Moon Landing in Manhattan

How does a preacher with murky credentials draw a crowd in jaded New York City? Simple. You field a corps of 2,000 tireless, polite young buttonholers who spend weeks offering people free tickets. Invest $300,000 on publicity for the one-night stand--far more than Billy Graham has ever spent for an eight-day crusade. Along with the radio and TV spots and full-page newspaper ads, plaster posters of the smiling preacher on all conceivable wall space.

It all worked for the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, 54, South Korea's crypto-Messiah, who packed Madison Square Garden to overflowing last week. The happening, complete with numbers by the Korean Folk Ballet, kicked off an eight-city tour that climaxes his drive to build a base in the U.S. just seven years before the Messianic Age is to begin. Moon, through an interpreter, told the Garden-goers in guttural shouts, "The time of the Second Coming of Christ is near, and America is the landing site!" Half the crowd filtered out during the 2 1/2-hour oration, but for many of those who stayed, there was little doubt that the Messiah is Moon himself.

Since his New York appearance a year ago (TIME, Oct. 15), Moon has spoken in all 50 states, typically drawing only several hundred people. Meanwhile, his church has bought a former Catholic seminary to expand Moon's schools for training outsiders. With a previously purchased estate and the lavish mansion where Moon lives, this gives the movement $3 million worth of property in the Hudson River Valley. The Moonmen say income for U.S. operations ($7 million last year) comes mostly from street peddling of flowers, peanuts and candles--which is possible, given the fervor of his international corps of disciples. (As salesmen minus work visas, the aliens among them are now threatened with deportation.)

While Moon was on a brief trip home to Korea last November, God revealed to him that Americans "must love Richard Nixon." For weeks the well-scrubbed Moon-people demonstrated in the capital with GOD LOVES NIXON signs. Many politicians, including four Nixon loyalists on the House Judiciary Committee, endorsed the hang-in-there campaign.

Moon is a man of many faces. To some, he is a Korean exemplar of Americanism and anti-Communism who merits fond words from the superpatriotic Sons of the American Revolution. To others, he is an international educator who lures students to indoctrination seminars with guest lectures by such big-name academics as Political Scientists Roger Hilsman and Samuel P. Huntington.

Moon's public religious face is that of a brotherhood-minded Christian clergyman and founder of the "ecumenical" Unification Church. At a Waldorf banquet in his honor last week, a monsignor offered the opening prayer, and another Catholic, Seer Jeane Dixon, gushed, "Bless you, Reverend Moon, for your message."

In private meetings, he is the authoritarian "Master" Moon who claims to be "greater than Jesus himself" and says, "God is now throwing Christianity away and is now establishing a new religion, and this new religion is Unification Church ... We have only one way." Other in-group speeches have proclaimed, "I am your brain" and "The whole world is in my hand, and I will conquer and subjugate the world."

That heady mission began on Easter Sunday, 1936, when, Moon reports, Jesus appeared to him and commissioned him as a latter-day prophet. Moon, an ex-Presbyterian who was born in North Pyongan province in what became North Korea, later studied engineering in Japan and, he told New Yorkers last week, also spent time talking with Jesus and other biblical luminaries in the spirit world. Thus he is able to reveal the true meaning of the Bible, which is God's "coded message" to mankind. As God's cryptographer, Moon later published the movement's scripture, called Divine Principle.

Staunch Denial. Only at age 26 did he start preaching, and he immediately ran afoul of the new Soviet-styled regime. He spent three years in Communist prisons and was freed by United Nations forces in late 1950. He became a harbor laborer in Pusan, then founded his church in Seoul in 1954. Soon the new faith, which developed from an earlier Korean messianic movement, was under attack by Korean Christians and awash in controversy. South Korean police arrested Moon for draft dodging, later charged him with adultery and promiscuity, after persistent reports that the church practiced ritual sex so that Moon could "share the blood." The Moon church staunchly denied the charges, the government failed to prove them, and Moon was acquitted.

Moon began building a multi-million-dollar network of industries (pharmaceuticals, air rifles, titanium, tea), launched an anti-Communist organization, and gained steadily in official esteem. Today, while the Park regime jails numerous dissident Protestants and Catholics, it bestows favors on Moon. His movement has grown to a purported 362,000 members in South Korea and 500,000 worldwide, with claims sometimes vaulting to 3 million.

Last week's Moon landing in Manhattan demonstrated not only the dogmatic certainties but the highly disciplined, puritanical way of life that makes Moonism appealing to its young converts. When city fathers griped about the ubiquitous Moon posters, the Moon children--mostly quartered at two modest hotels--worked through the night after the Garden rally to remove them.

Besides disciples and the curious, the doings drew congeries of demonstrators. Charged Paul Moore, a Nazarene minister who mobilized a fervent protest by Evangelicals, "Rev. Moon is a liar and deceiver. He has belittled and negated every essential Christian belief, every principle of the Apostles' Creed, while at the same time pretending to be Christian. He denies the Trinity and the inspiration of the Scriptures."

In essence, Moon's theology makes wide use of biblical personae and events, but is no more than nominally Christian. Added ingredients are an odd mix: occultism, electrical engineering, Taoist dualism, pop sociology and opaque metaphysical jargon. Sample: "The constant action of give-and-take through the stages of Origin-Division-Union (Synthesis) within God and within all creation, which thus resembles God."

New Redeemer. One unique theme runs through Moon's message: the importance of matrimony. As it happens, Moon himself has been married twice or, according to his opponents in Korea, four times. The church's best-known practice is its arranged marriages, preferably in massive paramilitary ceremonies, after which the couple must not engage in sexual intercourse for 40 days. Moon thinks that the fall of man came when Satan seduced Eve. The first Messiah, Jesus Christ, had the major God-given task of finding the right woman and founding the Perfect Family. Since the Jews, according to Moon's teaching, "murdered" Jesus, and thus aborted that mission, Christ's death on the cross provided only a half-salvation.

That is where the Second Coming comes in. A new Messiah, who combines Christ and other holy men, must return to father the Perfect Family and redeem mankind physically. And this "Lord of the Second Advent" must be born as a normal man in Korea in this century. Who is he? Moon himself, devotees naturally assume. The Master does nothing to discourage the idea.

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