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Some observers are tolerant of the Moonies. "I just wonder why we can't get more motivation like the Moon motivation in our own churches," says the Rev. Dan Potter, director of the Council of Churches of the City of New York, which nevertheless has refused to admit the Unification Church to its membership. Adds Potter: "We are all a collection of groups grown out of the insights of so-called heretics." Religious orders have long sequestered their initiates from the world, and ceaseless work can be seen as beneficial.
Yet there is little evidence that the Moonies' efforts contribute to anything but Moon's coffers, and the glassy-eyed behavior of the youngsters has so alarmed many parents that they have resorted to illegal kidnapings and "deprogrammings" to retrieve their offspring. The best known of the deprogrammers is Ted Patrick, 45, an ex-middleweight fighter and onetime community relations aide for Governor Ronald Reagan in California. Patrick claims to have rescued 1,000 youths from the Unification Church and other cults. Mrs. Jenetta French of Greensboro, N.C., who has "lost" two daughters to Moon, described how Ronda, a former airline stewardess, behaved when Patrick was trying to deprogram her. "She was very childlike. In the car she would sing to drown out what you were saying to her. When Patrick tried to talk to her, she hummed, put her fingers in her ears, hid behind a piece of paper, anything to keep from listening." Eventually Ronda went back to Moon.
Parents in France, West Germany and other countries are also alarmed. After Mikio Goto, 19, dropped out of college and started peddling ginseng tea on Tokyo streets for Master Moon, his father formed an association of victims' parents, kidnaped his son, and "brainwashed him out of insanity."
Blood Cleansing. The Pied Piper of this international youth brigade was born into a Presbyterian family in Chongju-Gun, in northern Korea. He attended a pentecostal church, and on Easter Sunday of 1936, he reports, Jesus appeared and told him to carry out his unfinished task by completing man's salvation. Moon got married in 1944 but left his pregnant wife behind in Seoul to go to preach in the north. There, in 1948, he was imprisoned.
According to a former North Korean army officer who was in prison with him at the time, Moon received a seven-year sentence because he had contributed to "social disorder": he had been proclaiming the imminent coming of the second Messiah in Korea. When the Chinese pushed the U.N. troops out of North Korea in 1950, Moon fled to the south and later started a church in Seoul. In those days, say early members of the sect, ritual sex characterized the Moon communes. Since Moon was a pure man, sex with him ("blood cleansing") was supposed to purify both body and soul, and marriages of other cultists were in fact invalid until the wives slept with Moon. As the cult became bigger, the blood-cleansing rites were abandoned, but today Moon arranges his disciples' marriages, and after a mass wedding ceremony in Seoul in 1970 enjoined 1,500 newlyweds from sex for 40 days.