The MAGA-loving religious sect that worships with AR-15s has purchased a 130-acre property on a mountain in eastern Tennessee to serve as a “training center” and holy ground for its devoted, gun-toting followers, VICE News has learned.
The latest property acquisition is more evidence that Pastor Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon, a fervent conspiracy theorist and son of an accused cult leader, is determined to expand his reach into the American Heartland.
Moon’s congregation, Rod of Iron Ministries, also known as The World Peace and Unification Sanctuary, is a gun-centric spinoff of the much larger Unification Church, founded by his late father, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a self-proclaimed messiah and businessman whose followers were famously known as “Moonies.” The younger Moon, who also goes by “The Second King,” split from the main church amid a dramatic falling-out with his mother about who, between the two of them, was the rightful heir to his father’s empire.
In 2017, Moon founded his church in Newfoundland, Pennsylvania, siphoning off hundreds of followers from the main congregation who were willing to make the seemingly radical leap of incorporating high-powered rifles into their spiritual life. He did this with the backing of his older brother, Kook-jin “Justin” Moon, the CEO of Kahr Arms, a gun manufacturing company headquartered nearby. In recent years, he’s made headlines for recreating the mass wedding ceremonies that his father’s church was famous for, with the addition of AR-15s. […]
The goal of the Tennessee property, explained the younger Moon in a sermon streamed to the alternative video platform Rumble over the summer, is to recreate the Unification Church’s infamous spiritual retreat Cheongpyeong, located about 27 miles outside of Seoul, South Korea.
“As soon as I was in the vicinity of this property, I immediately felt Cheongpyeong,” said Moon in his regular broadcast, titled “The King’s Report,” which he often delivers wearing a crown of polished bullets. “As this spiritual download was happening, and we could feel the presence of Cheongpyeong, we just knew that of all the Tennessee lands that we’ve seen, this is the one that we must get to reclaim and have as a spiritual retreat.” […]
A spokesperson for Rod of Iron Ministries told VICE News that Pastor Moon doesn’t conduct ancestor liberation via ansu but rather through written requests for spiritual cleansing that are presented to him in boxes and later burned. “There will be no ‘ansu’ activity,” Timothy Elder, director of world missions, wrote in an email. “We have no intention of repeating these excesses at the Tennessee property.”
Anyone who wants to undergo an ancestor liberation by Moon must fill out a form that’s available on the church’s website. On the form, members are asked to stipulate how many generations of ancestors they’d like to liberate, “1-70 generations, 70-140 generations, 140-210 generations.” Under the original church, members were required to pay a specific amount for every generation they hoped to liberate. Moon’s form has a donation section where people can choose how much they want to give for ancestor liberation and whether they’d prefer to pay via PayPal, check, wire, or cash.
It’s 2021 and still no one does “news story that’s just an incomprehensible number of signifiers smashed together” quite like Vice
The first mention of the Unification Church, which has denied any connection with the Korean Government, came in a United States Central Intelligence Agency report dated Feb. 26, 1963, stating from an undisclosed source that, “Kim Chong Pil organized the Unification Church while he was director of the R.O.K. Central Intelligence Agency, and has been using the church, which has a membership of 27,000, as a political tool.”
Mr. Kim was among the inner core of Army’ officers who led the coup that brought Mr. Park to power in 1961. He organized the K.C.I.A. shortly after, and later headed the ruling party and was Prime Minister. He is now out of favor with Mr. Park.
The intelligence report continued: “Members of the church are actively engaged in increasing membership in farming villages. The church apparently has considerable money, because it pays influential people in the villages a substantial sum for joining the church.”
The report concluded, “The church is headed by a Reverend Moon, a founder of the Olive Tree cult.” Mr. Moon’s full name was not then known, the report said.
Followers of Mr. Moon in the United States became controversial for their lobbying in the early 1970’s, allegedly in favor of South Korea, and for their efforts, reportedly at the direction of Seoul, to prevent the impeachment of President Nixon.
Mr. Moon’s church has also been the target of criticism from parents of college‐age men and women who have been recruited into the cult against the wishes of their parents.
Later intelligence reports, also released today, asserted that, by 1965, the Unification Church had branches throughout South Korea. The intelligence source contended that “the church is a secret and is run like a Communist organization.”
The church was also reported by then to have branches in every neutral country that had Korean residents, apparently in an attempt to counter Communist infiltration of Korean organizations there.
The reports further said that the Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation, founded in 1965, was a forerunner to a Unification Church branch in the United States.
The subcommittee released many other documents tracing the founding and expansion of the foundation, which eventually claimed former Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower as honorary chairmen, into a K.C.I.A. front for fund‐raising and lobbying efforts.
The subcommittee heard testimony from Gary Ledyard a professor of Korean studies at Columbia University, and Marshall Green, former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian affairs, on the motives for the Korean lobby, which arose from failing, confidence in the American commitment to Korean security in 1970.
In addition, former Ambassador William Porter described a meeting between President Park and Vice President Agnew in August 1970, in which Mr. Park showed his displeasure with the United States by refusing to serve Mr. Agnew lunch or to permit him to leave the room during a seven‐hour session.
Today, on the anniversary of the Oct. 16, 1859, raid on Harper’s Ferry by a band of Black and white abolitionist guerrillas led by John Brown, read Vince Copeland’s important essay on the U.S. Civil War and the Black liberation struggle, “The Unfinished Revolution”:
“How could twenty Black and white revolutionaries have created so much hysteria, while the organized invasion of massed Northern troops was met by a fervor of militant, self-confident, and even temporarily victorious defensism?
“The difference between the John Brown raid and the long-fought Civil War was not just in the massive character of the latter as opposed to the allegedly individualist character of the former. It wasn‘t just that the Northern army had conventional organization into companies, regiments, brigades, and so on, as opposed to the general guerrilla insurrection almost begun by Brown and Anderson.
“The real difference lay in the fact that one conceived of a slave uprising and took the first steps in that direction — while the other, although forced to free the slaves in the long run, and forced to enlist nearly 200,000 Black men in its ranks, did not at first contemplate an actual slave uprising, and, in fact, opposed it.”
