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Michael Breen |
The Korea Times
09-03-2012 19:02
It’s hard to feel sorry for
a billionaire, harder if he’s regarded by thousands around
the world as the messiah.
But spare a thought for Rev. Moon
Sun-myung who in public, outside of his adoring inner circle,
never had a single good review. He was vilified and ridiculed most
of his adult life. The criticism and hounding of his followers
contemptuously known as “Moonies” have been
unrelenting. Why? Not because his beliefs and claims are any more
ridiculous than other religious notions, but because they were
new.
Ironically, his core message that God suffers has
never even got through the noise, let alone made an impact.
It
was only in his twilight years he was 92 that
governments and media let him be, which explains why he dropped
from the news and why most people under 30, even in Korea and
Japan, where his following is largest, have not heard of him. When
he was taken on Aug. 14 to St. Mary’s Catholic Hospital in
Gangnam, Seoul, critically ill with pneumonia and reported by
doctors to have a 50-50 chance, most dailies did not consider the
news worth the front page.
That’s a far cry from the
1970s and ’80s when sensational media coverage in America,
Europe and elsewhere made Moon the most infamous Korean in the
world.
Everyone, it seemed, had a reason to dislike him.
The political left hated him for saying communism was the
anti-Christ; Christians said he was anti-Christ; to most, he was a
conman who used religion to get rich, a brainwasher of young
people, a nut-case who claimed to chat with the dead, a man who
broke up families, who had a factory that made weapons, who wanted
to control the White House, and maybe take over the world. The
presenter of one weekly religion program on normally sober BBC
once did a report on Moon dressed in a flak jacket and sporting an
M16.
Satisfied with this media interpretation, society
failed to ask the right questions about what Moon stood for and
whether he was really that dangerous. As a result, even
democracies put him on the black list with known terrorists. He
was banned for decades from Japan and most European countries.
If
his story presents an unflattering example of how most societies
are incapable of handling heretics in a dignified and democratic
manner, it is also a modern example of the ancient phenomenon of
how religion is born.
For Moon’s real offense is to
be a modern-day Jesus, to have something new to say about God and
to assume that doing so makes him spiritually superior to the rest
of us. There is no shyness in these claims. Moon believes he has
reversed the “fall of man,” the process by which evil
entered the world in the belief systems of Judaism, Christianity
and Islam, and that his family members are sinless and inherently
better than the rest of us.
Given this, why could he not
simply be ignored?
His story began in Pyongyang between the
end of World War II in 1945 and the outbreak of the Korean War in
1950. His central teaching at that time, delivered in long
emotional sermons, was that Jesus Christ should have lived a full
and exemplary life but had been turned over to colonial
authorities by the religious establishment for execution. Contrary
to normal Christian doctrine, this murder went against the will of
God, he said. He also taught, heretically, that the same Jesus
would not return as promised, but that his mission would be
completed by another man.
These ideas and Moon’s
charisma electrified a small number of Christians. After a few key
members left their churches to join Moon, thinking he was the
prophesied messiah, Protestant ministers reported him to the
communist authorities.
Moon was arrested and severely
tortured by Korean police schooled in Japanese torture techniques.
He was released and a year later arrested again and tried for
“disturbing society.” He was sentenced to a labor camp
in the east coast city of Heungnam and had served two years and 8
months when guards let prisoners go before advancing South Korean
and U.N. forces.
In all, Moon has been jailed six times. In
South Korea in the mid-1950s he was reported to police after
several professors and students from the Methodist Ewha Womans
University joined his church. He was jailed, tried and found not
guilty. In the 1980s, he served an 18-month sentence in a prison
in Connecticut in the United States where he was convicted for
failing to pay taxes on church funds held in accounts in his
name.
Moon was born in a village in North Pyeongan Province
in North Korea in 1920. He claims to have developed his theology
over a nine-year period of prayer and discovery that began with an
encounter with Jesus at age 15. Its root is Judeo-Christian,
although Moon approaches the relationship with God as a filial
Confucian son.
His interpretation of the biblical “fall
of man” is that mankind disobeyed God not by eating fruit,
but through premature sexual relations. The notion that selfish
misuse of love lies at the heart of human sin drives strict views
about sex in the Unification Church.
While his teaching
points to Moon as the prophesied messiah, he did not make any such
public claim outside of the Unification Church until the early
1990s when he told an audience of reporters and academics that he
and his wife, Han Hak-ja, were the “True Parents of
mankind.”
Once asked if he was the messiah, Moon
said, “Yes I am.” Then he pointed to each person
seated around the table. “And so are you, and you, and
you.”
The qualifier ― “and so are all of
you” ― sheds light on the puzzle of how a farm boy
from Korea could attract so many people from the campuses and
middle-class homes of advanced nations.
They are for the
large part decent, educated and idealistic people transformed in
Moon’s glow to believe they too are doing their messianic
bit and saving the world.
How they will fare without him
remains an open question.
The writer is a Korea Times
columnist and author of “Sun Myung Moon: The Early Years
1920-53.”