Moonies - Part 2
Aired: May 6, 1997

To anyone over 35 years old, the Unification Church was once well known. It was founded by Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who says he is the messiah. Followers, dubbed "Moonies," were accused in the 1970s of cult-like behavior and deceptive recruiting tactics. In Part 1 of his series, Anthony Moor reported the church is still active at college campuses under different names. Now, in Part 2, he shows how they play on the heartstrings of idealistic youth.

At SF State and at the University of California Berkeley, they call themselves 'Pure Love Alliance.' But as we showed you in Part 1 of this series, they're really the Unification Church and its collegiate arm, CARP. "It's the student branch of the Unification Church," clarifies a group member.

For decades the church has been accused of using deception to recruit members. We found that deception and non-disclosure continues today.

Rosemarie Beard says she was brought to this church house in San Francisco last fall after a young woman asked her to complete a survey in Union Square: "She was an environmentalist group. She didn't say that she was a religious group. She didn't say that she was church of Unification or she works for Reverend Moon. She was basically an environmentalist group."

Rosemarie was new in town. She wanted to work for an environmentalist group. She stayed three hours.

"In the middle of it I became suspicious," she says.

"Why?"

"Because he wasn't answering my questions. I was trying to find out who they were, but he wouldn't let me know."

Rosemarie was invited to a meeting later in the week. But when she learned from her own research that CARP was the Unification Church, she never went back. "I felt really, really cheated," she adds. "When I researched who they were, I realized that I could have got myself into something extremely dangerous."

A woman the church knew as "Michelle" is not surprised. For six months until last November she was a church member. She lived in a church house next to the Berkeley campus. She remembers bowing to a picture of Moon daily, and receiving "indemnity."

"It's a baseball bat-like stick, and they would hit you three times," she describes. "It's something that Reverend Moon has proclaimed to be holy."

But while she staffed a table on the Berkeley campus for CARP and solicited donations door-to-door, Michelle says she was told not to say CARP was with the Unification Church. She was told to make up what would "hit people at the heart."

"It was all lies. I would come up and say...`I'm fundraising for my youth organization, my international youth organization called CARP. We go out, take care of young kids. We go out and do projects for the elderly. We go out and work for the environment. We go out and try to clean up the city,' and things like that."

"Isn't that what CARP does?"

"No, it isn't."

"What is CARP really doing?"

"Getting people to join Reverend Moon."

NewsCenter4 obtained this flyer that appeared on the SF State campus in 1995. It appears to be a request for tutors for San Francisco Educational Services, a non-profit affiliated with city schools. The flyer offers transportation to college students who wish to tutor twice a week.

But who should people call? CARP.

We checked with San Francisco Educational Services. They had no idea the Unification Church's student group had organized this, and they weren't pleased. "This is very dishonest, very dangerous, and very scary," says Garry Bieringer.

A former CARP leader tells NewsCenter4 that the goal was to "get close to fellow college students; to bond and become Moonies. It wasn't to tutor kids."

Bieringer has now filed a police report. "This is clearly a group that's trying to use what we do to recruit young people for their own reasons, whatever they might be," he says.

There's no evidence CARP ever brought any tutors here, nor any evidence that children were exposed to Unification Church teachings. But Michelle tells us that while training in Southern California, she was taken several times on the "Ocean Challenge," a boat that takes at-risk children from group homes on one-day sea adventures.

The brochure doesn't say the boat is owned by Unification Church members. And though the group's president says they teach a marine sciences curriculum, Michelle says she was told to teach Unification Church principles.

"While we were on that boat we'd tell kids...we'd just kind of tell them about Reverend Moon, we'd tell them about pure love. We'd give them little, tiny personal lectures, you know."

"How old were these kids?"

"Eight to sixteen."

Lawyer Ford Greene, who has successfully fought the Unification Church alleging deceptive tactics, has a sister who is a member and he himself was briefly a member in the 1970s. He says he's not surprised at what is happening today, "The pitch that's always made is a pitch to conscience; is a pitch to a person's highest, most moral inner yearnings. And the ultimate result is enslavement."

The Unification Church refused our requests for an interview. Many Unificationists have criticized our reporting primarily because of the use of the term "Moonies." It was coined by the Washington Post decades ago to denote followers of Reverend Moon. They consider it disrespectful.