Right now in Humanities we’re studying new religious movements (NRMs), which are often referred to as “cults.” Cult is a tricky word, as it’s come to be used to describe any religion somebody doesn’t like. However, the definition of a new religious movement is more comprehensive. An NRM is a religion that has been created recently in comparison to other religions, and claims to offer “answers” different from the rest of society. They are usually run by a charismatic leader who demands more and more commitment from their followers, and may claim to have exclusive information or connection to a higher power. What makes NRMs dangerous is that they often become destructive or damaging to their members or to society at large. This can be in the form of exploitation, manipulation, and abuse of their members, or physical harm to others.
To showcase how damaging these movements can be to their members, I’ll focus on a specific example—the Unification Church. The Unification Church was founded in Korea in 1954 by Reverend Sun Myung Moon, and his followers are often referred to as “Moonies.” Moon claimed that God appeared to him when he was 16, and told him that he had to continue Jesus’s mission. He began spreading the beliefs of his new church several years later. These beliefs were based on Christianity, with a much stronger focus on the sins of sexual intercourse. An important, and notorious, ceremony within the movement were the mass weddings, known as Blessings. These were ceremonies where Moon would match couples of members who did not know each other, and bless their marriages. The movement struggled in Korea, so in the 1970s, Moon moved to the US and brought recruitment efforts there. The Unification Church became powerful and influential in North America and Europe. The organization used their money and influence to buy several buildings, maintain several businesses, open a university, and launch the publication of right-wing newspapers in several different countries. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the movement attracted many young, white, middle-class adults. They were enticed by vague ideas, such as “making the world a better place”, but were unaware of the group’s true beliefs and goals.
However, these beliefs alone are not why the movement is destructive, or why it incited such a media frenzy in the US and Europe. There were dangerous aspects to the movement, which led it to be called a “cult” by many. The most dangerous was its leader, Sun Myung Moon. In 1992, Moon claimed that he was the messiah, and that he and his wife Hak Ja Han Moon were the True Parents of humanity, and that they alone would lead the world and solve all of its problems. The followers of Sun Myung Moon excessively worshipped him; they pledged allegiance to God and the True Parents. Members of the group felt as if everyone other than Moon was wrong, and they developed a mentality that separated people into right and wrong, believers and non-believers, and it allowed them to rationalize this complete and utter worship. The way that many members lost themselves in the movement caused a media frenzy; many people panicked about the group’s more extreme practices, especially the Blessings. It was extremely confusing to the public that so many people would willingly marry someone they didn’t know in an enormous ceremony. The development of the Unification Church follows the pattern of many other new religious movements: they do not last with their original beliefs. NRMs either meet a destructive end, like the mass suicides of Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate, or their beliefs change over the course of generations. Throughout the 1990s, new conversion to the movement was waning, and Moon began declaring new ideas for his followers to believe, and several new ceremonies for members of the church to complete. The Unification Church still exists, but its beliefs have changed rapidly over the course of the last seventy years, and have become less extreme. The Blessing ceremonies now extend to couples who weren’t matched by Moon, and some are even unaffiliated with the Unification Church. Sun Myung Moon passed away in 2012, and since 2009, his daughter, In Jin Moon, has taken over the leadership of the church. She has attempted to make the church more appealing to the modern era, but it is losing members faster than it is gaining them. The Unification Church has lost its popularity and notoriety, and it no longer attracts the media attention about its “cult activities” that was pervasive in the 1970s and 1980s. I believe that, if the church survives this generation and the ones following, its beliefs will become so watered down over time that it will eventually be respected as a real religion.