On the night after my first Adidam meeting, I swung over to the New York HQ of Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church on 43rd St. Inside its storefront, there were a few people at tables and some general Asian music playing on a boom box. A smiley girl named Dana introduced herself, then told me I should come to service on Sunday to learn more about Mooniedom and gave me her number. I put my info on a little sign-in sheet and was free to go.
The next Sunday I ditched out on sleep to go to Moonie church. For all the supposed fiscal might of the UWC, their chapel looked a lot like a grade school gym, except with a big, wooden mandala-looking emblem surrounded by purple curtains where the scoreboard would be and a sharply-dressed Jamaican guy named Rev. Delton preaching at the free-throw line. The congregation was a weird mix of old black women, teenage Koreans, dumpy middle-aged white guys with Asian wives, and two white junkies covered with tattoos who got up in the middle of the sermon—needles in hand—to go shoot up in the bathroom.
Apparently the Rev. Moon and his associates are really big on “unifying cultural divisions through marriage,” and like to express this sentiment by pointing out mixed-race couples whenever they have the chance. After crowing about one Guyanese woman’s willingness to marry a Trinidadian, Delton asked a lone white guy with a graying bowl cut and absent Japanese wife to stand up and be recognized for his contribution to global unity. “He is white and he married a Japanese! We all talk about it, but this guy actually did it!”
After the sermon, Rev. Delton invited one of the other ministers up to the stage to perform a spirited, vaguely homoerotic duet of the Carpenters’ “Top of the World” while everybody lined up in front of the altar to give their offerings.
I was starting to get nervous about things wrapping up quickly, but luckily this was it. Dana snagged me on my way out and introduced me to a short, stocky Korean guy named Rev. Hyun who told me to come back later in the week so he could help me through some of the basic tenets and terminology of the movement.
When I popped in on the Moonies the next day, a short black man I’d never met before looked up at me from his table and said, “Hi, Thomas.” Before I could get wigged out, Dana came over from the back to smile and have me sign in again, then grabbed Rev. Hyun and a plate of cookies and we all sat down to have a little chat about Unification.
Basically their whole deal is that Rev. Moon was visited by the spirit of Jesus when he was 16 and told he could be the second coming by getting everybody to have a bunch of kids and be faithful to their wives. This would fulfill Christ’s original mission of founding God’s family on earth, which got fucked up by his crucifixion. Right after he told me this, Rev. Hyun kind of shifted his glance and made this exaggerated Wha?!? face, going, “Are you telling me Jesus was supposed to get married?! Ohhh kayye.” I wanted to tell him that this wasn’t such a hard sell compared with worshiping a 60-year-old guido, but settled on just mentioning something about the Da Vinci Code.
Rev. Hyun moved on to talking about the Unification’s biggest enemies: Freud, Alfred Kinsey, and Hugh Hefner, the forefathers of the “Free Sex” movement.
“Rev. Moon’s alternative to this is ‘Absolute Sex,’” he told me. “That’s where the husband’s genitals belong to his wife and vice versa. Black preachers always crack up when they hear him talk about this, because they know it’s true.”
The Moonies were already off to a pretty good lead with the cookies and vaguely plausible theology and genital ownership policy. As if to seal the deal, when I asked him how much it would cost to sign up for the introductory lectures, Rev. Hyun went, “Psssshhht, I’ll do it for free.”
For the rest of the week I devoted myself wholly to the UWC. No bulbous gurus, no unresponsive Japanese supervillains, just me and the Rev and some slickly illustrated PowerPoint presentations each afternoon, going over how the four-unit foundation of love provided a stable bridge between the perfection stage of human development and the achievement of the three divine blessings. It got a little convoluted and technical at times but all in all, everything made pretty sound sense when I could understand it, even the part about Eve fucking Satan (which Hyun paved the way for with another “Here comes some zany shit…” face).
By the end of the third lecture I was basically sold. I started to find myself thinking that sex was sort of bullshit, and looking through crap on the Unification website at night instead of browsing for porn. Did you know the Moonies want to build a bridge-and-tunnel network connecting Alaska and Russia across the Bering Strait called the “World Peace King Tunnel”? Maybe it’s just the indoctrination speaking, but doesn’t that seem like a really, really good idea?
About the only thing I was balking at was being matched up with a stranger to be mass-married, but from what I’d seen around the building, odds were pretty good the girl they’d hook me up with would be something of a looker or at least Asian.
When Rev. Hyun read to me from his email that True Father Moon was going to be in New York the next weekend, you could have heard my gasp down the hall. Then he reread the message and realized it was just going to be his wife. Crud.
Nevertheless, after Sunday service, the Reverend and I cruised over to the Hammerstein Ballroom, which it turns out is fully Moonie-owned and -operated. It’s hard to explain an auditorium full of grown men and women psyched to the point of screaming about an old Korean woman in a business suit slowly taking the stage then plodding through a speech with all the personality and enthusiasm of someone reading from the phone book, but when you’re there with them, doing creamer shots of grape juice in the Holy Wine Ceremony and reading along in English about the fucking Peace Tunnel, it’s pretty hard not to scream a little yourself.
I’m not going back to the Moonies and I know this was just supposed to be a cult evaluation, but to be totally honest, I have a hard time not answering the phone when they call me. The Moonies is hands down the best cult I’ve ever been in.
TO BE CONTINUED:
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