'Blessing '97': Moon's Church Adapts, Endures

By Caryle Murphy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 19, 1997; Page B01
The Washington Post

To promote its "Blessing '97" marriage rededication ceremony at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium later this month, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church recently dispatched church members to buttonhole couples and pass out leaflets at 45 shopping malls, parking lots and Metro stations.

The Nov. 29 gathering, featuring singer Whitney Houston and billed in full-page newspaper ads as "True Love Day at RFK," is described by church organizers as an interfaith ceremony for 30,000 couples, with an additional 3.6 million couples participating via worldwide satellite hookups.

It will cap Moon's World Culture and Sports Festival III, a church-sponsored week of scheduled artistic, academic and sports activities that start Sunday and are aimed at achieving "world peace through ideal families."

Church officials said yesterday they have sold 46,000 tickets to the RFK event. But a city official involved with logistical planning for the gathering said the church's unusual ticketing procedures -- it is selling vouchers that must be exchanged later for tickets -- make it difficult to predict how many of the stadium's 52,000 seats will be filled.

"The event organizers want to ensure that everyone who has a ticket to the event actually uses it and shows up at the stadium . . . in order to maximize their attendance," said the official, who asked not to be identified. "Their largest concern is to make sure the stadium is full. Their motivation is not financial."

The church is so determined to have a full house that it has dropped ticket prices from the $70 a couple initially advertised to $40 -- and will take less.

"We are requesting a minimum donation of $10 per person," said Neal Salonen, a church member who is the festival's secretary general. "Tickets are officially on sale for $40 per couple, but if there are cases where they don't have money, they'd be invited to participate anyway."

The festival, which Salonen estimates will cost about $9 million, is Moon's latest effort to keep his controversial church before the public eye. Its staging also is an indication of the durability of the organization, which was founded by Moon, 77, more than 40 years ago on the doctrine that he has a key role in the world's eternal salvation.

The Unification Church has been the subject of intense media scrutiny and persistent allegations, many coming from former members, that it is a high-pressure, destructive group or, some say, a cult. A congressional committee investigated the organization in the late 1970s. Moon served a 13-month federal prison term in the mid-1980s for tax fraud.

But the controversy surrounding the church and its founder hasn't deterred such prominent figures as former presidents George Bush and Gerald R. Ford, Republican Party stalwart Jack Kemp and former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev from accepting invitations -- in return for handsome fees -- to address Unification Church-organized conferences.

Among those scheduled to participate in several festival conferences next week, according to church officials, are Maureen Reagan, daughter of former president Ronald Reagan; Camilia Anwar Sadat, daughter of slain Egyptian president Anwar Sadat; Benazir Bhutto, former Pakistani prime minister; Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition; Kenneth Kaunda, former president of Zambia; and former prime ministers from Egypt, Ireland, the United Kingdom and France.

"I naively thought that the Moonies would be exposed and the group would crumble" back in the late 1970s, said former church member Steve Hassan, 43, now a psychological counselor and anti-cult activist in Boston. "It's incomprehensible to me that it's 21 years since I got out of the Moonies and in that time, Moon owns the Washington Times and the University of Bridgeport and has wined and dined so many politicians and celebrities."

One reason for the church's survival, its critics say, is its adaptability. As its hallmark anti-communism became passe in a post-Cold War era, Moon moved to an increasingly popular theme: saving the family.

"Family values" may mean different things to different people, but it is also a rallying cry that resonates. First came Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March in 1995, then former college football coach Bill McCartney's Promise Keepers rally this fall. Now comes the Unification Church.

The church also has been vigilant in countering what it perceives as disrespect. Its officials held a news conference yesterday and later demonstrated outside The Washington Post to protest the paper's use of the term "Moonie" in two recent stories, a word members consider pejorative. They also objected to The Post's characterization of "Blessing '97" as an event restricted to followers of Moon.

The official sponsor of next week's festival is the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, founded a little over a year ago by the church, according to church officials.

"Reverend Moon has been promoting a message of family unity and in particular a partnership with God," said Salonen, a member of the church for 30 years. "Last year, he founded this federation to transcend religions. . . . What he's really saying is . . . we have moved past the age of organized religion and into the age of direct personal experience of God. . . . You experience God in the family, since the essence of God is love, and family is the workshop of love."

Open to all faiths, the federation says it has 35 million members worldwide, including, Salonen said, those who have joined the group, or at least have "filled out a form saying they would like to be part of this group to affirm the culture of marriage."

The new organization has been set up at a time when church membership seems to be growing in developing countries while remaining steady in the United States. The church says it has 50,000 U.S. members, though former members and academics who have studied the group put actual membership at 2,000 to 5,000.

"The movement's visibility and contact with fairly important people is far greater than the grass-roots statistics," said Eileen Barker, a sociologist at the London School of Economics.

The Unification Church was founded in 1954 by Moon, who was born in what is now North Korea and introduced to Christianity by American Presbyterian missionaries. His theology holds that he is a sinless man fulfilling the mission that Jesus Christ did not accomplish because Jesus did not marry and was rejected by his people.

Moon and his wife, Hak Ja Han Moon, call themselves the "True Parents" of humanity. And under what Moon calls the "Divine Principle," marriage is central to the church's mission of uniting all Christian denominations.

"I would say that the core of Unification belief is that the Reverend and Mrs. Moon have a central messianic role to build the kingdom of God on earth," said Darrol Bryant, professor of religion at University of Waterloo-Renison College in Ontario.

"That's their central belief, and that's partly what this blessing in Washington is about. The connection is that one of the central ways in which the Kingdom of God is built on earth is through blessed couples, through blessed marriages," Bryant said.

Festival organizers are working out of leased space at the church-owned Washington Times, Salonen said. The announced conferences include discussions on "absolute values and unity in the sciences," "identity and character" the "influence of family and society on personality development," "a world vision for the 21st century." and the media in the next century.

Tom Goldstein, dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, is a scheduled speaker at the media seminar.

"I generally go to groups of all different persuasions. It's a way for me to learn about things," said Goldstein, who plans to give his $6,000 fee to charity. "I approach it that [the church] is the backer of the Washington Times, which is a newspaper that I need to understand more about."

The festival also includes a Nov. 27 and 28 sports competition, sponsored by the Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles, a campus organization associated with the church. Some sports activities are scheduled to take place at Spingarn High School in Northeast Washington and at several D.C. recreation centers. A Nov. 28 march by another church-affiliated group, Pure Love Alliance, will advocate "purity" in marriage and premarital sexual abstinence.

For the church, the RFK Stadium gathering is the most significant. The interfaith message has been reinforced by inviting Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, the Rev. Walter E. Fauntroy and other religious leaders. Houston apparently was hired to ensure a big crowd, and festival organizers also have added a laser show and fireworks.

With the event little more than a week away, organizers have yet to provide a list of the 50 global satellite sites where they say 3.6 million couples will gather. Salonen said there is no way to immediately verify the overseas turnout.

And those who only buy tickets because Houston will be there may have to sit through the entire ceremony to see her afternoon performance.

"We're basically closing the doors at 10:30 a.m.," said Salonen, though a stadium spokesman says anyone with a valid ticket will be admitted at any time during the event.

Although church officials a year ago billed "Blessing '97" as a "wedding" of 40,000 couples, they are now calling it a marriage rededication ceremony. It differs from the mass wedding ceremony Moon held in 1982 at New York's Madison Square Garden for 2,000 couples.

Salonen said, however, that 500 to 1,000 couples will be dressed in wedding attire and plan to formally commit themselves to marry a church-selected partner.

Michelle Myers, 23, a church member and organizer of the Pure Love Alliance march, is among those getting married -- though she learned her intended's name and whereabouts -- Andrey Iliyn, an economics student in Moscow -- only last week. The couple had their first conversation, through a translator, on the telephone Nov. 11.

"It's within the religious faith that we'll make the commitment to marriage," said Myers, who plans to be at RFK in a wedding gown. "I hope it doesn't snow, [because] my dress will get ruined."

© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company

List of Groups		Steve Hassan Biography		Endorsements