Ladies and gentlemen, if there is illness in your home, do you not need a doctor from outside? God has sent me to America in the role of a doctor, in the role of a fire fighter ... For the last three years, with my entire heart and soul I have been teaching American youth a new revelation from God.
The speaker was that sleek, self-anointed savior from Korea, Sun Myung Moon, 56, and his podium last week was in New York's Yankee Stadium. As the head of the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, Reverend Moon, whose country was once a target for Christian missionaries, is now three years into his program for turning the tables on the West and evangelizing it for his own (TIME, Nov. 10). He had forecast an overflow crowd of 200,000, perhaps even an absurd million, for his stadium extravaganza. In preparation, 1,500 of his relentlessly smiling young followers held brass-band rallies from Harlem to Wall Street, plastered every available wall with red-white-and-blue posters bearing Moon's smiling face, and handed out free tickets to the "God Bless America Festival." In a shrewd civic come-on, platoons of Moonies donned white jumpsuits, armed themselves with brooms and plastic bags and cheerfully worked from neighborhood to neighborhood tidying up city streets.
In the event, the stadium seating 54,000 was only about half full. Many who did come left long before the end of Moon's hour-long harangue, punched out in rough, guttural Korean and translated into English paragraph by paragraph. Outside the stadium, 50 groups of Moon's foes paraded and picketed with signs like A PROPHET FOR PROFIT, and NO SLAVE LABOR ALLOWED. Among the most vociferous of the demonstrators were parents of his disciples, who for the most part lose contact with their families upon joining Moon's religion.
The Unification Church is only one of dozens of religious cults that are drawing young Americans these days. Other notable ones are Hare Krishna, the Children of God, Brother Julius, Love Israel and the Divine Light Mission. But Moon's penchant for publicity and totalitarian trappings attracts the most attention and stirs the strongest emotions —not only in the U.S., where he claims 30,000 followers, but in South Korea, where he claims 300,000 and in Japan 200,000. His small following in Europe has grown rapidly in the past few years. There are 1,000 in France, 6,000 in West Germany.
Ginseng Tea. To some spectators in New York City in the weeks leading up to his rally, his cadres of shorthaired, fresh-faced youths marching and singing together were a reminder of early Nazi days. So are the anti-Semitic doctrines expressed in Moon's religious writings, though many of his followers are young Jews. Moon's wealth and his political connections and apparatus are also under increasing scrutiny. He never seems to lack funds with which to fly or bus squads of converts wherever he needs them. Strongly antiCommunist, Moon orates frequently about politics. An industrialist back home in South Korea, he is staunch in his support of President Park Chung Hee, and during the
Watergate crisis, met privately with Nixon and took out full-page ads supporting him.