For all of Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s good qualities — his business acumen, his robust self-esteem as “Lord of the Second Advent,” his dynamic leadership of one of the century’s most durable cults — he’s a disaster of a wedding coordinator. The food is bad, there’s no cash bar, the entertainment doesn’t show — and sometimes the spouses don’t either.
On November 29 at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in Washington, D.C., Moon conducted a mass wedding of 2,500 couples — mostly foreign imports from the dwindling rolls of his Unification church, whose members are known pejoratively as “Moonies.” The wedding was the capstone of the multimillion-dollar World Culture and Sports Festival that unfolded over Thanksgiving week. The festival included art exhibits, concerts, and sporting events, as well as eight academic conferences that had scholars and other conferees discussing science, religion, and the media.
The ostensible long-term goal of such gatherings is the promotion of world peace through family, marriage, chastity, and so on. It’s a banal notion that we can all get behind — and for honoraria that have topped $ 100,000, many celebrities and politicians have. The more immediate purpose is the promotion of Sun Myung Moon, who for decades has suffered from a very literal Messiah complex, claiming that he will ultimately establish the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth through his mass marriages. The academic conferences lend a much-needed veneer of sanity to the whole operation and are held regularly by Moon’s myriad organizations, most notably the Family Federation for World Peace.
The sheer weirdness of the Washington spectacle was exemplified by the inaugural address of the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences (whose name is in keeping with the creepy one-world-under-a-bad-Moon theme). At the Hilton Towers, Mayor Marion Barry implored a roomful of Unificationists, most of them Asian and listening through U.N.-style headsets, to “spend as much money as you can.” Intent on impressing the panel of scientists there to discuss such topics as neutrino emissions of supernova explosions, Barry boasted that, in college, “I was trained as a chemist . . . but I moved from molecules to people.” And then he moved back to crack — although the irony apparently did not translate.
The mass ceremony does not confer legal matrimony, but it is considered spiritually and eternally binding within the church. Unificationists now insist on calling it a “blessing,” a dubious euphemism. Moon selects spouses after contemplating their pictures. He often matches people who have never met, don’t speak the same language, and don’t even find out whom they’re marrying until days before the ceremony. As a bonus, connubial consummation is often prohibited for up to three years after the wedding. (Mazel tov!)
It may seem distasteful to be yoked by a stumpy Korean who sports tacky boutonnieres the size of babies’ heads and whose matchmaking involves playing Fifty-two Pick-up with your 8 by 10, but it is all in keeping with the church’s theology. Unificationism teaches that Jesus failed in his intent to restore mankind to its Edenic state, getting crucified before he could marry John the Baptist’s younger sister, a union that would have yielded sinless children. Fortunately, Moon was called in 1936 to bat clean-up for Christ, charged with restoring the Kingdom along with his lovely wife Hak Ja Han (his second according to Moon, his fourth according to former Moonies). Together as the “True Parents,” they are to complete the job that Christ could not finish through the holy sacrament of mass weddings. Strangely, what any Christian would consider a bizarre sacrilege has been given tacit support by the family-values folks — from George Bush to Ralph Reed — who regularly show up for Moon’s conferences.
What becomes immediately clear after exposure to the particular pool of newlyweds in Washington is that there is no surfeit of material for a Most Eligible Bachelor/Bachelorette contest. For many, to be inflicted on a stranger who wouldn’t dare contest Moon’s divine appointment is perhaps the last, best chance at companionship. According to the “couples’ profiles” disseminated to the media, a Russian economics student named Andrey, for instance, “studies martial arts, works as a security guard and lives with his grandmother.”
Sebastien Jean is a 24-year-old house painter with a Mick Fleetwood ponytail and rings of silver Gothic crosses — “Jesus is my bro’,” he explains. Over lunch with his fiancee, whom he met two weeks prior, he tells me he doesn’t love her, won’t comment on whether he finds her attractive, and isn’t even sure she likes the music of his hardcore industrial band. Still, he’s elated: “How many people get to start completely fresh and don’t have to worry about breaking up, or if this person is going to leave me?”
The wedding’s surrealism quotient would make Andre Breton beg for recess. Black vendors outside RFK Stadium, who normally hawk Million Man March paraphernalia, tried to sell chocolate sweet-potato wedding cakes to bespectacled Korean brides while circumnavigating ex-Moonie protesters. The former Moonies claim the movement engages in deceptive recruiting methods, keeps recruits from contacting their demonized parents, and makes members sleep 11 to a van while traveling the country selling cheap trinkets and flowers, with no health benefits or salaries — in order to enrich Moon and offset the costs of gatherings such as this one.
On the stadium’s field, brides in puff-sleeved wedding gowns and grooms in dark suits and maroon ties took their places in tight formations of metal folding chairs. With the rigorous uniformity of artificial flowers and Men’s Wearhouse suits, it looked like the Stepford wives attending a Maoist prom. Around the couples’ chairs were trench coats (though some of the brides wore the coats over their dresses) and commemorative tote bags stuffed with heating pads and boxed reception lunches containing some sort of curried vittle and a cube of wedding cake.
One particular section of the stadium contained a disproportionate number of solo brides, as their fiances couldn’t get travel visas, forcing them to put on their own rings after sliding off their satin gloves while balancing framed pictures of their mystery grooms. Organizers corralled the media in suites high above the field, forbidding us backstage access and a chance to work the stadium crowd. We were allowed on the field only in 10-minute, tightly controlled press pools. After shaking my media escort, I spent most of my time trying to find somebody who could speak English. Even when I succeeded, the most candid quotes I got were along the lines of, “Rev. Moon knows best.” The one time I managed to escape to the concourse, there appeared to be traditional jitters, as brides stood in long lines outside the restrooms, gathering their trains to keep them from getting soiled by the detritus of Redskins’ games past.
The couples sat in formation all day, with breaks filled by pulsating dance remixes, as martial- arts troupes feigned a lot of crotch-kicking for no apparent reason. The ceremony itself opened with the dramatic arrival of the “True Parents,” Moon and his wife, who descended a red-carpeted staircase as if high-stepping through an MGM musical. They wore typically understated gold-trimmed holy robes and his-and-her crowns, along with Pat Boone-ish white loafers, which could be seen when Moon’s frock caught a gust of wind.
Before sitting on his throne, Moon hocked up the vows in Korean, asking the assemblage to promise to inherit “the tradition of the Unification Family” and “the will of God and the True Parents.” One would think such vows, coming from a man who has advocated an “automatic theocracy” and promised to “conquer and subjugate the world,” would give pause to non-believers. But there was an ecumenical showing of clergy from Christian and Eastern religions. The Moons removed their gloves to sprinkle selected couples with holy water. (In the past, Mother Moon has reportedly cut the homebrew with her breast milk.) And Moon’s representatives throughout the stadium did the same to the audience at large, while remaining wary of splattering the leather-coated Fruit of Islam, who were working security in case a distraught bride made a mad dash for Louis Farrakhan, who was also onstage.
The promised “cavalcade of stars” never quite materialized — though some of the non-Moonies in the two-thirds-full stadium had paid as much as $ 70 for the entertainment portion of the program. The only face-time I secured with “celebrities” was with “Hollywood” Brown and “Sugar Bear” Capers, two former Harlem Globetrotters so marked down that they used to play for the “trotters” stooge team, the Washington Generals. An errant tip from a roadie had me passing a malicious lie around the press box that Gloria Estefan would be singing. It turned out to be Gloria del Paraguay, a heavily rouged South American songstress who belted John Denver covers in an operatic tremolo. Organizers offered small consolation, saying Gloria was so beloved back home, “she travels with a diplomatic passport.”
As the brides sat frozen on the field, an anonymous Neil Diamond knock-off in a ruffled maroon suit nearly shook himself off his lifts while singing “Coming to America.” In the press box, conservative talk-show host Armstrong Williams was outcrooning the faux Diamond while adding hand motions and loudly accusing the impostor of lip-synching. Williams, one of many media types who have received VIP treatment from the Moonies, had come to see Whitney Houston.
Many others had too, though she never showed up. After getting rough press for headlining the new Messiah’s media spectacular, Houston came down with a mysterious illness and forfeited a million-dollar payday. Such low comedy is always part of the fun at a Moonie gala — though the greater reward lies in listening for the joint-popping genuflection of respectable and sane people who defer to him whose name means “Word of Shining Light.” Earlier this year at a Washington dinner, Moon gave an exegesis of the concavity and convexity of “human sexual organs.” How could he pull off such dinner-chatter deviance? Shortly afterward, he said, “God likes me. . . . Nobody can oppose me.” He also distributed a speech in which he discussed oneness with one’s own body: ” When you defecate, do you wear a gas mask? . . . If you are near someone defecating, you will quickly move a good distance away. But when you smell your own feces, you do not even notice it.” In case the point was missed, he went on: “Did you ever taste the dried mucus from your nose? Does it taste sweet or salty? It’s salty, right? Since you can answer, you must have tasted it! Why did you not feel that it was dirty? It was because it was part of your body.”
But his grossing out a roomful of Washington luminaries hasn’t led them to censure Moon. His conference speakers frequently justify their appearances by saying they had no idea the meetings were sponsored by Moon, by blaming it on their agents, or by saying the conferences themselves have nothing to do with Moon’s theology. Whitney Houston and CNN’s Lou Dobbs, who was also scheduled to appear in Washington but canceled, both said they hadn’t known the events were affiliated with Sun Myung Moon. But Unification officials provided journalists with copies of Houston’s contracts, which clearly disclosed the sponsor. As for Dobbs, Arnaud de Borchgrave, the editor- at-large of the Moon-founded Washington Times, maintains his representations weren’t quite on the level: “He agreed to speak, it was my idea, he’s an old friend, and his p.r. department decided against it. Of course he knows [of the Moon sponsorship].”
Since Moon began spreading money around official Washington 15 years ago to paper over his demented rants, his cult-leader image, and his 13-month felony conviction for tax evasion, his apologists have grown much faster than his church membership. Sen. Orrin Hatch has called Moon “a religious alternative to communism.” Sen. Trent Lott has lobbied on the Senate floor for the Moon-sponsored “True Parents Day” (which is now on the national calendar as a watered-down ” Parents’ Day”). Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed are but two evangelicals who once turned down Moon money, then later wet their beaks. Jack Kemp, Gerald Ford, and Jeane Kirkpatrick have all seen paydays at Moon rests. And George Bush, who in a single year made 12 Moon-sponsored appearances, has traveled to Japan and Buenos Aires at the Moons’ behest. His total take has been estimated at $ 10 million, and Bush continues to insist Moon’s organizations are about “strengthening the family.”
Many conservatives jumped on board in the 1980s, when Moon proved himself a staunch anti-Communist, funding the contras and lavishing junkets abroad. But Moon functions have despotic, authoritarian accents that would do North Korea’s late Kim Il-sung proud. Moon has his “World Culture and Sports Festival.” Kim had his “International Sports and Cultural Festival.” Kim called himself the “Great Leader.” Moon calls himself the “True Father.” When photographing the Great Leader, North Korean cameramen took pains to avoid capturing the unsightly tumor on the back of Kim’s neck. Moon, too, has his protective spear-carriers.
De Borchgrave, confronted with one of Moon’s subjugation-of-the world statements, responds, “I just don’t believe he ever said that.” Frequent federation speaker Maureen Reagan, like other conservatives, is comfortable in the pocket of the Moon propaganda machine. “I’ve met some of the nicest, most educated people just trying to make a better world,” she says. “That may sound incredibly naive. But I could take a little naivete this point.”
Matt Labash is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
