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Sun Myung Moon's Ministry in America
After working in his native Korea from 1950 to 1971, Moon came to the United States. It had become evident to him that the only political, economic, and military power capable of confronting the threat of world communism was the United States. The bad name that McCarthyism had given to opposition to communism (which the Left quickly seized upon to dismiss the validity of any criticism of communism) caused important sectors of American society to have reservations about confronting communism; the American Establishment had become "anti-anti-communist."
When Reverend Moon began his ministry in the United States in 1971, many American youth were caught in a morass of moral and ideological confusion, provoked by the sexual revolution and the ongoing controversy surrounding the continued American military presence in Vietnam.
Moon began his American ministry by attempting to address America's identity and mission. He conducted speaking tours throughout the nation with the explicit purpose of reminding America of her responsibility as the foremost power in the free world and as a world level representative of the Christian tradition.3
Moon addressed crowded audiences in New York's Madison Square Garden, at Yankee Stadium, and at the Washington Monument. He also spoke on three occasions before the U.S. Congress. In his speeches, Moon spoke of the vision of America's founding fathers and of the need for unity and cooperation between America's civic and religious leaders in addressing the threat of communism. It was not unusual for there to be protests at Reverend Moon's talks and even threats to his security, yet Moon never missed one of his public speeches.
In his 1973 twenty-one City Speaking Tour in the United States, Moon stressed that God had chosen America to proclaim the existence of God and stand against communism's atheism Beginning in the 1960s, some Americans had begun to jest about anticommunism. They had also begun to belittle, reinterpret, or deny the nation's founding values. Prayer was removed from American public schools through the Supreme Court's Engle v. Vitale (1960) and Abingdon School District v. Schempp (1963) decisions. Pornography was rationalized, legitimized, and mainstreamed. Sexual purity was replaced by calls for sexual freedom and American youth were cajoled to "make love not war."
One might say that just as the Romans abandoned the family values of Caesar Augustus, Americans began to be encouraged by modern American media and the entertainment industry to stray from their founding ideals of belief in God, self control, and family devotion and, instead, to accommodate sexual experimentation, alternate lifestyles, recreation drugs, and open marriage. The failed marriages and immorality of actors and actresses came to be glamorized. American films and television provided further rationales for sexual promiscuity.
In his public speeches, Moon passionately described the sacrificial course of America's Pilgrim Fathers, explaining to his listening audiences that these early settlers had abandoned the comfort and familiar surroundings of their homeland in order to have a place to worship God and exercise their faith. He recounted how during their first winter in the New World, Pilgrim elders chose not to eat the grain stored in the hull of their ship because it was for the first spring planting. Moon reminded his listeners that less than half of the Pilgrims survived the first Massachusetts winter because of meager food and a lack of supplies. The Pilgrims denied themselves so that their descendants might survive in the New World, which they had dedicated to the Creator.
Reverend Moon was not ignorant of America's transgressions, e.g., of how white settlers had abused both Native Americans and Africans. As a religious man, he felt that God could forgive America's serious past transgressions because, at its founding, there existed a critical mass of men and women of faith. God would have been willing to forgive the transgressions of Sodom and Gomorrah if there were ten faithful men and women. Moon felt that God's commitment and blessing to America stemmed from the nation's early exemplars of faith. Even when he faced imprisonment in America, Moon reflected on the motivation and heart of the first settlers at Plymouth. He felt that he should be ready to go to prison to prevent that precious foundation from being lost. In his sermons and public talks, he called upon Americans to emulate the quality of faithdemonstrated by the Pilgrim Fathers. He shared this appeal with the members of his Church and with audiences in all fifty states during the first three years of his ministry in America. He also strongly emphasized the need for Christianity to confront communism, save the American youth from moral corruption, and he encouraged Churches to work together beyond denomination to address the problems of the nation.
The International Federation for Victory over Communism (IFVOC) Activity in Latin America
Following the Sandinista takeover of Nicaragua in July 1979, Reverend Moon took steps to conduct national, regional, and even hemispheric seminars on Marxism throughout the Americas. In 1980 Moon officially founded CAUSA International and Dr. Bo Hi Pak was appointed as President. Pak, a decorated Korean War veteran, had come to the United States in 1961. He had been one of the three founding Unification Church missionaries in America, along with Dr. Young Oon Kim and Dr. David S. C. Kim. Pak served as the Assistant Military Attaché to the Korean Embassy in Washington, D.C. from 1961 to 1964 and then began to function as a Special Assistant to Moon. With his impeccable English, he later also served as Moon's interpreter.
Pak was recognized for his remarkable skills as a strategist, a diplomat, a teacher, and a metteur en scène. His warm and embracing nature drew people to him and his perpetually positive attitude earned him the nickname "Mr. Bubbling Enthusiasm." Indeed, these combined traits and talents made Pak the appropriate person for Reverend Moon to support in overseeing the work of CAUSA and in creating a quality ed-ucational program. In 1980 CAUSA staff members began to translate and adapt its critique of communism for Spanish-speaking audiences. The first CAUSA text was published in Spanish in 1981. Throughout the 1980s CAUSA conducted hundreds of seminars in Latin America for political, military and civic leaders. By 1983, CAUSA had become well known for its "high tech" presentations, which included an illustrated lecture manual as well as state-of-the art visuals and an 18 projector multi-media presentation on the underpinnings and the practical implications of communist ideology. A significant portion of the adapted educational materials, which CAUSA later used in the United States, was first developed in Spanish.
CAUSA set up regional offices in the Caribbean (the Dominican Republic), the Southern Cone (Uruguay), and in Central America (Honduras). Between 1983 and 1987 CAUSA's Central American office alone conducted over 120 seminars for tens of thousands of government leaders, scholars, military officers, teachers, students, and peasants. At the request of the Salvadoran government and with their support, CAUSA's Central American director, Mr. Jesus Gonzalez, frequently crossed the lines of guerrilla-controlled territory to conduct seminars on VOC theory for the villages that had come under the control of Marxist insurgents.
Between 1980 and 1990 CAUSA International conducted more than 250 major educational conferences in 40 nations. Most of these conferences lasted for three to four days and they were attended by over 60,000 government officials and civic leaders. These programs mobilized the support and participation of Latin American Presidents, Vice Presidents, cabinet officers, senators, and other high-ranking officials. By 1985 CAUSA conferences were even being conducted clandestinely inside communist-controlled Nicaragua.
IFVOC Activity in the United States
Moon's American VOC activities began in the United States with the creation of the Freedom Leadership Foundation (FLF) in 1969. With its headquarters in Washington, D.C., FLF conducted seminars on Marxism and organized rallies and demonstrations exposing and denouncing human rights violations behind the Iron Curtain. The FLF published texts critical of communism. One of them, Communism: Promises and Practice (1973), detailed the flagrant gaps between official Soviet policies of equality and economic justice and the reality of the emergence of a new class in the U.S.S.R. and in other communist countries, which thrived at the expense of the remaining population. Communism: Critique and Counterproposal, the first English language translation of IFVOC material, was published in the United States in 1973.
FLF also published a bi-weekly newspaper, The Rising Tide, which was widely distributed in Washington and available in Washington newsstands. The Tide's reading audience included U.S. Congressmen and their staff. Throughout the Vietnam conflict, the FLF argued in favor of continuing the American military presence in Southeast Asia, warning that a reversal of U.S. foreign policy would have a most adverse result.
CAUSA in the United States
In the 1980s CAUSA International began to have a growing presence inNorth America and then in Western Europe. Beginning in 1983, the United States became the central focus for CAUSA activities. The CAUSA Lecture Manual was published in English in 1985. It served as a teaching aide for CAUSA activists around the world and it was supplemented by twelve one hour slide presentations, covering each aspect of Marxist theory as well as Moon's critique and counterproposal.
Unlike any other country, the United States was equipped with the economic, political and military resources to confront communism and hasten its demise. Moon recognized, however, that by the late 1960s America lacked the vision and willpower needed to take a public stance against communism's advocacy of atheism. He felt called to reawaken America to her responsibility to liberate the communist world. In critiquing communism, Moon emphasized that the fundamental ideological flaw was not politics, economics, or human rights. The fundamental issue, as CAUSA materials expressed it, was "God or no God." If God existed, then because of its militant atheism, communism had to be false. Reverend Moon taught that America, because of her religiously inspired founding, had a responsibility to speak out against communist atheism.
CAUSA, along with The News World, The Washington Times, the Professors World Peace Academy, the Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles, and the International Federation for the Victory over Communism, numbered among the important institutions launched by Moon to address the demise of classical American values and the danger of communist expansionism.
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