Moonies - Part 1
Aired: May 5, 1997

It's been six weeks since authorities discovered the "Heaven's Gate" mass suicide. Like Jonestown and Waco before it, the deaths appeared to spell the end for another cult religion. But one group considered by some to be a dangerous, destructive cult in the mid-1970s is as big as ever. It's the Moonies -- officially known as the Unification Church. And as NewsCenter4's Anthony Moor reports, deceptive sidewalk recruiting tactics criticized twenty years ago appear to have shifted to Bay Area college campuses.

It is lunch time on the Cal campus. Students have set out tables to promote activities and groups that include the Pure Love Alliance. "It's a student organization; it's an alliance of students. It's non-sectarian, non-religious, whatever. Just anyone who believes in promoting abstinence," describes Keijo Shimmyo, a member of the group.

But NewsCenter4 has learned that the Pure Love Alliance is really a new way to promote a controversial religion: The Unification Church.

The Unification Church was founded by a Korean citizen named Sun Myung Moon, who claims he is the messiah. In the 1970s, Moon's followers -- dubbed "Moonies" -- were criticized for whisking away unsuspecting young travelers to remote Northern California camps after inviting them for dinner and subjecting them to grueling religious indoctrination, which cult experts call brainwashing.

As recently as 1993, we watched Moonies solicit young tourists in San Francisco to attend a dinner. Cult consultant Allen Tate Wood, who rose to the upper reaches of The Unification Church during a six-year career in the 1970s, was a tourist visiting Cal when he agreed to go to a dinner.

"The purpose of taking that person there [to a dinner] is to get them off to a training center, run them through a training regimen of seven, or twenty-one, or forty days. When that's complete, that person's going to be on a bus for the next seven years working sixteen hours a day. They're not up front about that."

Parents complained they were cut off from their children, who lived communally, traveling cross-country selling flowers and recruiting others.

Today, Reverend Moon heads a worldwide church with a reported three million followers. He holds mass weddings marrying hundreds of thousands of people at once, some to spouses they've never met and with whom they share no common language.

NewsCenter4 has also learned that the church has moved away from soliciting tourists on sidewalks, to recruiting on college campuses. Yet to today's college-age kids, Reverend Moon and his church mean nothing:

"Have you ever heard of the Unification Church?"

"No, I haven't," replies one student.

"Have you heard of Reverend Sun Myung Moon?"

"Uh, no," answers another.

"Have either of you ever heard of 'The Moonies?'"

"No," says one.

"Sounds like a band," responds the other.

How could the church remain unknown? Because it continues to solicit youthful recruits by hiding what it is.

We sent a NewsCenter4 staffer to the Cal Pure Love Alliance table one recent weekday. She repeatedly tried to learn more about who and what the group is:

"So PLA is talking about abstinence, but not from any kind of religious background?"

"No, no, no," answers a group member.

"Just kind of for yourself?"

"Yeah, for ourselves."

She was invited a meeting, to a dinner, on a trip to Alaska, and was told about a recent excursion to Yosemite. But twenty minutes went by before one member explained where the Pure Love Alliance gets its members -- from a group called 'CARP.'

"It's the student branch of the Unification Church. It's the Collegiate Association for Researching the Principle."

"And you said church," says our staffer.

"Uh huh, Unification Church."

Lawyer and cult expert Ford Greene has successfully sued the Unification Church for deceptively recruiting members. His own sister has been in the church for two decades, and Greene says he was brainwashed by Moonies and followed them for eight months in 1974.

"At the outset, there's never a disclosure," says Greene. "One, we are Unification church. Two, we believe that Reverend Moon is the second coming of Christ. Three, we believe that you are dominated by Satan. Four, the way for you to become free from Satan is by being unconditionally obedient to Moon because he's the only human being who's ever conquered and defeated Satan."

At San Francisco State University, we found the PLA selling sushi. They denied the group is part of the Unification Church, but admitted they are all church members.

And in a revealing exchange, the campus CARP president showed the evasive way she interests potential converts:

"First I tell them, I ask them, 'Are you interested in blah blah blah?' I don't say, 'Come on over.'"

"What do you say you're interested in?"

"Are you interested in...I don't know, it just depends on how it comes up. If this person, I have intuition, if I feel like they're interested."

"In what?"

"In exploring new information. We're at a school, we're an educational system here, and it's part of education about life."

"Well, why don't you just say `Are you interested in the Unification Church?"

"Because it's not as simple as that."

Church officials refused to talk with us. But in materials produced for the media, they admit using deceptive tactics in the past and say they have insisted that Unificationists stop the practice.

In Part 2 of his report, Anthony talks to a church member who recently quit. She claims recruiters tug at students' heartstrings by suggesting they help children and the elderly. And one San Francisco children's services organization is incensed the church used its name for promotion without permission.