Rev. Moon’s Rising Political Influence (1989)
▲ Sun Myung Moon (with Bo Hi Pak)
U.S. News & World Report
by John Judis March 27, 1989 pp. 27-29, 31
Rev. Moon’s Rising Political Influence
His empire is spending big money trying to win favor with conservatives
On New Year’s Day, 1987, South Korean mystic Sun Myung Moon, who considers himself to be the son of God, told his Unification Church followers that he wanted to expand the church’s political influence in the United States. His aim, Moon said, was “the natural subjugation of the American government and population.”
The church and its businesses have spent as much as $300 million buying political clout. Through its 100,000-circulation Washington Times, Insight, a weekly newsmagazine, and a host of organizations that it funds, the church has become a major player in conservative politics. The church, which insists its doctrine stems from Christianity, is now trying to gain a foothold in right-wing Christian circles through a new organization, the American Freedom Coalition. Moon’s chief lieutenant, South Korean former military attaché Col. Bo Hi Pak, boasted last year to conservative activist David Finzer: “We are going to make it so that no one can run for office in the United States without our permission.”
Moon’s bid for political power is disquieting because the church’s theology runs counter to America’s democratic tradition. Moon claims that on Easter, 1936, when he was 16, Jesus appeared to him and told him that he had been chosen by God to complete the mission that Jesus had been unable to finish because of the Crucifixion. This mission, spelled out in his lectures and in the text of The Divine Principle, consists in creating an “automatic theocracy to rule the world.” Moon says, “Separation between religion and politics is what Satan likes most.” But former Unification Church official Michael Warder says, “Within the Moon movement, there is no foundation for the ideas of freedom, the rule of law and the dignity of the individual as they are understood in the West.”
Keeping its goals quiet. The church, founded in Seoul in 1954, began recruiting in the U.S. in 1959. In the ’60s, Moon’s followers, called “Moonies,” became a fixture in college communities, where they sought recruits and sold lowers. The church was open about its purely religious functions. In 1982, at a massive ceremony at New York’s Madison Square Garden, Moon blessed 2,100 couples that church elders [it was almost entirely Moon himself] had peremptorily paired for marriage. But since Moon’s 1982 conviction tor tax evasion, the church has eschewed public religious dismays in this country. It has kept its long-range goals to itself and concentrated on winning popular assent to an anti-Communist message.
The initiative for starting the Unification Church’s latest political venture, the American Freedom Coalition, came from Pak and from Gary Jarmin, a founder of the fundamentalist group Christian Voice. In the fall of 1986, as the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority was in retreat, Pak and Jarmin met with several other conservatives to plan an explicitly Christian third party that, in the words of one participant, would attract religious people repelled by the “more atheistic and nonreligious Republican and Democratic parties.”
The divine principle. Moon’s organizations are now trying to gain a foothold in conservative Christian circles through a new group, the American Freedom Coalition, that promotes an anti-Communist message. Some conservatives worry that this is compromising the movement and could help discredit its believers.
Jarmin was an official of the Unification Church in the early ’70s but left the church when he divorced his church-chosen wife. Unlike other former church members, Jarmin retained close ties with church-backed organizations, according to several conservatives. Jarmin still considers himself a follower of Moon’s church and refers to Moon in private meetings as “Father.”
▲ Chief aide. Bo Hi Pak monitors Moon’s operations
The True Father. “Moon says Jesus came to him in a dream and instructed him to create a perfect new society, free of evil influence. Moon does not claim directly to be a new messiah, but he does call himself the chosen “True Father” of his followers. Together, he preaches, they will unify the world into one harmonious kingdom of God.
The enemy. Fighting the creation of this God-centered world, Moon says, is Communism, an atheistic ideology that turns classes against each other. Division is “Satan’s strongest weapon.”
The strictures. Moon says true believers should be cheerful and obedient at all times, which enables him to dictate nearly every aspect of their lives, including picking their spouses. Many followers accept Moon’s random selection of their mates, even though bride and groom often have never met and may not speak the same language. According to one follower married in 1982, “God works through [Moon]. So it was God, really, who picked my wife.” Parents are often pressured to let the church tend their children so that the adults can devote themselves totally to the church’s work of saving the world.
The new values. Traditional morals are also reinterpreted. Lying, for instance, is not taboo but a necessary tool in battling Satan. Falsehoods help convert nonbelievers; they are therefore praised as “heavenly deceptions.”
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To avoid the appearance of religious sectarianism, Pak and Jarmin later decided not to label the party “Christian.” They called it instead the American Freedom Coalition and scaled down its immediate purpose to the creation of a 50-state lobbying group that would concentrate on traditional conservative causes like abortion and the Contras. But Jarmin and Pak still envision the American Freedom Coalition evolving into a third party after several years, with its state organizations and lavish national headquarters in Washington.
“Fall on their swords for me.” The Rev. Robert Grant, Jarmin’s associate at Christian Voice and a telegenic minister with a round, boyish face and an ingratiating manner, was recruited by Jarmin and Pak to be the coalition’s president. In 1987, the American Freedom Coalition was launched. It made no mention of the Unification Church in its direct mail, its publications or its leaflets. Even some of the coalition’s state officials remain unaware of its ties to the church. But the organization could not have existed without the church.
According to participants at early meetings, officials of church businesses arranged $5 million in loans for a first direct-mail campaign. The church also contributed 60 members as full-time paid organizers, one for each state and one for each region, and 10 or more staff members to coalition headquarters. Grant says that he has been “very impressed” by the church members. “These people would fall on their swords for me. I would just have to say, ‘Fall,’ and they’d say, ‘Where?’ or ‘When?’ ”
When pressed, Grant acknowledges that the church pays for coalition projects. The coalition’s main money raiser has been an hourlong videocassette on the life of Oliver North that it sells nationwide. The church’s Global Images, a church-affiliated film-production company, donated the film, which cost about $250,000 to produce, “The integrity of the organization is not affected in any way by these contributions,” Grant insists.
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▲ Public displays of affection. In 1982 at Madison Square Garden, Moon blessed 2,075 couples. Now Moon seeks secular allies.
Last year, the coalition’s main activity was distributing 25 million presidential score cards that highlighted Dukakis’s failings on issues important to the religious right, such as mandatory AIDS testing and opposition to gay rights. The coalition also sought foot soldiers in prayer breakfasts held at fundamentalist churches in the Prairie and Midwestern states. “We keep getting letters from our readers asking who these people are,” says Kim Lawton, a correspondent for Christianity Today.
The organization has suffered embarrassments when its ties to the Unification Church have surfaced. In South Dakota last fall, 7-Elven Stores stopped stocking the coalition’s election guide because of its church links. Also, Scoreboard Publications, which used to put out the Christian Voice’s “Biblical Scoreboard” rating of politicians’ morality, severed its connection with Christian Voice and the new organization because of their Moon links.
The American Freedom Coalition has tried to recruit well-known conservatives to enhance its appeal. Grant offered Alabama Senator Jeremiah Denton, defeated for re-election in 1986, a three-year escalating salary going from $100,000 to $200,000 to $300,000 to become a figurehead chairman of the coalition, but Denton balked because of the coalition’s connection to the Unification Church.
Grant had more success recruiting “new right” direct-mail whiz Richard Viguerie. Like other allies, Viguerie appears to have needed the church’s money as much it needed his name. Once one of the most powerful conservatives in Washington, D.C., by 1987, Viguerie was more than $1.5 million in debt. In October, 1987, the church-owned U.S. Property Development Corporation, whose president is Moon’s Colonel Pak, paid $10.06 million for an office building that Viguerie owned in Falls Church, Va. Viguerie paid his debts and now does the mailings for the Washington Times as well as the American Freedom Coalition. He is also a member of the coalition’s national advisory board. Viguerie has said he is “proud to be associated” with the Washington Times and the AFC. (He refused to be interviewed for this story.)
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MOON’S U.S. EMPIRE
The Unification Church has at least 335 closely affiliated companies worldwide, 280 in the U.S., and has growing business relations with such major conservative activists as direct-mail expert Richard Viguerie, [photo] below. The church’s direct holdings include—
Political groups
American Freedom Coalition
CAUSA USA
CAUSA International
American Leadership Conference
American Constitution Committee
Association for the Unity of Latin America
Media organizations
News World Communications
Washington Times Company
New York City Tribune
Insight magazine
World Media Association
Businesses
One Up Enterprises
U.S. Property Development [Corporation]
International Oceanic Enterprises
Religious organizations
55 principal worship centers
(2 in California. Texas and New York, 1 in every other state, D.C. and Puerto Rico) and 206 additional churches, with an estimated 10,000 followers
Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity
International Cultural Foundation
Washington Institute for Values in Public Policy
USN&WR Sources: Cult Awareness Network, Seattle Times
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Business associate
▲ Viguerie is “proud” of his Moon ties
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Church loyalists claim that when it funds political organizations, it does so without trying to impose its political or religious agenda upon them, but the church has tried to pressure at least one organization that it funds to join the American Freedom Coalition. In 1985, it began giving money to the Conservative Action Foundation, an anti-Communist organization founded in 1983 by militant young conservatives. The organization has become widely known in Washington for its highly theatrical demonstrations.
Some strings attached. According to CAF founder David Finzer, a hulking man who wears cowboy boots and drives a jeep, Bo Hi Pak initially offered the organization money “with no strings attached.” Over two years, it contributed about $200,000 to the Conservative Action Foundation. But at the beginning of 1987, after CAF had gone deeply into debt on the promise of $250,000 for a pro-SDI project it was planning, the colonel pulled in the strings.
Finzer says Pak told him that CAF would have to “be subsumed under the American Freedom Coalition and that I would have to become its marketing director.” Pak also began hinting that Finzer, a Roman Catholic, should convert. Church members gave him Unification Church texts, including The Divine Principle, and Pak told him, “You can believe in the Pope in the West, but you’ve got to believe in Moon in the East.” When Finzer, skeptical about Pak’s grandiose plans for the coalition, refused to make CAF part of it, Pak cut him off and CAF floundered. Pak himself refused a request for an interview, but a knowledgeable source confirmed Finzer’s account.
The church’s first and most expensive foray into the political arena was the Washington Times. The newspaper has lost more than $200 million since it was founded in 1982, but it has given the church needed prestige in Seoul and become a well-read publication beyond its target audience of Washington conservatives. Claims by Washington Times editors that the newspaper is politically independent of the church were shattered in 1984 when Jim Whelan, its first editor and publisher, quit in protest of church attempts to assume direct control. Then in April, 1987, Editorial Page Editor William Cheshire and four colleagues resigned over church interference with the newspaper’s editorials. The Washington Times’s latest editor, former Newsweek reporter Arnaud de Borchgrave, claims that the newspaper “has nothing to do with the church.” But the paper and its sister publication, Insight, remain owned by News World Communications, whose president is Pak. While separate from the church’s local ministry, it is an integral part of Moon’s overall empire. De Borchgruve also claims that he has complete editorial independence: “To this day, I’ve yet to receive a single editorial suggestion from our South Korean owners.”
The church has been building political organizations since the early ’80s. In 1983, it established a U.S. arm of CAUSA, its Pak-led world anti-Communist organization, which has given aid to the Nicaraguan Contras and held conferences where it promoted a watered-down version of Moon theology called “Godism.” Moon describes Godism, which depicts the cold war in theological terms, as “the most effective weapon to liberate people from Communism.”
These organizations try to connect the church with the names of influential conservatives, who, according to former church official Warder, “provide legitimacy to Moon and his movement.” In 1984, Joseph Churba, who had served for a year in the Reagan administration’s Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, was looking for someone to fund his Center for International Security. Through CAUSA, Pak agreed to aid a new organization, the International Security Council, with Churba as its president. The ISC’s purpose, Churba stated, would be to counter Soviet attempts at “global hegemony.”
▲ Former Washington Times Editor Jim Whelan says Moon’s goal is “power across the world.”
▼ David Finzer was asked to convert after he accepted Moon’s money.
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Churba has recruited other Reagan officials, including former ACDA Director Eugene Rostow and former Deputy U.N. Ambassador Charles Lichenstein. Lichenstein, who is also a Heritage Foundation senior fellow, is chairman of the ISC’s International Advisory Council. The gnomelike Churba extols the “selfless commitment” of the Reverend Moon to the project. He believes that the church has gotten a “raw deal” from the media because of “leftist Communist disinformation about its objectives and long-term goals.” But while ISC states its link to CAUSA in its organizational brochure, it does not do so in its journal, Global Affairs, in the position papers that it sends out to the press, or in the full-page newspaper ads it has run opposing U.S.-Soviet arms-control agreements.
More tolerance. Through this method of recruiting, the church has established a network of affiliated organizations and connections in almost every conservative organization in Washington, including the Heritage Foundation, largest of the conservative think tanks and an important source of government personnel during the Reagan administration. Although Heritage officials deny it, the foundation has dramatically changed its policy toward the Unification Church. In the early ’80s, the foundation, wary of the church’s aims, prohibited staff or fellows from being associated with Unification Church organizations or taking money from the church or church-financed institutions.
As the Washington Times has become the voice of capital conservatives, the Heritage Foundation has become far more tolerant of church ties. The foundation accepts the participation of Lichenstein and other senior fellows in church-funded enterprises and allows its staff members to go to church conferences.
The Unification Church’s newfound influence has occasioned intense debate among conservatives. One group of worried young conservatives meets regularly in private to compare notes about the problem. But little of the debate has surfaced at public forums, “Most people are afraid to address the issue publicly because they don’t want to publicize the extent of the church’s involvement,” says Amy Moritz, of the conservative National Center for Public Policy Research.
Some of Moon’s former followers quote him as saying:
“The whole world is in my hand, and I will conquer and subjugate the world.” (1973)
“We must have an automatic theocracy to rule the world. So we cannot separate the political field from the religious.” (1973)
“History will make the position of Rev. Moon clear, and his enemies, the American population and government, will bow down to him.” (1986)
“The time will come when even a presidential candidate will need Father’s endorsement in order to succeed.” (1987)
USN&WR—Sources: Cult Awareness Network, Capital Research Center
Because almost all conservative organizations in Washington have some ties to the church, conservatives also fear repercussions if they expose the church’s role. That happened when one organization, the Capital Research Center, published a newsletter last November warning of the church’s attempt to create a “centralized world theocracy.” One of its board members, who was also on the board of the International Security Council, resigned in protest, and conservatives, charging that the newsletter was fomenting discord on the right, besieged the center with angry calls. “We got a very, very strong reaction—almost as if we were an enemy—because we raised the issue,” says CRC Chairman Willa Johnson, a former vice president of the Heritage Foundation.
Few conservatives believe that the church will take over the movement that carried Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980, let alone achieve its ancillary goal of subjugating America. CAUSA USA is reportedly floundering; the American Freedom Coalition may not survive the George Bush years. But conservatives fear that in its attempt to win influence, the church could discredit conservatives in the same way that American Communists discredited a previous generation of liberals. “What happens,” asks Tom Holt, the editor of the Capital Research Center’s newsletter, “when Bush nominates a conservative who is on the board of one of the church’s organizations? I can hear Democrats starting to talk about his belonging to a South Korean cult.” ■
by John B. Judis
Judis is author of William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives
NOTE: Name of Jim Whelan corrected (from Whalen)
wikipedia:
James R. Whelan (July 27, 1933 – December 1, 2012) was a journalist and historian who served as the first editor in chief of The Washington Times, holding the position from 1982 to 1984. He is also known as the author of several books, most of them on the recent political history of Latin America. He was born in Buffalo, New York.
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VIDEO: Drunk on Power: Christian Nationalism’s war on democracy
“Moon’s Law: God Is Phasing Out Democracy”
In order to rule the world, Sun Myung Moon had to start with Korea.
Sun Myung Moon’s desire to take over the League for his own financial and political ends
Inside Moon’s Washington – Washington Post report (1989)
The Resurrection of Reverend Sun Myung Moon
Sun Myung Moon’s One-World Theocracy
United States Congressional investigation of Moon’s organization
Contents
1. Fraser Report – Conclusions and Recommendations (1978)
2. Michael Warder comment on Congressman Fraser
3. Moonie “Dirty Tricks” against Donald Fraser, MinPost, 2012
4. Congressman Fraser info from the Gifts of Deceit book
5. Robert W. Roland statement to the Fraser investigation, June 22, 1976
6. Congressional Information Meeting on Cults 1979: Statement of Robert Boettcher
7. The Mysterious Death of Robert Boettcher in 1984, New York Times
8. Bo Hi Pak and the KCFF scam – and Sun Myung Moon’s ROFA scam
9. Minions and Master – a short extract from the Gifts of Deceit book
10. Gifts of Deceit book review by Allen Tate Wood
11. Fraser Final Report on the Moon Organization. pages 312-392
12. Moon’s aggressive move into U.S. political affairs in early 1970s
– Confessions of a former Unification Church member
13. Bo Hi Pak and the “Unification Church Pension Fund International”
14. Fraser Report: Summaries of Representative Documents including FBI Reports, State Department Memoranda, KCFF Minutes, etc.
