Meet the Moonies: Inside the Cultish Religious Group Recruiting at the U of M

Diminished but active, the Unification Church officiates mass weddings and recently became entangled in the assassination of a world leader. Its leaders are still hoping to turn Gophers into Moonies.

Racket/August 28, 2024

By Spencer White

Walking across the University of Minnesota campus one morning this past February, I was stopped and asked a series of jarring questions.

What is the cause of human suffering?

Where does evil come from?

Does god exist?

What is the purpose of life?

And, perhaps most troubling: How can we create true relationships?

I was hardly awake. I’d barely made it through a Media Law lecture with my consciousness intact.

Tomoko Taira, the woman who conducted this existential interview, told me the answer to all of these questions, as well as some bonus ones, lay within the teachings of the Unification Church. Otherwise known as the Moonies, this South Korea-born religious group was made famous by its associations with stadium-packing mass weddings and the 2022 assassination of Japan’s former prime minister, Shinzo Abe.

So why would she be standing outside of Murphy Hall on a random winter morning, conversing with sleep-deprived degenerates such as myself?

Turns out Moonies like Taira seek out new members not just in South Korea, but across dozens of countries, throughout greater Minnesota, and even on a college campus near you. Buckle up—in time you will fall down a rabbit hole of conspiracy, right-wing politics, fishing enterprises, and a cult expert whose name is homonymous with an American rap icon.

Moonies: A Brief History

A Korean man named Sun Myung Moon founded the Unification Church in 1954 based on his insistence that Jesus contacted him on Easter Sunday, 1936. He claimed he recognized Jesus from a vision he had when he was three, NPR reports. Moon died in 2012 at age 92, according to The Guardian. His wife, Hak Ja Han Moon, took over as head of the church following his death, according to Taira.

Taira gifted me a book written by Hak Ja Han Moon. At the risk of losing some journalistic integrity, I will admit to not having read it; in my defense, it is really long and not even the core doctrine of the Moonie faith. To clear up some vocabulary before we get too deep into the weeds here: I will be using the names Unification Church and Moonies interchangeably, though some in the church view Moonie as a derogatory term. This is one belief system derived from the teachings of the aforementioned Moon (thus, Moonies), and much of his teaching revolves around the idea that all world religions should be united as one (thus, Unification).

Taira cites inter-faith squabbling as a top issue among the world’s religions, a problem the Unification Church reportedly manages to avoid. She believes that, unlike with those other mainstream religions, Moonie beliefs are as verifiable as one plus one equals two.

To keep it relatively simple, the church and its followers believe that before he died Jesus was meant to be married, to undo the sins of Adam and Eve, and Sun Myung Moon was meant to continue this mission of total unification of all religions and governments through marriages, restoring the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. Except for communists, who use brainwashing and lies to fight the church (we’ll come back to this). Basically Adam and Eve didn’t put a ring on it before they did it (in the Biblical sense), so humanity needs to avoid premarital sex generationally to right their wrongs. And Moon was a sort of, almost, Jesus-like figure sent on this mission by Christ himself via dream voicemail.

“The key thing is to bring all religions together,” Taira says. “All races, all nationalities bring together under one god as your parent.”

The church reached the U.S. by the 1970s and gained massive popularity through college recruitment, according to Rick Ross, 71, the founder and director of the New Jersey-based Cult Education Institute. (Yes, his name is Rick Ross, just like the famous drug lord and the even more famous rapper who stole his street valor.) After my time with Taira, Ross and I spoke at length about the church. Out of respect for his profession and general no-nonsense disposition, I never mentioned the name thing.

Ross tells me about Moon’s brand of hustling, which largely involved recruiting college students as exploitable labor from which his religious empire could profit. Sun Myung Moon was a profit-minded self-professed prophet. He barrelled into the fishing industry in the ’80s and, at one point, owned one-third of the American fishing industry and 50% of all wholesale sushi in the U.S., according to Ross. He says the Moon family is now worth over $1 billion.

In an interview with KCRW, journalist Karen Pinchin says the fishing biz began with Moon’s obsession with bluefin tuna. What started as a fairly rudimentary operation in dories became a mega-business with a large hold on the American fishing industry, one that persists today as True World Foods. In fact, the church-controlled seafood company even has a location in Eagan. If anyone wants some cultish tuna hotdish, you know where to source the ingredients.

Beyond the fishing industry, Sun Myung Moon founded the Kirov Academy of Ballet and the right-wing Washington Times newspaper. His other business interests included jewelry, fur, construction, and a vast real estate portfolio that once contained Manhattan's New Yorker Hotel, per his New York Times obit; his 18-acre New York compound featured six pizza ovens and a noisy-sounding upstairs bowling alley. Ross says Sun Myung Moon acted as a blueprint for other new religious movements to follow—groups like the Falun Gong, who own the conservative Epoch Times news org and the Shen Yun dance troupe. He says this recruitment relies on front organizations with names that were intentionally misleading or hid their involvement with the church. One of these organizations is the College Association for the Research of Principles, CARP for short.

If that name seems like a bunch of words strewn together to sound like they mean something, you’re half right. Moon’s book, 1966’s The Divine Principle, is studied by the Unification Church like any other holy text and provides the P in CARP.

Recruiting New Moonies

Taira’s official title within the church is outreach ministry leader. Her local faction of Moonies mainly operates out of the Minnesota Family Church, a gray and white industrial-looking building in Columbia Heights located amid car washes and a Culver’s.

Taira says she is on campus every Thursday to study with students involved with or interested in the church, usually at the Starbucks inside Coffman Memorial Union. On days when there’s nobody specific to meet with, she stands outside of campus buildings to talk to students about the church.

Sometimes she sits alone; other times she’s accompanied by church members. Interested passersby include some potential recruits and also journalism majors working on Racket stories who can’t stop themselves from talking to strangers. Taira admits campus recruitment tends to be a slow grind. I met with her several times over the course of the spring semester, and only once did I encounter another student.

Samuel Forlines, 21, a second-year student at the University of Minnesota, says he was first introduced to the church in the fall of 2022. He’s now acting treasurer for CARP’s University of Minnesota chapter. He says CARP has five official members and five other folks who regularly attend meetings. CARP provides students with three core principles—god, family, and peace—to address difficult questions of life and improve their lives overall, according to its website.

Forlines says he grew up in Venezuela with his Catholic grandmother and atheist grandfather. That dichotomy increased his curiosity about god and religion.

“I was raised in a Catholic environment, country,” Forlines says. “But myself, I just identify as Christian, but with questions.”

Forlines says he has encountered plenty of criticism of the church, and he believes some of it is valid. However, Forlines adds that his experience with the Moonies has mostly been positive, allowing him to explore his faith in a relaxed environment. CARP reportedly maintains a laid-back social atmosphere—picnics, study sessions, and road trips to meet with other chapters.

“They’re nice to me,” he says. “They care about me. They care about others.”

Forlines says he did not agree with all of the beliefs of the church, specifically its treatment of the LGBTQ+ community and disdain for alcohol. Sun Myung Moon once likened homosexuals to “dung eating dogs,” and argued that drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and free sex are tools of Satan, which is honestly a pretty compelling sales pitch for Satanism.

Despite these disagreements, Forlines says he appreciates the church’s openness to differing perspectives and backgrounds. Openness and acceptance aren’t necessarily what first comes to mind when hearing marginalized groups referred to as animals, but that’s just me.

In my obsessive research into the Moonies, one element kept popping up again and again: the mass weddings. Forlines says he thinks they are odd, but if people want to keep up with the tradition, by all means. In 1982, when the church and its practices were near their peak, 4,000 followers of Moon were married in a mass wedding at Madison Square Garden. Taira says Moon himself used to pair couples for these mass weddings, sometimes by simply pointing at two random people in a crowd of prospective brides and grooms, but now if any arrangements happen they’re determined by the families. I suspect that, considering the faith’s membership continues to decline from its peak of 3 million in the ’80s, rules had to be loosened. Who in 2024 wants god to tell them who they can get steamy with?

Taira, who was raised by a Buddhist father and Christian mother, joined the church in 1983 while living in Japan. She says she struggled with religion growing up, and that a fellow teacher in Japan was the first person to introduce her to the church. Taira spent three and a half years in Albania doing missionary work before she was sent to the U.S. She arrived in Minnesota to spread the word of the church in 2000, and now lives here with her family.

Why Minnesota? Because a lottery decided it was so. When she got to the U.S. with the rest of her foreign recruiters, a raffle decided who went where—or, in Taira’s words, god decided. Twenty-four years later, Taira remains in Minnesota doing what she can for the church, including recruitment efforts and regular donations. Taira says she and her family donated $100,000 before she came to America in 2000 and $10,000 per year since—or, by my back-of-napkin math, about $340,000 over roughly 40 years. She was almost apologetic when she told me these numbers, as if $340K is a modest sum.

Seemingly ridiculous donations are really where everything starts with the Moonies. And they led to the murder of Shinzo Abe.

Politics and Controversy

Abe was assassinated on July 8, 2022, by a man who became disillusioned with the Unification Church after $675,000 in donations bankrupted his family. Abe and much of the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan had ties to the Unification Church; an investigation by the Japanese government concluded that the church pressured members to make large donations in violation of the 1951 Religious Corporations Act.

While Taira says the church’s primary goal is spreading peace through religious unification, Abe was often criticized as a warmonger due to his restructuring of the Japanese military during his time as prime minister. Abe was not a member of the church, but he and his grandfather both had ties to it, largely related to hardline Moonie stances on communism.

The Unification Church still opposes communist ideology, specifically the Chinese Communist Party, according to Taira. She says communist infiltrators in Japan attempted to abduct and brainwash members of the Unification Church while the communist-infiltrated press tried to vilify the church in its reporting. Taira sent me several articles and videos on this topic from an online publication called Bitter Winter, a self-proclaimed religious freedom advocacy group in China. The core argument? That the criticisms of the church are no more than attempts from communist ne’er do-wells to destroy religion, the pro-capitalist Unification Church in particular.

Speaking of commies: The Moonies were around during the Cold War, and they weren’t exactly paragons of diplomacy. Sun Myung Moon funded former Nazi Klaus Barbie, known as the “Butcher of Lyon,” along with several cartels and paramilitary organizations in a coup against the Bolivian government in 1980. That decade the church also backed the Contras, a right-wing Nicaraguan rebel group that also received illegally sourced funding from the Reagan administration.  

Moon’s political meddling didn’t stop in South America. Not even close.

Sun Myung Moon met former Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and was one of the largest donors to Bush’s presidential library in Texas, Ross observes. Sun Myung Moon made immense profits during the Reagan administration, according to The Guardian. In 1978, a congressional subcommittee investigated Sun Myung Moon and described the church in stark terms, effectively, as a multinational military organization attempting to form a unified world government intended to abolish the separation of church and state. This investigation was dropped when Reagan was elected president in 1980, despite the best efforts of Minnesota voters.

Weird timing, eh?

According to Taira, this political involvement was for the best.

“So [we] need to wake this nation again to be god's nation,” she says. “And this, America, can help other nations as brothers and sisters.”

Taira thinks it’s important to return the U.S. to the light of god, particularly in terms of American politics.

“Because right and the left is like brothers,” she says. “Brothers need parents to unite. The parent is god.”

But Is It a Cult?
Back to our beloved baller/cult researcher Rick Ross, who has testified as an expert on destructive authoritarian groups—or cults—in 13 states.

Ross does not use the word “cult” lightly. He says that for a group to be considered a cult, they must have a totalitarian leader, utilize coercive persuasion to control their members, and inflict harm on their members or others through this control.

At a 2004 Washington, D.C., banquet, Moon stated that globe-spanning leaders had, “declared to all heaven and earth that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is none other than humanity’s savior, messiah, returning lord, and true parent.” He added that Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, and (curiously) Marx had, “found strength in my teachings, mended their ways, and [were] reborn as new persons.”

So, yeah…

“In my opinion,” Ross concludes, “The Unification Church is a destructive authoritarian organization, and I see it as a personality cult.”

The Unification Church laid the groundwork for right-wing religious cults to infiltrate American politics, according to Ross. He says it started with the Washington Times, Reagan, and Bush, and continues with the Epoch Times and former President Donald Trump.

Now, deep into the trenches of this group and their history, you may be wondering: Why should I give a shit? There aren’t even that many of them around these days!

I’ll tell you why. A) It’s a crazy story and you learned more about America’s troubling history during the Cold War; B) This organization is—while less dominant—still around and allegedly victimizing people in our backyard.

Because they are protected as a religious organization, there isn’t much that can be done about the Moonies.

In my conversations with Forlines and Taira, both of whom were extremely pleasant to interact with, they had almost nothing negative to say about the church. Forlines says he had never given any money to the church and didn’t follow their overall beliefs.

While an organization allowing dissent in the expression of religious beliefs would seem to be a good thing, an organization that keeps its own beliefs intentionally vague to bring people in and exploit their struggles with religious identity is another thing entirely.

There you have it: There’s an (alleged!) cult recruiting near the Gopher football stadium that funded anti-communist violence and far-right politicians. Don’t join it. Or do. I’m not your dad.