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Theocrazies - Sun Myung Moon and the 'One World Under God'
Ralph Jensen
2005
Some writers recently have been very fond of certain statements of Sun Myung Moon concerning plans for world dominion. That would neatly line him up with major evildoers of the recent and not so recent past.
One that has gained a certain level of popularity - in spite of its status as an antiquity - is a quote where he uses automatic theocracy' as the goal of his endeavors. The term appears in a 1973 speech called "The Value of the Training Session" for example. (The site probably passes as an unofficial Moonie site.)
If you google the term 'theocracy' you can read in the The Catholic Encyclopedia that a theocracy is "A form of civil government in which God himself is recognized as the head."
The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theocracy) wikipedia says: "The term theocracy is used to describe a form of government in which a religion or faith plays a dominant role."
Officials of a theocratic government would be dignitaries of the respective religion, the legal system would reflect the doctrines of that religion. Concepts like the separation of church and state would be secular icons of the past.
Opponents of the movement have a field day with this quote, supplying one more proof that the old man is nuts to the core. A few members have responded that it can't be so bad. After all, God is love. It depends how you interpret it.
The amusing truth of the matter is: The old man never said anything even remotely close to it.
True, the speech on tparents.org contains this term. However, as a matter of fact the simultaneous translation of Mrs. Won Pok Choi was simply flat out wrong. The movement has dedicated quite some effort to sort out the truth of the matter. In preparation for a 1984 court case, where they expected the issue to come up, they carefully retranslated the speech.
Dan Fefferman describes the process:
"...the re-translation was done in connection with a British court case in 1984, since it was known that the 'automatic theocracy' quote would come up in that case. The method of this translation was this: first, the recorded speech by Sun Myung Moon was carefully transcribed into Korean text and then translated into English from the transcription. Parentheses indicate the translator's sense of references (such as pronouns) which the Korean language does not use."
Here the two translated versions - first the original words of Mrs. Won Pok Choi which are a wrong translation:
"My dream is to organize a Christian political party including the Protestant denominations, Catholics and all the religious sects. Then, the communist power will be helpless before ours. We are going to do this because the communists are coming to the political scene. Before the pulpit, all the ministers of the established churches must give their sermon on how to smash or absorb communism - but they are not doing that. We are going to do this. Unless we lay the foundation for this we cannot carry it out. In the medieval ages, they had to separate from the cities - statesmanship from the religious field - because people were corrupted at that time. But when it comes to our age we must have an automatic theocracy to rule the world - and that is logical. We have to purge the corrupted politicians and the sons of God must rule the world."
There we have it - automatic theocracy - an interesting concept, may be, though the term doesn't exist and it wouldn't make much sense.
This is what the old man really said:
"It is Teacher's dream to make an international level Christian political party, a coalition of Catholics and Protestants throughout the world. That is, I desire to create a Christian political party centering on our Unification Church in each country gathering all Catholic people, Protestant people and (non-religious) people from throughout the world. Then we should quickly dissuade (people) from communism. Because communism is gaining political influence, it is Teacher's view that things will get worse unless we democratic Christians build a similar foundation.
These days, Catholic priests and Protestant ministers ought to preach that we should act to stop international communism. They are not doing that now. I think this is needed because I believe it is impossible to effectively stop communism unless (democratic Christians) build this kind of foundation.
That religion and politics should be separated is a theory that arose at the end of the Middle Ages to prevent the misuse of power after the Papacy had become corrupt. Let's see, how did democracy start? What was its source? Democracy was born out of the Reformation against the corrupt Catholic Church. Because of this origin, religion and politics were separated.
What? Separate religion from politics? Why separate religion from politics? Why separate politics from religion? Can you separate God from politics? God is active in the realization of all human affairs. Therefore, when the democracies produce a succession of many uncorrupted politicians, it will become heaven on earth. Don't you agree that this is the way it should be?"
First of all, the original version appears to be considerably longer - 148 words for the wrong translation versus 251 for the corrected version.
Listeners of the old man's speeches are often mystified when a translator manages to condense half a minute talk into one or two sentences. People are equally surprised to hear a translator take a minute for a single sentence. Occurrences like this are frequently observed. The crux of the matter - apparently work under pressure.
Acknowledging the phenomenon of this 'shrinkage of meaning', nowadays 'original translations' are preceded by remarks that they should be taken with a grain of salt. On the FFWPU site all speeches are edited or even retranslated from a transcript. However, on sites like tparents.org we still find unedited, 'original' versions, reflecting all the weaknesses of work under stress. Given the amount of speeches that would have to be retranslated, the presence of these unedited versions is forgivable.
However, people that follow Sun Myung Moon's speeches will have noticed that he does talk about "having a nation", "... once we have our own nation ... " etc. Statements that follow these mentionings then largely refer to internal matters of respecting God's laws and principles of heaven. He also has mentioned a constitution for God's nation.
These terms are certainly worth an evaluation - no matter what side one is on. However, it is quite clear that we are not looking at a system anywhere close to a 'theocracy'. May be the folks at www.iifwp.org for www.ffwpu.org/ could be so kind to provide some useful, official information on their (official) sites.
In any case we always have to deal with something that the old man puts high emphasis on - the conscience of the individual. For Sun Myung Moon that conscience, a person's channel to God, stands even above the teacher himself. In this light a conscientious follower is relieved from all obligations that would conflict with his or her understanding of right and wrong. The doors to heaven are not closed to those that follow their conscience, the opposite is the case.
This relinquishing of all doctrinaire control of man over man appears to be a trademark of the old man's view of the world to come, a sign of his almost unconditional trust in the original goodness of mankind, a ticket to freedom centering on the divine.
A person who later transcribed the tape found there also a discussion that followed the speech and remembers:
"... there was a speech back in the 1970's when Father was speaking informally, and the interpreter was a woman, and she was struggling to interpret Father, and she blurted out the phrase 'automatic theocracy'. This caused quite a stir, even among loyal members, and there was some discussion about whether Father had actually said that. Later, one of Father's 'regular' interpreters said that those words did not convey what Father had actually meant to say, that the meaning was different in Korean, and that it was not easy to put into English."
I think at tparents.org they should edit the speech and put it right - 32 years after the event it's about time.
If you still hope for a grain of sand in the system - after all, nobody is perfect - read the sequel of this article - "Theocrazies II, advanced reflections", coming some time this month.
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