Rev. Moon’s sons build church — services are locked, loaded
Sanctuary Church — whose proper name is World Peace and Unification Sanctuary, but which also goes by the more muscular-sounding Rod of Iron Ministries — stands inconspicuously on a country road that winds through the village of Newfoundland, Pa., 25 miles southeast of Scranton.
The one-story, low-slung building used to be St. Anthony’s Catholic Church. Before that, it was a community theater, which is why there are no pews, only a semicircle of tiered seats facing the old stage, now an altar.
On a Sunday morning in late February, Pastor Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon, son of the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon, entered from stage right wearing a white hoodie and cargo pants. He strapped on a leather headband and picked up a microphone.
“OK, take it away,” he said to the electric pianist and two female vocalists who are the choir. They launched into the first of four songs: “O, light of grace, shining above / lighting my dim shadowed way ...”
The 200-plus congregants packed into the room sang along with gusto. Pastor Sean, 38, stood by his front-row seat with his wife at his side, wringing his hands like an orchestra conductor.
The song cycle ended and, after a brief prayer, he took center stage.
“Look at all these crowns of sovereignty!” he exclaimed, gazing upon his audience.
One tenet of the church is that all people are independent kings and queens in God’s Kingdom — a kind of don’ttread-on-me notion of personal sovereignty. Hence, symbolic gold and silver crowns bobbed on row after row of heads. and Korea. That ceremony — officially, the “Cosmic True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humanity Cheon Il Guk Book of Life Registration Blessing” — would cap a week of activities that had already included an arts festival, a survival skills contest and a goat-butchering demonstration.
The wedding-blessing event was generating nationwide attention — something new for Sanctuary Church, which, until now, hadn’t even registered on the radar of the Pocono Record, the local daily newspaper.
A pillar of Sanctuary dogma is the importance of owning a gun, particularly the AR-15 semi-automatic, which the National Rifle Association has proclaimed “the most popular rifle in America.”
Last fall, Pastor Sean had studied the Book of Revelation. It makes multiple references to how Christ one day will rule his earthly kingdom “with a rod of iron.”
Although Revelation was written long before the advent of firearms, Pastor Sean concluded that “rod of iron” was Bible-speak for the AR-15 and that Christ, not being a “tyrant,” will need armed sovereigns to help him keep the peace in his kingdom.
As a result, a Sanctuary Church news release had noted that “blessed couples are requested” to bring with them to the upcoming Book of Life ceremony an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle “or equivalents.”
It was unfortunate timing: The next day a young man walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., and killed 17 people with an AR-15.
That Florida tragedy was freshly imprinted on millions of minds, among them Pastor Sean’s. He eased into his hourlong sermon the following Sunday by reminding everyone of what President Donald Trump had pointed out after the Parkland shooting: “He said if the teachers were armed, they would have shot the hell out of that guy. This is the first time we’ve heard a president talk like that. This is God’s grace, folks.”
Virtually the entire congregation was coming back for the big blessing ceremony, so he reviewed some safety precautions, like securing rifle triggers with a zip tie: “Remember, folks, you can never take back a bullet.”
After delivering a few social announcements (parents seeking marriage partners for their adult children were meeting at 3 p.m.; tomorrow at 5 p.m. there would be an AR-15 “breakdown” tutorial on how to properly disassemble the rifle), Pastor Sean delivered the meat of his sermon. He plowed familiar ground at first, citing Bible passages where the “rod of iron” was used to smite evildoers. Pacing the altar, he then segued into a freewheeling, gunfire-and-brimstone diatribe.
“You must shed the slave mentality and adopt the royal mentality . ... The Democratic Party has become the Communist Party funded by Nazi collaborator George Soros . ... The fake ministers and fake priests are pushing a dictatorChrist.” He took potshots at some favorite targets: Hillary Clinton (”she was paying for the Russian dossier”), Pope Francis (”a socialist, communist devil”) and government that gets too big for its britches.
“Jesus never centralized power. Jesus never created government,” he said. “The worst killer in all of humanity the last 100 years is centralized government.”
In a few days, reporters, photographers and TV camera crews would swarm upon sleepy Newfoundland for the wedding-blessing ceremony.
But the media circus also would move on, without answering questions left dangling. Who are these Sanctuarians? And, with their injection of guns into the country’s divisive mix of politics and religion, what do they want?
When the Rev. Sun Myung Moon died of complications from pneumonia in 2012 at age 92, it set off a power struggle within his family.
Sean, with backing from older brother Kook Jin “Justin” Moon, contends he was selected from among his 10 adult siblings to inherit the Unification Church mantle and be crowned the nextgeneration “Second King” — not a full-fledged messiah like his father purported to be, but nonetheless responsible for finishing the work of building God’s Kingdom.
Meanwhile, their mother, Hak Ja Han, claims the Rev. Moon, her husband of 52 years, passed the baton to her.
fighting over has roots in both Korea and America. The Rev. Moon — born in 1920 in what is now North Korea but was then part of Japan — said Jesus appeared to him when he was 15 and asked him to take on the “special mission” of completing God’s Kingdom on Earth, Cheon Il Guk in his native Korean.
He established a church in Seoul in 1954, dubbing it the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity. He codified his beliefs in a text titled “Divine Principle.”
One core construct says Satan seduced Eve in the Garden of Eden. This caused “the fall” of humankind by contaminating the bloodlines she and Adam transmitted through Cain and Abel. God sent Jesus to serve as a Second Adam to find sin-free love and salvage the family of man. But Jesus didn’t live long enough to marry. It thus became Sun Myung Moon’s destiny to step in as a Third Adam and redeem the world.
His ministry put a premium on the sanctity of traditional marriage and condemned premarital sex, divorce and homosexuality. That conservative message found an audience in Seoul, though police arrested him twice — for suspicion of having religious sex orgies and ducking the draft. (Both charges ultimately were dropped.)
By 1957, he’d built a network of 30 churches and was wired into the South Korean business community and government. The only glitch was that his own marriage proved imperfect, ending in divorce.
However, Hak Ja Han soon entered his life. They married in 1960, and followers hailed them as God’s anointed “True Parents.”
A decade later the Rev. Moon came to the United States, a necessary foothold for uniting the planet under his Unification banner. Moon spun a web of foundations and interlocking companies, reportedly becoming South Korea’s first billionaire. His followers were untroubled by his wealth, but Congress investigated his empire, and then the Internal Revenue Service came after him.
In the mid-1980s Moon served 13 months in prison for failure to declare $162,000 in taxable income. Ever the entrepreneur, he made arrangements in prison to start the conservative Washington Times, saying he did it “to fulfill God’s desperate desire to save this world.”
Unification Church membership figures have always been elastic, ranging from tens of thousands to several million. In 2009, the Washington Times cited 110,000 “adherents.” Whatever the correct number, it had peaked by the late 1990s. Yet the Rev. Moon pressed on.
In 2003, a double-page ad in the Washington Times trumpeted this news: All 36 deceased American presidents acknowledged Sun Myung Moon’s greatness. What’s more, each one had written an endorsement letter from the Great Beyond. “People of America, rise again. Return to the nation’s founding spirit,” said Thomas Jefferson, once characterized as a “howling atheist” by political opponents. “Follow the teachings of Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the Messiah to all people.”
Jefferson was, of course, one of the architects of America’s system of government — which will become obsolete if the Rev. Moon’s vision of God’s Kingdom on Earth comes to pass.
Pastor Sean is convinced that will happen, and in preparation, he has taken it upon himself to write a Constitution of the United States of Cheon Il Guk, grounded in principles articulated by his father.
If all proceeds according to divine plan, the country will be ruled by monarchs drawn from his branch of the Moon family. If the Kingdom comes in Sean’s lifetime, he’ll take the reins as king of the United States.
Don’t worry. It’s not a theocracy, Sean says: “We would refer to it as a libertarian Christian monarchy or maybe a libertarian republican democracy.”