Converts at What Price? Unification's Techniques
Not Unusual
Date: Monday, January 7, 1980
Section: RUN OF PAPER
Page: ?
By James L. Franklin Globe Staff
This is the second in a two-part series examining
the recruitment policies of the Unification Church.
When Deborah Block left the Florida seminar conducted
by CARP, the student group of the Unification Church, she had spent
at most five hours at the YMCA camp where the week-long seminar
was held.
Her decision to leave that seminar - advertised on
campuses throughout the nation as a week of "sun, fun, people,
excitement, sports, inspiration and top topics with great speakers"
- was regarded by many as an escape from almost forced enrollment
in the controversial organization founded by Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
What happened at the rest of that seminar, offered
to college students for a token $20 fee? How did it compare with
other programs run by the Unification Church to recruit new members?
How successful are such recruiting efforts and what are the susceptibilities
of those who attend them?
Interviews with Block, the organizers of the seminar,
present and former members of CARP and the Unification Church, and
other observers show:
- The Florida seminar that began a week ago last Saturday
was typical of programs run by the Unification Church to build interest
in its views and recruit members.
- There are heated differences of opinion on how much
pressure is put on persons attending such programs to join either
CARP or the church, as well as agreement that there are many similarities
to techniques used by other groups, religious or not.
- Relatively few persons are converted by such programs,
but the most susceptible are highly idealistic persons in late adolescence
who are often good students and leaders in their own groups, even
though persons of all ages and personality types can be reached
by such efforts.
The Florida seminar was one of two national seminars
run by CARP, the Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles.
The summer seminar was held in Colorado; the winter seminar, "New
Leadership for a New Age," was held at the YMCA's Camp McConnell
near Gainesville, Fla.
Despite the national publicity and the low fee, only
150 persons attended, according to the organizers. Another 80 members
of CARP also attended.
CARP officials stress that the group is incorporated
separately from the Unification Church and that not all the 600
CARP members in the United States are members of the church.
However, the church's New England director, Aidan
Barry, acknowledged that "CARP is based on the Divine Principle,"
Rev. Moon's statement of the group's beliefs.
The schedule at the seminar was tight, according to
two participants, Christine Edwards, 23, a June graduate of the
State University of New York at Purchase, and Edward Roberts, 21,
a graduate of Kingston-upon-Hull University in England and now a
special student at Yale University.
They said in Boston on Friday that the schedule called
for rising at 7 a.m., with breakfast at 8, preceded by "two
or three songs and prayer to God in the name of his son." After
breakfast there was a short period of free time, followed by three
one-hour lectures given by seminar leaders and academics, with discussion
in between. Lunch was at 1 p.m., again preceded by songs and prayer.
The two said the afternoon was devoted to organized
sports, although both of them said they were able to decline to
participate and did at least once during the seminar. The schedule
allowed for an hour of free time before more songs, prayer and dinner,
which was followed by entertainment and dessert.
Both Edwards and Roberts said they were not members
of CARP or the Unification Church but did not feel they had been
manipulated during the program. "There were two open question
sessions when we were able to ask anything we wanted," said
Edwards.
A very different picture is presented by former members
of the Unification Church and of CARP. Steven Hassan, 25, of Brookline,
who has organized a group called Ex-Members Against Moon, says that
he directed the most successful CARP group in the nation in New
York City between March and October of 1974. "We got 22 students
who quit school and joined the church full-time."
Despite statements of church and CARP officials that
students are encouraged to stay in school, Hassan said the "standard
course of action was to get people to drop out and become full-time
members even though CARP was registered as a student club."
After making contact with students, he said, the students
were invited to the local CARP center to "meet people from
12 different countries . . . Moon is never mentioned till way down
the road after the introductory lecture.
"We tried to gain the trust of new people and
get them to volunteer as much information as possible," Hassan
said. Information such as parent's marital status or an individual's
sexual activity was passed along to the center director and to those
running later workshops and seminars.
He said the three-day workshops were not intended
to convert people but were structured to encourage participants
to stay to the end and begin as soon as possible a seven-day workshop,
which usually began immediately after the weekend workshop.
Workshop sites were deliberately set in isolated areas
and communication was restricted. "If you go with a friend,
your wife or husband, we would separate you, trying to cut down
all possibilities for reality testing," Hassan said. "Every
week we went to the training center at Barrytown, N.Y., the one
pay telephone was out of order."
The intense lectures, usually three to four in a daily
schedule sometimes lasting as long as 13 or 14 hours, were intended
to "soften people up so they could receive the (church's) information
on an emotional basis," he said. "People would think the
things that were happening were arising spontaneously or spiritually
- in reality it was carefully orchestrated and planned, an engineered
rebirth experience to let them know the messiah is on earth and
they've got to join, otherwise they will be fallen."
Darrald Gibson of Milford, Del., is a Dartmouth graduate
and former member of the Unification Church who organized the CARP
chapter in Chicago. Interviewed by telephone, Gibson said that church
members "believe Moon is the lord of the second coming and
the purpose of CARP is simply to convince others that this is true.
"To do this they use a program of sophisticated
mind control or manipulative techniques," he said. Part of
the technique is to provide workshop participants with a high carbohydrate
diet to "raise their blood sugar level and make them more susceptible
to emotionalism . . .
"Members go through an intense period of training
in how to recruit new members. We would teach them how to develop
friendship and a bond of love to encourage membership."
Some mental health professionals believe such manipulation
to be easily accomplished. John Clark of Weston, a psychiatrist
who has often warned of the danger of such groups, writes that based
on interviews with former members of what he terms "destructive
cults," such as the Unification Church, it is clear that "radical
conversions were apparently easy to accomplish . . . Very recent
converts seemed to be able to convert others in their turn after
very little training . . . "
William Goldberg, a psychiatric social worker who
runs a volunteer counseling service for former members of the Unification
Church in the suburbs of New York, said techniques described by
former members include "mass hypnosis, isolation from the outside
world, appeal to unconscious guilt, working on the individual's
need to be accepted by his peer group."
There is a "tremendous difference in degree between
what happens in the Unification Church experience and what goes
on in other conversion situations," Goldberg said. "Everything
is defined as either positive or negative, godlike or satanic. That
doesn't happen in football training and even in the Army, people
still have the ability to make independent decisions. Ex-members
said they followed blindly, with no questions asked."
Other professionals make a more cautious assessment.
J. Stillson Judah, professor emeritus of religion at the Graduate
Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif., is one of the few to have
surveyed members of the church. In a paper published three years
ago, he wrote that "only a small percentage of those attending
. . . a weekend workshop . . . appear to remain for a longer period.
Of . . . present Unification Church members, only 10 percent were
converted withing a two-day period."
In a telephone interview last week, Judah said that
a more recent survey found that more than half of the full-time
members converted within a month's time, while the balance took
longer. "But there's a high percentage who attend workshops
who never converted," he said.
(Aidan Barry, New England director of the church,
said that "of the 204 persons who became full-time missionary
members in 1979, 97 took more than two months to join and 107 took
less, from the time they first attended a church program to actually
making some dedication to the church.")
Orlo Strunk Jr., who teaches the psychology of religion
at Boston University, said in an interview that while there may
be a difference "in the intensity or singlemindedness of the
conversion experience, the processes are the same . . . whether
we talk about a religious cult or a change from being a Republican
to a Democrat."
Conversion, Strunk said, is a process of resolving
conflict within a person, especially in the case of an adolescent,
who is coping with "economic and personal identity issues .
. . For some, they are reaching out to a meaning system that promises
the answer to those issues, which can be a powerful motive in a
person's life."
A meaning system like one of the new religions can
exert a powerful hold on the individual, he said. "Even when
we want to make a change in jobs, we are in one sense captured by
the retirement system, the mortgage, the risks involved."
Both Judah and Strunk warned that very little study
has been made of religious conversion by psychologists and psychiatrists.
Who are the most susceptible to such conversions?
"They tend to be brighter kids but I would definitely classify
most of them as naive," said social worker Goldberg. "They
tend to be idealists who project their own goodness on the rest
of the world. Secondly, there's the belief that most individuals
have that they're too smart, clever and healthy to get sucked in.
That's a fatal fallacy - any of us can be converted under the proper
circumstances."
Debbie Block said in an interview Friday that "most
of the kids I talked to said that the trip to Florida for just $20
was a pretty good deal, that if we don't want to listen to the lectures
we'll just go break out and hitchhike back.' A couple of the boys
did but the girls were too frightened."
(Michael Smith, East Coast director of CARP, said
that 10 of the 150 guests left the seminar, including Block.)
Darrald Gibson said that when he looks back on his
experience in the church "one of the things I see is that I
was trusting, naive, unaware that men would go to great lengths
to decieve and use others . . . My best friend invited me to go
to my first CARP meeting. I didn't expect what I found . . . Now
I'm more cautious in dealings with organizations and groups than
I was previously."
Block, who said she first accepted the invitation
to stay at CARP's Boston center because she had lost her apartment
and felt "too ashamed to go home," said:
"What I learned was that you can't trust someone
else to put your life in a new direction. You have to do it yourself.
The reason they were able to get to me was that I was in kind of
a vulnerable state wondering how to do all this stuff, to get an
apartment and go to school and not disappoint my parents. When I
got back from Florida they told me they weren't disappointed and
wouldn't have been if I came to them before . . . It was a question
of pride."
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