For weeks his placid Korean countenance seemed to be everywhere New Yorkers looked: on commuter train posters, in full-page newspaper ads, in a flurry of broadsides handed out by earnest young men and women on the sidewalks of Manhattan. The message of his coming was brief: CHRISTIANITY IN CRISIS. NEW HOPE. REV. SUN MYUNG MOON. Last week, in Carnegie Hall, the Rev. Moon finally appeared in person to begin a four-month, 21-city "Day of Hope" tour of the U.S. His goal: nothing less than the unification of all mankind. His credentials: though Moon himself never quite claims the title, his followers believe him to be the "Lord of the Second Advent"—the Second Coming of Christ.
That part of Moon's message does not get top billing these days, however. At a tour kickoff dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, Master Moon—as his disciples often call him—was presented somewhat vaguely as the standard-bearer of a new ecumenical morality campaign who is a staunch anti-Communist to boot. His audience was a prosperous looking crowd which was liberally sprinkled with U.S. military uniforms. Scattered among the guests, saying "sir" and "ma'am," were Moon's own well-scrubbed troops: neatly barbered young men in crisp new suits and carefully coiffed young women in demure dresses.
Moon does not fit the standard image of the guru out of the East. At 53, he is, in fact, a millionaire whose holdings in various enterprises (including ginseng tea, titanium production, pharmaceuticals, air rifles) are worth perhaps $15 million. The business success has grown hand-in-hand with his religious endeavors, which began, as he tells it, with a vision of Jesus Christ on a Korean mountainside in 1936, a vision that told young Moon—then a Presbyterian—to "carry out my undone task."
Moon became an electrical engineer before he found his mission after World War II in Communist North Korea. He fell in with some Pentecostal Christians in Pyongyang's underground church—among whom there were already predictions of a Korean Messiah—and developed a following of his own. Imprisoned by the Communists for nearly three years, he was liberated in 1950. By 1954 he had founded the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity—known more simply as the Unification Church. In the same year his wife of ten years left him because, he claims, "she could not comprehend my mission."
His book of doctrine, Divine Principle, appeared in 1957, quickly to become the Bible of his followers. It is a curious mixture of Christian fundamentalism, Taoist-like dualism, numerology, and even metaphors from Moon's electrical engineering (the "give and take" between proton and electron, for example, as a model for that between God and man). The book points to a new Saviour from Korea, whose timing is remarkably similar to Moon's.