Meet the Moonies: Inside the Cultish Religious Group Recruiting at the U of M
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Walking across the University of Minnesota campus one morning this past February, I was stopped and asked a series of jarring questions.
What is the cause of human suffering? Where does evil come from? Does god exist? What is the purpose of life?
And, perhaps most troubling: How can we create true relationships?
I was hardly awake. I’d barely made it through a Media Law lecture with my consciousness intact.
Tomoko Taira, the woman who conducted this existential interview, told me the answer to all of these questions, as well as some bonus ones, lay within the teachings of the Unification Church. Otherwise known as the Moonies, this South Korea-born religious group was made famous by its associations with stadium-packing mass weddings and the 2022 assassination of Japan’s former prime minister, Shinzo Abe.
So why would she be standing outside of Murphy Hall on a random winter morning, conversing with sleep-deprived degenerates such as myself?
Turns out Moonies like Taira seek out new members not just in South Korea, but across dozens of countries, throughout greater Minnesota, and even on a college campus near you. Buckle up—in time you will fall down a rabbit hole of conspiracy, right-wing politics, fishing enterprises, and a cult expert whose name is homonymous with an American rap icon.
A Korean man named Sun Myung Moon founded the Unification Church in 1954 based on his insistence that Jesus contacted him on Easter Sunday, 1936. He claimed he recognized Jesus from a vision he had when he was three, NPR reports. Moon died in 2012 at age 92, according to The Guardian. His wife, Hak Ja Han Moon, took over as head of the church following his death, according to Taira.
Taira gifted me a book written by Hak Ja Han Moon. At the risk of losing some journalistic integrity, I will admit to not having read it; in my defense, it is really long and not even the core doctrine of the Moonie faith. To clear up some vocabulary before we get too deep into the weeds here: I will be using the names Unification Church and Moonies interchangeably, though some in the church view Moonie as a derogatory term. This is one belief system derived from the teachings of the aforementioned Moon (thus, Moonies), and much of his teaching revolves around the idea that all world religions should be united as one (thus, Unification).
Content retrieved from: https://racketmn.com/meet-the-moonies-inside-the-cultish-religious-group-recruiting-at-the-u-of-m.
