dildos.

And yes, indeed, they were at the Capitol on January 6th, live streaming.

So, you know, there's some interesting continued integration of the Moonies into modern conservatism and into like sort of like the post-2016 versions of the right wing.

But they are really very diminished, both in terms of their numbers and in terms of their like monetary strength since the death of Deerleader in 2012.

So like, I became interested in the Moonies when I'm in college.

And I'm going to tell a personal story.

But I went to college at Bard College, which is embarrassing enough on its own, but 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.

And like a lot of women, I experimented in college with heterosexuality.

And like one night in college, I picked up this guy and I brought him home.

And we're like fooling around and he

starts like really freaking out.

And I'm like, whoa, are you all right?

I'm going to like make you some tea.

Like, what's going on?

And he's like, I got to get out of here.

I'm a moonie.

What?

This means nothing to me at the time, right?

Yeah.

And so I like go out.

I talk to my roommates and they're like, oh my God, Moira made out with a cult member.

And that's when I realized that I was living like half a mile away from one of the centers of one of the most powerful like cult fanatical religious groups in America.

And because I was like an adolescent completely oblivious to anything other than myself, I had like literally not noticed.

But part of the Moonies is that they like they do walk among us, right?

This is a group that got, particularly in the subsequent generations, like fairly well integrated into like just ordinary American culture, but retained some of their weirdness and their distinction.

Although I will say, it's maybe also a point about American colleges that the only two groups of people that will slap a large compound into bucolic hills with no fucking bus line to it or whatever are colleges and cults.

And so like, it's maybe not totally shocking that those who would wind up sheet to jowl, you know.

There's just like a sense of like isolation.

Like there's nothing to do but read the books we give you up here.

Yeah.

Exactly.

But yeah, the Unification Theological Seminary, the place where they trained their ministers was just down the road from Bard.

And 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.

Come rent a room, like a really cheap, below-market room in our big seminary and commute to Bard.

And people would warn you not to do it because they were a cult.

Of course, both organizations might end up with members marrying each other.

Well, 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 like a large group of mixed-raced half-Asian people because of their arranged marriage and because of their mandated procreation and because of the population of the Moonies, which are much bigger in Korea and in Japan than they are in the US.

A lot of these sort of deliberately interracial cross-cultural marriages happened, unifying Korean and Japanese Moonis with white American followers.

So there's also really interesting race politics around Son Young-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.

In some ways, this is like a very standard cult story, right?

It's the 1970s and a charismatic leader recruits a lot of lost, vulnerable, searching kind of young people, and he initiates them into weird sex stuff and takes all their money, right?

Tale is old as time.

We've all watched that documentary on Netflix at like 1 a.m., right?

That's right.

It's very standard.

But 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?

They 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 Jin Jones who lured them in with like all these world peace promises, right?

The other way to put that is that cults on the American right tend to just be within organized religion 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.

It's a cult, which like it's to defend exactly neither of these two enterprises.

I'm just saying, I know it's a homology and yet different treatment.

So yeah, this is unusual.

Yeah, the other thing that we're going to wind up talking about is like, how different are the Moonis really from other religions, right?

Because some of this stuff seems very strange, but I think it's really just kind of standard issue forms of conservatism in a new package.

But the Moonis really did emerge pretty solidly from the political right and were always on the political right.

And they also are sort of fusion of what I like to think of as like religious and secular kinds of cults.

Like we talked in our episode with the brilliant Bridget Reid 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.

And 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.

Because 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 like collectively called the Moon organization, some of which are like extremely successful, a lot of which are contracted to national governments.

He actually wound up owning a lot of arms manufacturers, weirdly, which is how you get to his sons with the guns.

The big thing you would definitely know about is the New Yorker Hotel.

It is owned by the Moonies.

It is a site of a lot of Mooney activities.

He owns a lot of ballets in Japan and Korea.

A lot of like children's ballet schools was kind of a weird thing.

I mean, that checks out because that's definitely a cult.

He 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.

Most prominently for our listeners, they owned until 2010, something called the Washington Times, which is sort of a right-wing DC newspaper.

Yeah, they also own a tremendous amount of fisheries.

This 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.

It's a beach town.

He bought like a summer house there, and there was still a fishing industry in Gloucester.

And he's like, fuck it.

I'm going to become a fishing magnate.

And then he did.

And now, if you've had sushi in the United States ever, you've probably eaten fish that was harvested by a Mooney-owned fishery.

I was going to make an anchovy joke, but

it's much grimmer than that.

Gloucester Mass is where the boat from The Perfect Storm started, I believe.

Really?

I think so.

The Ben Aff-like accent is just ringing through my ears.

You know, you can almost hear it.

Yeah.

All about apples and lobsters.

So 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 indulgence style way, like give us a lot of money and we can buy your ancestors out of purgatory, right?

He was merging Korean indigenous ancestor worship of the kind that he would have known from his upbringing with like pre-Reformation style indulgences.

Martin Luther's over there, like, what the fuck am I?

And the notion was that like the more you give, the more of your ancestors you can buy out of purgatory and release into heaven.

What if they were assholes, though?

You're like, I want to exempt great aunt Hortens

straight up bee.

And he also didn't just have these tithing donations.

He also had a lot of cheap labor.

Right.

And something we're going to talk about is American Moonies who joined the church during what is called the first generation, like basically boomers.

Often they were recruited from college and encouraged to drop out and devote themselves full-time to the church and its ministries.

And that meant that they were often not really qualified for remunerative jobs.

Like you need a college degree in the U.S.

to get a middle-class job in a lot of cases.

And so a lot of of them wound up permanently working for Mooney businesses and then tithing back those large portions of those salaries back into the Mooney organization.

And it was a font for, allegedly, or according to the federal government, a lot of money laundering.

So, we're going to get into all of that good stuff, but 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?

And this is like something you see a lot with American commentators looking at Korea.

They'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?

So Moon really merged right-wing reactions to the 60s counterculture, John Birch-style conspiratorial anti-communism, labor exploitation, arms and humans trafficking.

He was really into like Ronald Reagan style, charismatic conservatism.

And then he also, I think, tapped in pretty successfully to various anxieties about race, heritage, lineage, and really above all, the family.

Right.

So the broadstroke 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.

And his doctrine preached this like millenarian notion of humanity's divinely guided effort towards perfection and towards the repayment for past sins.

So 54 in Seoul, so that's immediately after the Korean War.

I 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?

Interesting.

So over the course of his career, he becomes increasingly explicit and avowed in his claim to be the second coming of Christ.

For a lot of his career, he did this Trump style, like many people are saying,

that I am the Messiah.

There's this like really funny late night talk show interview he did soon after he moved to the US in 1971, where it's not Johnny Johnny Carson, but it's a Johnny Carson type, goes, Are you really the second coming of Christ?

Are you really the Messiah?

And Moon, through a translator, he puts this kind of smirk on his face and he's like, I didn't say I'm the Messiah, but perhaps you had a divine revelation that I am.

And the whole crowd laughs.

At present, Mr.

Moon is regarded as a Messiah.

by many devout and very attractive followers.

There are some in the audience tonight.

And he's regarded as a messiah.

Now,

there are, by my researches, 27 working messiahs roaming the world right now, and that doesn't include John Yoko and Lemon.

Or John Lemon and Yoko.

I get my messiahs all mixed up.

Now, what I would like to know is:

are the other

26 messiahs fakes?

And is Mr.

Moon the only true one?

He's a charmer.

He's a guy with some serious charisma, right?

So he slowly starts hinting, and then eventually in 1992, he will formally crown himself the Messiah.

But he's always explicit about this notion that it is his special divinely ordained job to restore humanity to a blessed and sinless state.

So his church that he founded in Seoul in 1954 expands rapidly throughout Asia in the 1950s and 60s.

It's particularly successful and it is particularly politically connected in Korea and Japan.

It eventually becomes very embedded within the ruling governments of what becomes South Korea and Japan and very intimately connected to the assassination of Shinzo Abe eventually, which I hope we can get to.

Yeah.

Okay.

Wow.

Moon moves to the US in in 1971 to expand his reach there.

His church recruited really heavily from college campuses, mostly, though of course not exclusively, among white kids.

And 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?

There'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.

But maybe they're afraid of drugs or they've got like more conservative sexual politics.

Those are the people that the Moonies are really, really successful with.

I feel like this is something that I haven't seen explored that much in the United States, but 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.

And that in some ways, they want a version of that, except, as you say, without the changes to structure of power and the order of business that it would entail.

And there is this, what's our rock and roll going to be?

What's our kind of youth culture going to be like?

And it would make perfect sense that these kind of charismatic cults would be part of that too.

Yeah, it's like that meme where the youth pastor like spins around the chair to sit backwards in it.

It's like, you know, who else had long hair and lived with a bunch of his friends, you know?

Something about the countercultural era makes a lot of different people with a whole bunch of different ideological commitments see an opportunity to seize on this zeitgeist and the sexiness of this like new cultural milieu to try and push their own agenda.

Moon 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.

When you say college students, do we know the gender breakdown of this?

Because that is what sets a lot of these cults apart, right?

That, like, some of them seem to have very heavily drawn on women, right?

The Manson family famously.

And there are others that are, frankly, of a gender imbalance in the other direction.

Where did the Moonies fall?

I 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.

Why no?

Yeah.

You know, the Moonies, they're taking who they can get, but a lot of people who were in the group and later left talk about being recruited by like cute people, right?

So like one guy who is now a cult deprogrammer and a psychologist is like, yeah, they came to my college campus at Suwannee in Tennessee.

Yeah, University of the South.

And there were a lot of cute girls.

And they were telling me to come and hang out with them at this seminar.

And they said it wasn't religious, which was a lie.

And then I followed them because I wanted to follow the girls and wound up in this place where I didn't know how to get home and they wouldn't let me sleep and they kept me up all night and made me throw out my book of poetry.

You know, like people's grievances against the way that they were recruited are varied, but they frequently center on what's called like a honeypot kind of solicitation.

A Romeo agent, if you will.

Wait, do you think that maybe that guy

was going to recruit you?

No, I think he was terrified of sex.

He was a very beautiful, half-asian man.

This is how this is how they get you.

Something else that happened in post-war Korea is that son preference led to a massive gender disparity in the Korean population.

One 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 son preference, which is like not true in the United States.

Right.

So there's just way more Korean men than there are women.

And in the 80s and the 90s, this was one thing that drove Korean recruits to Moon.

It's like, oh, you can get me an American wife or you can get me a Japanese wife.

And then I won't have to compete in this marriage market.

That doesn't really come into play until later because it's not as pronounced a difference in the Korean sex ratio

earlier on when Moon is starting off his career, but it is something that comes up a lot.

The typical pairing

I have seen, although this is not exclusive by any means, is a white woman and an Asian man.

That tends to be a little more common in Mooney marriages.

Fascinating.

So they do become known for these mass weddings, right?

They are these televised stadium affairs in which hundreds or sometimes thousands of couples, a lot of them strangers to each other, whose marriages had been arranged by Reverend Moon, get married all at once.

Intimate and beautiful.

Yes, yes.

With just 10,000 of our closest friends and strangers.

And 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.

So like every woman wears the same wedding dress, every man wears the same tucks, etc.

And they all say the same vows, which are very particular vows.

And then they became known not just for these mass weddings, but also for the distress of the recruits' parents.

So 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 length to retrieve their children from Moon's organization and deprogram them and restore them to their previous worldview, right?

So on the one hand, you have these massed weddings with arranged marriages.

And on the other hand, you have like parents funding the, like really just a kidnapping and deprogramming of their cult recruited kids.

And both of these are just like news media bait, right?

Like you said that the exoticism of Moon being Korean may have helped draw white American teenagers to his operation.

Of course, the idea that an Asian man took my child is also a very old racist trope in American media.

And 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 so there is also this foreign exotic operation that's recruiting our teenagers it almost is a kind of orientalist conspiracy theory and 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.

So you have these like stories of people like leaving unification church buildings like with sometimes literally bags over their head so that the deep programmers who are waiting outside to snatch them can't tell who it is.

So 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.

Throughout all this, while he's both mass marrying people and people are getting dragged out of his mass ceremonies by irite parents, he has this other side, right?

He's becoming far more connected.

Like 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?

Yeah, 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.

He's a guy who makes a subtext

of a lot of like right-wing Christianity texts.

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?

So 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.

He also pitches himself even more strongly as an anti-communist.

He 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?

And so he pitches himself as somebody who is not just a committed anti-communist, 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 intimate relation with this area that he understands as a divinely ordained site of contest between these ideologies.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah, 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 the Colonia Dignidad in Chile, the idea that in beating back communism, we have to make common cause with these religious nuts, but to murder communists, it was very much accepted, even among realists in the foreign policy space, I would think.

Yeah, I mean, one of Moon's big American projects, one of his more successful fundraising efforts, was for the Nicaraguan Contras.

One of 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.

Which makes it kind of an interesting cult.

I feel like cults do thrive normally on cutting you off from everyone else and saying everyone else is doing it wrong.

And 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.

I can see why they network themselves sort of into American life a lot better than, you know, your branch Davidians or something like that.

Yeah, I mean, he has very different pitches to those within his church and those without it, right?

So, to those in the church, he says, everybody who is not a Moonie is a disciple of Satan, and therefore you should not be associating or have intimate relationships with people who aren't Moonies.

Your kids should mostly only be hanging out with Moonies.

You really shouldn't be dating or marrying any non-Moonies.

However, to those on the outside, he's saying we can make common cause.

And 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, right?

Like there's Mooney collective child care, there's Mooney like high schools and grammar schools in parts of the country, particularly DC.

There's a Mooney University.

They bought the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut.

Oh, really?

Yeah, after like the longest academic faculty strike in history, the university just sold itself to the Mooney.

So now they own a credentialed institution in Bridgeport, and you can go get a four-year degree from a Mooney school.

You 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.

Yeah.

But 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?

So 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.

So this is a path of integration and normalcy that a lot of new religious movements take.

It's not that different from what happened with like the Mormons.

And 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.

Right.

And so then you get a series of scandals.

There is a wide-reaching federal investigation of Moon, which was very controversial among the religious right.

He had a lot of people coming out of the woodwork to defend him.

Like Larry Tribe was one of his lawyers.

Like it's weird.

Civil libertarians sort of found something to defend there, too.

Yeah.

There was a big investigation into him for fraud, for trafficking, for money laundering.

It was like the mob, what they eventually got him on was tax fraud, this like truly minuscule amount of tax fraud.

They said that he underpaid his taxes by like $8,000.

And that's what he was convicted on.

And he was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

He served 13.

And when he came out in the early 90s, that's when he finally declared himself the Messiah.

He's like, now that I've been to an American prison,

I think I can do it.

But that caused a lot of people to leave the church in the late 80s and early 90s.

And then in 1999, one of his former daughters-in-law published a memoir called In the Shadow of the Moons, which revealed a lot of things.

Among them confirmed Moon's long-rumored extramarital affairs and illegitimate children, which he discussed as being providential.

We're going to talk about like Moon's

theological approach to sex with him, a classic cult, you gotta fuck the main guy kind of a thing.

Shocker.

Yeah, he's a guy who is preaching absolute sexual chastity to his followers as a matter of their souls, right?

And himself is like philandering pretty aggressively.

And 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.

His oldest son with his wife, his current wife, his current widow,

Hawk, who became like what was called the true mother of the church, died of functionally drug overdose, right?

They're trust fund kids.

They're messy.

Yeah, right.

The fail sons of the Messiah.

It 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.

And the hypocrisy was pretty startling.

And 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.

Damn.

So that also caused a lot of people to leave in 1999.

And then Moon died in 2012.

He was 92 years old and he died in Korea.

And this led to a schism over the church's leadership between his wife and two of his sons, which further damaged the organization.

As a non-religious person, one thing I understand about religion, that it's always schism o'clock in religion land.

You know, when you claim that you're the Messiah, that raises the stakes somewhat.

This 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?

Yeah, I was going to ask about that.

It is one about the historical forces that led this age cohort first into the counterculture and then onto the political right.

Like the Mooney Boomers are narrated overwhelmingly by the two generations that sandwiched them.

So 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.

And then on the other hand, you have their kids, these millennials, right?

The Moony 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.

So there's these two genres of Moony media, right?

Which is these freaks stole my child on the one hand, and these freaks stole my childhood on the other hand.

And the other way to tell the story is, okay, 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.

Sun Myung-moon was born on January 26th, 1920, in a small village in what is now North Korea, which was at the time under Japanese imperial rule.

He was the fifth of eight children born to a farmer.

These are humble origins.

His dad was literate and had some education in classical Confucianism.

And the family was pretty religious, practicing an indigenous form of like shamanic ancestor worship until Moon was about 10 years old.

And at that time, around 1930, the family went through an unspecified series of disasters.

And I couldn't really figure out which kind of disasters it was.

It may may have been health stuff.

It may have been money stuff, but they were in a bad way.

And they start doing these shamanic rituals, which are not working, right?

Moon'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.

And what they do is they turn to a local Christian healer.

And that guy persuades them to convert to Presbyterianism.

So the family becomes pretty devout.

And Moon, he is teaching Sunday school throughout his youth, but he later claims that on Easter Sunday in 1935, when he's about 15, Jesus appears to him at his home and issues a revelation of God's divine plan and Moon's own special status in fulfilling it.

I don't want to say something super on PC, but I need some of our Korean listeners to enlighten me as to this.

I feel like this is such a common thing that I'm not aware of a lot of Korean Korean public religious culture that just goes halfway.

Like,

so they just converted and they're just like diving headfirst.

They're like, I'm talking to Jesus three years later, right?

There's an intensity there.

It's really quite remarkable, especially given that this is a fairly mercantile way of managing your religious conversion.

You're like, the ancestors crapped out on us.

Let's see what this Jesus guy can do.

And then you're like a charismatic preacher like three years later.

That's incredible.

Yeah.

I think as a testament to Moon's fusionism, he says that he also received these visitations and revelations from Moses, Confucius, Muhammad, and the Buddha.

So he's an equal opportunity guy, but his primary tradition and mode that he's working from is Christian.

These kinds of fusionist cults are really, really common in Korea.

Wasn't there that case of...

I'm going to butcher her name, but Korean president, Park Jun-hee, is that her name?

Who was also in a cult?

Well, she was linked to this cult leader.

What was the cult called had a great name this is definitely a cult kind of name but that was also like buddhist christian shamanism all together church of eternal life is what it's called sounds like a cult they always have great names yeah great names like lofty euphemistic don't ask too many questions

but if your president is like i gotta talk to someone from the church of eternal life you're like uh-oh

they did get rid of her over this they were like this lady's crazy they are much better at getting rid of of their crazy presidents than we are.

So impressive.

So conspicuously to me, he does not write down any of this until 11 years later, when he's 26, when he writes the early drafts of what later becomes his book, The Divine Principle, which is the Mooni's sacred text.

So in his teens and 20s, Moon receives formal education in electrical engineering, first in Seoul and then in Tokyo.

And by this point, World War II is underway and the tenor of Japanese occupation in Korea, including its cultural domination, is becoming like really intense.

So Japanese Shintoism is made a mandatory religious practice for Koreans.

Koreans in Korea are subject to arrest and prosecution if they are overheard speaking Korean rather than Japanese.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

And 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.

As you said, it's always schism o'clock in religion and particularly in Korean Christianity in the 20th century.

It is always schism o'clock.

They've got a lot of charismatic preachers who are sort of like rivals for attention.

Meanwhile, girls and women of like really exactly Moon's age, like teenagers and young 20-somethings, are being abducted en masse by the Japanese authorities and trafficked to the front lines of the war to serve as quote-unquote comfort women, like military sex slaves, to Japanese soldiers.

It's not a good time to be a young Korean person.

And Moon has been educated in Tokyo.

Like he could have theoretically stayed there, but he doesn't.

He returns to Seoul in 1943 and he seeks out a matchmaker who contracts him in an arranged marriage with his first wife, Sok Il-choi.

But pretty soon after his return to Korea, he's arrested by the authorities in the south on suspicion of cooperation with the communists.

A big part of the Japanese crackdown in Korea at this time was this kind of paranoia about the possible presence of Soviet allies or Soviet spies among the Korean population.

So Moon is tortured and beaten on suspicion of communist sympathies for 60 days.

And this is the beginning of like a wartime and post-war like jailbird period for Moon.

So at the time, he's traveling frequently up and down the Korean peninsula between the north and the south, preaching and looking for acolytes without a ton of success, right?

So 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.

And then he'll get out of jail and move to Seoul and the same thing will happen over again, right?

So he's ping-ponging back and forth between North and South Korean prisons.

Meanwhile, his wife, who he impregnated and then like immediately abandoned, is following him him around up and down the country, trying to convince him to be her husband and support her and their son.

And they formally divorce in 1953.

She kind of like gives up on trying to get this guy to like actually be her husband.

She should have snuck into one of those football stadiums, you know?

Yeah, she got married to somebody else.

Dumbass.

So he has this idea that like after the Japanese surrender in 1945, he's like, okay, this is great.

This is going to make it easier for me to preach and to recruit followers.

But there's a really uneasy post-war peace in Korea, and this makes it tough.

So, 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.

And 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.

And this is partly because authorities in both places are responding to pressure from the newly liberated Christian movements to crack down on these preachers.

So, you could see this experience of his going either way, right?

He is a colonial subject of extremely humble origins who's educated in the Metropole and persecuted by occupying forces.

Like this sounds to me like the start of a biography of like a post-colonial intellectual, right?

But 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.

He does not seem to resent the Americans who will soon bomb the north of Korea where he grew up like really two smithereens.

He does not seem to resent the Japanese who have oppressed his people and his religion for decades.

He resents the Soviets who he blames for basically all of his early suffering and becomes this committed, almost obsessive anti-communist.

And this might be because his primary commitment has always really been to religion and he sees the communists as godless.

It might also be because his own accounts of his arrests in the south are contested.

So there is sort of two histories of Moon's early life in Korea, right?

He says that when he was in Seoul, he was being arrested for suspicion regarding his political activity.

But other sources say that he was being arrested in the South because he was doing weird ritual sex stuff.

And that the like Korean government and like establishment Korean Christians really were trying to stamp out these like ritual sex practices that he was engaged in.

Have you ever heard of a practice called picarium?

No.

I might be butchering this.

It's a P apostrophe, I-K-R-E-U-M.

I shudder to think what a sex practice would be that has an apostrophe in it.

Well, it's Korean.

This is a

ritual practice that is translated as like blood purification or blood exchange.

He didn't come up with it.

And for the record, Moon always denied ever participating in this in his early church life.

Kind 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.

This 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.

It 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.

It is fucking three times, usually over the course of three days, and it has to have a witness.

So do without what you will.

It's just wife swapping with extra steps.

Yeah, also like she then has a sexual obligation to her husband, right?

Central to Moon's theology is something called the serpent seed heresy, which in its short version it says that original sin is basically sexually transmitted.

And a lot of what Moon does is he's like, okay, well, Satan did X, so I have to do the same thing, but for good, right?

Oh, emulating Satan is in many ways a great guide for how to do good in the world.

That's his whole deal.

So, like, one of the things he says, his followers are like, Father, you're lying.

Like, 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.

It is religious.

And 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.

Satan operates through sexuality, and therefore we need to have this like purification sexuality to defeat Satan.

He says he never did this.

A lot of women say he did.

I tend to be a little more inclined towards their side.

And it makes a lot of logical sense when you follow his absolutely illogical batshit theology.

It's like, oh,

of course he was doing this.

So like this might also be a good moment to pause and consider the role of Christianity in Korea in like the late 40s and 1950s.

Yes, please.

Which was like dynamic, internally contradictory, multifaceted, and like pretty weird, right?

So Christianity had taken root in Korea in the 18th and 19th centuries when Western missionaries found a kind of more interested audience, I would say, in Korea than they did in some other East Asian regions.

But its popularity really exploded in the mid-20th century, largely in response to these upheavals that Korea experienced during World War II and then in what we call the Korean War.

So Moon was like really far from being the only charismatic preacher in Korea trying to gain a following with a millenarian message.

This was like a genre of guy there at the time, right?

There were a bunch of these preachers and like establishment churches, as well as like the communists were all skeptical of them, and a bunch of them wound up in jail.

In fact, one of the early ways that Moon recruited to his own cult was when he was in prison, he would encounter other gurus and their followers.

I really like this one story from this time when he was in prison in the north and he encountered the followers of another sect called the In the Belly Church.

And the In the Belly Church was called this because their charismatic leader was actually a woman, you know, girl boss, women in male fields.

Nice.

And this woman who was running the cult had a prominent abdomen.

And when she would receive revelations, her belly would move as if she was pregnant and there was a fetus moving around inside her.

Like she could somehow make this happen.

And when she was delivering her divine revelations, her stomach would churn as if she was about to create and give birth this divine knowledge.

And he convinced her followers, who he met in prison, that he was the messianic figure she had alluded to in one of her prophecies.

She had borne him?

Or, like, she had predicted him somehow.

And he was like, I'm that guy.

I feel bad for this cult leader.

He stole all her followers from her in prison.

She's like, you John the Baptist of me, Gene the Baptist.

So this, like, era of frequent imprisonment is also when Moon started honing his theology and his theory of recruitment.

So, Moon is released in prison in 1950, basically because the communist regime that is there like holding him captive in this labor camp is like collapsing, right?

There's like so much bombing going on that they just cannot maintain these prisons.

So, he walks out, and like a lot of people, he's doing this massive pilgrimage down to the south because the American Americans don't really do the kind of like atonement soul searching over the korean war that we do over like vietnam or like the atomic bombing but like we probably should because america flattened north korea well quick point you also don't do it about vietnam yeah

what soul searching i'm sorry footage not found you feel bad about how the people doing it felt

Yeah, it does not loom as large in the American imagination.

I think probably because like just fewer Americans were deployed to Korea than were ultimately deployed to Vietnam.

But this bombing campaign was apocalyptic.

And like a lot of people, Moon flees to the south, but he makes it to Seoul.

And this is when stuff finally takes off for him.

He deploys one of his early disciples, women disciples, to recruit at a woman's college.

And that's really successful.

And by 1957, there's 30 Mooney churches in South Korea.

It explodes really fast.

And it's interesting, just very briefly, because he's in his 30s at this point.

It's also interesting that like a lot of this kind of boomer recruitment happens from people who are quite a bit older.

Mike Manson is famously older than the women that he draws to himself.

There's always an interesting age gap about these things.

Not huge in the beginning, but considerable.

Well, around 1960, when he performs his first marriage, he christens himself True Father.

And the woman he marries, Hak Jahan, who's either his second or his third wife, again, depending on who you ask, is the true mother.

They very explicitly say, we are a replacement for your parents.

We are more your parents than the people who gave birth to and/or raised you.

We are your true parents as opposed to your mere bodily parents, right?

The Oedipal

aspiration is not subtext.

It is text.

Okay.

So they perform the first mass marriage of 32 couples in Seoul a few months after their own nuptials in 1960.

Okay.

How old is Hak Jahan, by the way?

23 years younger than he is.

I don't know why I asked.

She's about 17 in 1960 when they get married, and he is 40.

So what does Moon actually believe?

At this point, he's sending missionaries to the Philippines, to Japan, eventually to like California.

And he's got a theology that is peculiar, right?

Yeah, you mentioned the serpent seed thing.

Is that his invention?

You've never heard of the serpent seed theory?

This is so not his invention.

Okay.

It was named the serpent seed heresy in the year 100 by an early church follower.

It is basically the first thing Christians think of when they encounter Genesis, which is that it wasn't an apple, it was fucking, right?

Moon says that Adam and Eve were supposed to conceive children sinlessly who would worship and glorify God in this state of perpetual spiritual perfection, right?

But that before they matured into spiritually perfect beings, Lucifer, in the guise of the snake, sexually seduced Eve, right?

So the apple is a metaphor for fucking in Genesis.

Not an original idea.

A lot of people have had that kind of impulse about it before.

So, okay, now it's ringing a bell, but this is, 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, should not procreate.

But that's clearly not what's going on here.

No.

I think some pedestrian assessments of right-wing sexual politics are like they hate sex, right?

They hate and fear sex.

That's not really what's going on.

What is going on is that Moon, like a lot of right-wing religious people, has very strong normative ideas about sex and is very, very invested in lots of the right kind of sex happening, which means that there's a lot of sex you're not allowed to have, and then there's a lot of sex you have to have, whether you like it or not.

Yeah.

So 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?

And the resulting children are thus cursed with original sin, what Moon and his followers call the bloody lineage.

And they went on to therefore propagate this contaminated influence of Satan throughout human history.

So this is implicit in a lot of Christian thought, but it's most often explicitly rejected.

But 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, crucially, like God is not exactly omnipotent in Moon's theology, to bring mankind back into a sinless state of unification with him throughout history, right?

And 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.

So basically, it's a bang debt.

Yeah, 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 the main guy.

Win-win for someone.

Yeah, for it to see who.

So, like, history then is depicted as this force.

It's both progressive and cyclical, right?

Mankind is coming ever closer to sinlessness, but never attaining it.

In one element of this theory of like divine effort and then like human failure, Jesus was sent as a quote-unquote second Adam to establish the blessed lineage, right?

That is a sinless form of humankind, but failed.

So, to be the second Messiah, you have to justify yourself by saying that the first one didn't do it right.

So in Moon's theology.

This Jesus does not fuck.

Well, no, literally, that's the problem.

No, no, I got there.

Jesus was supposed to fuck.

He was supposed to create a blessed lineage of his descendants who would be born without original sin.

The crucifixion was an accident.

Oh, okay.

He was also in his 30s.

If that was his mission, he could have gotten busy before, but he was just hanging out with dudes.

You know, you have all these other heretical ideas about Mary Magdalene.

I'm I'm guessing the Moonies did not enjoy the Da Vinci Code where...

Is it Audrey Tattoo is the descendant of Jesus or something?

Really?

Really?

I never

thought.

She's just like so twee.

Like Christ is just so annoyingly twee.

Well, checks out.

Yeah, no, he was supposed to have these babies.

He didn't.

The crucifixion is like that it was on purpose is pretty central to Christianity.

This is why I like almost don't know if you can count the Moonies as Christians, right?

But they think it was an accident.

And because Jesus died, he was not able to marry and have these children born without original sin.

So this, of course, is where Moon comes in.

Right.

It 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.

I have to say that to lose one atom may be regarded as misfortune.

To lose two seems like carelessness.

And once you're on the third atom, you're just done fucked up.

Yeah, the account of divine power is like really

attenuated.

God can be thwarted.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh no.

Again.

Like you have to follow his plan, but it will be foiled by

basically anything.

Yeah.

Cut to like George Sr.

being, I got the worst fucking atoms.

Like a lot of high control religious movements, the unification church has these detailed demands for its members' daily life, right?

So any image of Moon has to be bowed to, and there's like images of him everywhere So they're bowing all the time says the Catholic

I'm constantly standing up and Catholic turning my shit again

I'm the only person with my head above the pew and I'm like fuck why are you in a Catholic church?

I'm married to a Catholic Oh, hung is a Catholic?

Is he really?

Yeah.

Oh, I didn't know that.

I thought he was like, I don't do that shit anymore.

Oh, I mean, yeah, but his mom does do that shit.

Oh, shit.

Yeah, this gets to the point of like, how different is this really?

Like,

a lot of this stuff like seems weird because they're doing it to an image of moon, but like, how many times have I like crossed myself in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary or whatever?

He's not getting it from nowhere, right?

He's drawing on these other traditions.

But then there's other stuff that's like a little

different.

Like there's this blessed salt that the moonies distribute.

And you have to put it on everything that you bring into your house so that it's not tainted with the outside world Satanism anymore.

So like you get groceries, you have to sprinkle the bust salt only, like this kind of shit.

Like a lot of ritual purification, basically.

And then you're also supposed to wake up at five in the morning.

I'm out.

You had me with the salt and the bowing, whatever.

I'll do it.

5 a.m.

is a hard no for me.

I like to go run that early in Golden Gate Park.

It's deserted.

It's just you and the disturbing public art there.

And the moonies.

And the moonies praying.

But like one thing that former moonies talk about is like, yeah, I was never getting any sleep.

Cults and reality television both are explicable only if you think about the power of sleep deprivation.

As someone who raised a infant in the last five years, like I remember you could have made me sign over anything during that time.

Like it's just like your brain just really does something to your personality structure, et cetera, et cetera.

And this is why I think reality show producers don't let their people sleep and why Jim Jones didn't either.

Like X-Moonies will talk about how they were always told that True Father only needed three hours of sleep a night.

And then one of the big things that led at least some people to leave was this revelation by a former security guard at Sun Young Moon's mansion headquarters in Terrytown, New York, of all places.

Oh.

Where this guy was like, oh God, yeah, it was such a pain in the ass to work there because you'd have to be really quiet until noon or one in the afternoon because dear later wanted to sleep in.

And all the Moonies were like, God fucking damn it.

I was told that this guy was up at four or three and like working until midnight, like every single day.

And it turns out only I was doing that.

Well, reversing my earlier statement, I would join the Moonies if I got to be true father, because I do love the sound of sleeping in my house.

So like another thing that they have to do is like large donations

for the absolution of sins, right?

Like

extortionate donations.

This is part of why Shinzo Abe got assassinated because Abe was, you know, he was the former prime minister of Japan, ahead of a conservative party, and his family had deep ties to the unification church.

And the shooter who assembled this gun by himself was like, the unification church is too powerful in Japanese politics.

The right-wing Abe party is coddling them, basically.

And my mother has bankrupted herself because she keeps giving greater and greater.

And like, as a political tactic, this assassination was extraordinarily successful because what it actually did was draw attention to the role of the Moonis in Japanese politics and the way they were extorting their followers.

And really, the Moonies fell out of prominence a lot.

So you got to hand it to Shinzo Abe's assassin, who got exactly what he wanted from shooting Shinzo Abe with a handmade gun.

I had no idea that was the background.

Yeah.

Followers will often also frequently be told to do a pilgrimage to the church's global headquarters in Gapyeong, which is like a little bit east of Seoul.

I'm butchering the Korean names.

My apologies to our Korean-speaking listeners.

But there are these like 40-day workshops there.

Gotta have workshops.

You know, if you have a problem, you're doing a 40-day workshop in the global headquarters outside of Seoul, and the problems are like addiction or being gay.

And the treatment is mostly like this kind of ritualized collective self-flagellation where you're supposed to be beating the evil spirits out of your own body.

I was just going to say that because the food would be excellent, but I'm not sure I'm willing to flagellate for really, really good Korean food.

But there's a lot of stuff they have to do.

This is all to say that they keep their followers very busy.

But the center of the unification church really is the blessing, the marriage ceremony, which some observers have called the religion's only real sacrament.

All of your life before the blessing is leading up to it, all of the life after the blessing is like maintaining it.

So in the early years, Moon would personally arrange marriages among his followers.

And he did this at random.

He hosted these matching ceremony events where a large group of Moonis would assemble in a big room with men on one side and women on the other.

And you can see videos of this.

And Moon is just kind of pointing.

And then he's like shrugging, you know?

Allegedly, Moon tried to match people who had as little in common as possible.

Not unlike colleges.

And 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.

So for a while, he was like, oh, I'm going to match all of my Korean followers in marriages to my Japanese followers.

And this will promote like post-war post-war reconciliation and healing.

I don't know how well that works.

There is this really strong strand in, oh, we can fuck away racism, right?

Like, this is something that a lot of people believe, and it's not just on the far right.

This 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.

If only we offer women as tribute across racial lines.

Exactly.

This led to a lot of unhappy marriages.

Like, it seems like people did

generally overcome the language barriers eventually.

To tell each other how much they hated each other.

It's like, how do you say in Japanese?

Fuck off.

There's a really interesting series of testimonials by a millennial person.

I think we're exactly the same age.

Hiteo Hikashiba, who grew up in the Moonies and was the product of a random union between a Japanese man and a white American woman.

And they're like, yeah, my parents are fucking miserable.

They're absolutely hating each other.

There'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?

Who then can like outpopulate the sinful satanic population?

So, you know, a couple days after being matched, couples are then married in these mass wedding ceremonies.

So, men and women are issued standard clothing and they say standard vows in unison.

And I want you to like scroll down to this part I'm highlighting here and read for me the Mooney wedding vows.

Are we doing this?

Oh, yeah, we're gonna get Mooney married.

I'm not ready for this.

Okay,

so the first vow is to become a true man or woman who practices sexual purity and lives for the sake of others.

To become a true husband or wife who respects true parents' example and establishes an eternal family which brings joy to God.

Number 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.

And number four, to create an ideal family which contributes to world peace.

Honestly, this would not be out of place in either a Miss America contest or honestly in just regular wedding vows.

Am I missing something?

I think there is an unusual degree of emphasis on procreation.

That is true.

It's all about having a family, about those children existing, about those children being raised in a specific way.

And this like ideal family notion is very, very central to Moon's actual theology, right?

This notion that it's not just a family, it's a family that follows this very specific strictures and is made in the image of God, right?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, this is another thing.

It's like, how different is this really from a mainstream conservative Christianity, right?

Well, having scrolled ahead in your notes, there is a place where it is kind of different, it seems.

Why, what are you thinking of?

So apparently there are traditional steps for sanctifying the blessing.

Right, because you don't just consummate a moony marriage.

You have to have a ritual consummation of the moony marriage.

So right before they get married.

You got to smack that ass, apparently, yeah.

Yeah, it was this Coldwood a chastening ceremony, which is apparently like you take a wooden spoon and smack each other on the ass.

This symbolically marks an end to sin and preparation for a new beginning.

Sure.

And then there's

Jan.

What's the line from Henry IV?

A wish was fathered to that thought.

It's a little on the nose, right?

We've got to do some ass smacking.

God wants it.

Yeah.

And then the holy wine ceremony.

Tell me, how do I engage in a holy wine ceremony?

You share a drink.

It's like they share a cup of consecrated wine or sometimes grape juice, symbolizing their engrafting to God's sinless lineage.

I think maybe the wine, I think in most traditions, would come before the spanking, but you know.

The whole thing has a kind of odd sequence to it.

And then you get married at the blessing, right?

And then you have to be abstinent for 40 days.

Yes, you do not consummate this union for 40 days, a ritual purification time when you refrain from having sex.

And then,

just like in the ritual sex that Moon totally did not participate in in Korea, you have to fuck three times in three different ritually prescribed positions over the course of three days.

Oh, wow.

But now I'm getting this.

So this is kind of supposed to reverse what Moon says Adam and Eve did to fall into sin.

You're literally rewinding the tape on the original sin.

Is that the idea?

Yep.

You're just doing it backwards, right?

So in a weird nod to Milton, it starts off with the woman on top, and that's like the bad kind of sex.

And then you wind up in the good kind of missionary sex in which the man's dominance is restored.

And the wooden spoon comes out again.

What's with the spoon, man?

Don't ask.

It's a sacrament.

You can find the instructions online, which I decided not to inflict on you.

But like, it's real step-by-step stuff, including like specific prayers and then specific positions and then specific ritual cleansing before and after.

It's really involved and it kind of takes the

spontaneity out of it.

There's not a lot of room for like improvisation.

There's something really interesting here about privacy and publicity, right?

So for one thing, like marriage is an interesting thing because it's about a very, very private thing that two people are doing, but it does obviously have this huge public dimension.

That's why we had the big fights over gay marriage in the United States.

At the same time, the specificity of these vows and of these rituals feels like it's just kind of one dude's kink that he turned into a religion, which like makes it feel like, oh, you're kind of oversharing, man, just have your own weird sex stuff.

But on the other hand, it is also, of course, a moment where people's private lives and their own preferences get regimented in this way that I'm sure, I realize I'm probably sounding a little conservative here myself, but like, who wants their marriage to be fucked around in that way, right?

Where it's like, oh, you must do it this way, you must do it that way.

It takes the one thing in your life that's supposed to be your own to shape and to structure.

Like, oh, we make it work for ourselves.

Like, no, no, no, no, three slaps with the spoon.

It's gonna be three slaps, right?

And you're like, I don't know, man.

Like, it just really feels like it's taking like, there's a weird involution of the private and the public here, it seems to me.

Right.

And this is also something that you know about everybody in your community.

Oh, yeah.

And that everybody in your community knows about you.

Everybody you know knows exactly the way that you fuck because it's prescribed by the Messiah.

There's something about

this imposition of meaning that I think speaks to like sexist centrality in the conservative imagination, right?

Yeah.

There's a way in which sex cannot mean anything else, right?

It can either be sinful or pure, right?

Yeah.

There's no right of sexual refusal for women in these marriages also.

That's like very explicit.

It's sin or restoration from sin.

There's nothing in between.

Right.

And that's it.

There's no room for like the humanity of the people involved.

And I think it's like also useful to talk about the way that Moon has talked about non-ritually purified sex.

Because like Moon has said that gay people are like dogs who eat their own shit.

He 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.

And that like women should fill their vaginas with concrete, which I gotta say is something I considered doing after reading the instructions for the ritual sex.

There's this intense maximalism about it, right?

And 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.

That's something about religion that I think has an appeal to it.

I can see the appeal.

But the intense prescriptiveness, the intense foreclosure of different possibilities for what those meanings might be is, I think, just like really oppressive.

You 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, right?

And that is something that in Jonestown, you could justify that with this kind of social justice language or with this language of liberation.

That's much harder for the Moonies to do.

They kind of have to just pretend that these two things are not in contradiction with each other.

Right.

Yeah.

And like they didn't really resolve that.

Right.

So for all of his theological emphasis on matrimony and on childbearing and on the creation of this blessed population with all these babies, there is actually not a lot of valuation of family life itself

in the Mooney organization.

Like, so young Mooney's, 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?

Yeah.

Like if your 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.

Yeah.

One of the things that they did was like create this abstinence-only only sex ed programming that they would then like license out to schools and often Moonies would be the instructors.

If you would get assigned to one of those missions, you don't really have the chance to say no.

And often people who were new parents were quite deliberately assigned far away from their kids.

One 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 live to be collectively raised.

This is a feature of a lot of like millennial Mooney childhoods, the childhoods of what are called like BCs or blessed children, right?

They often wouldn't be retrieved by their parents for like years, or the parents would come to visit like once every couple weeks or something like that.

So, a lot of these kids were collectively raised by like Mooney women.

This 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?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wow.

So, what happened is that these blessed children grew up.

There's a lot of reasons why the Moonies declined and sort of fell apart in the 21st century.

There was like a lot of financial mismanagement.

There was Moon's prosecution and imprisonment for his financial malfeasance.

But 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.

Like, there's two ways a cult can go.

Yeah, either like mass suicide, disaster, or some sort of like gradual fading out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The 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 to age and searching, you know, that's something that people sort of shed.

And as the, as their lives got bigger, you know, Moon sort of took on a smaller and smaller place of it.

And so they lost people a lot through these scandals, but they also lost people a lot through, I think, like the attrition of life, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Then these kids grew up and Moon took less of an interest in them than he had taken in their parents.

In, I believe, 2000, Moon said that he was no longer going to do the matching ceremonies himself.

Like, you still need parental consent to get married.

You need all four parents and both of the Mooney children to be eligible for like a blessing marriage.

But the matching now is done, like, these arranged marriages are done largely through an online forum

through what's called like picture matching, where you can like make a little like profile and then your eligible candidates will be sent to you.

And like, like your parents can like

left or right yeah

and like that is one way that like moonies who get these mass marriages do them now you usually like a lot of people really have to travel to Korea if you want to be married in a mass moonie wedding they don't do as many of them in the US anymore

they were doing them like later than you would think, like into the 2000s in the U.S., but that was also like a lot of like vow renewals for couples who were already married.

Oh, interesting.

They opened them up to like non-moony couples.

So like Al Sharpton like did a vow renewal at a mass moonie marriage, I think in like Madison Square Garden, like more recently than you would think he did.

Wow.

Their integration into like broader conservative worlds meant that they were having just a kind of a harder time recruiting and they were less interested.

Moon really became more interested in making money than in recruiting people to his like messianic cult.

And when he died, you know, for a while, his wife was trying to do matching ceremonies.

There was this one anecdote where she would be like, okay, I'm doing it different than my husband did.

And it's like, well, your husband was doing it basically at random.

But she's like, I want everybody to hold their hands up in a prayer position.

And then I want the women to go find the men who are holding their hands the same way that they are.

And that's your husband.

She was like doing crowd work.

I don't even understand these set of instructions.

All the ladies in the house go.

But you know, this kind of of stuff like

its wackiness makes it unsustainable right it's denial of the like ambiguity particularly i think of like sexuality makes it unsustainable you can get an arranged moonie marriage through these apps but a lot of the kids are just being like

hey my friend from church and i want to get married i 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.

And the right never ceases to rage against that fact.

Like, why is this child born living decades after when I was that age, not exactly like me when I was that age?

And so I think there's something interesting about the boomers here, right?

Because when they were young, they were doing something that their parents disapproved of in joining Seung Young Moon.

And then these like second generation kids are also like, yeah, I don't really like my parents' values either.

And a lot of them are like leaving what is left of this organization and like living different lives on their own terms.

We often joke about like what's River going to be like when she grows up and how is she going to be rebellious, but like this is part of the randomness of life is that you cannot control other people.

And that was the Mooney's strength in the 70s and it was a big part of their undoing in the 21st century.

Well, thank you for walking me through all this.

I learned a lot.

But for now, I want to say thank you to to you for walking me through it.

Thank you to all our BCs, all our blessed children out there, especially, I should say, the BCs who have tithed to the Patreon.

Please feed the Patreon.

It does not undo original sin, but it does help us put the show together.

And thank you so much for being here on your favorite cult slash podcast, Inbed with the Right.

Thanks, Adrienne.

In Bed with the Right is made possible by hundreds of listeners who support us via patreon.com.

Our episodes are produced and edited by Mark Yoshizumi and Katie Lau.

Our title music is by Katie Lau.