The Unification Church of Sun Myong Moon

The Unification Church of Sun Myong Moon

Introduction by the CICNS

The Unification Church has been a privileged target of the anti-cult fight in France. In our country, everyone is free to say what they think of a philosophy, of a religious movement, of its proselytism, of the theology of Reverend Moon in this instance.

The limit one would wish to see respected lies in the manner and means employed to express one’s point of view. When debate (respecting the other’s differences) and the exercise of the law are replaced by a combat driven by fear - the fear that one set of values will be replaced by another -, abuses are inevitable.

Of course, the anti-cult argument consists in saying that the danger is so great that it is a question of the survival of our system of values. Let us note first that this is a way of refusing a priori the forces of change and evolution in a society. But even granting that it becomes legitimate in a given situation to defend “our values”, the supposed danger would still have to be supported by irrefutable proof (disturbance of public order, delinquency of the incriminated groups, apology for criminal actions, etc.) Which, to our knowledge, is not the case for Moon’s Unification Church.

The anti-cult argument systematically evokes the worst in order to override our traditional values: respect for democratic debate, respect for the law, respect for the other, tolerance, freedom of conscience. The other is necessarily manipulated or a manipulator.

The anti-cult fight in France is a fairly precise measure of the state of our system of self-defence. The cursor has moved dangerously from a legitimate position of protection to a position of hysterical crispation.

Laurent Ladouce, in charge of public relations for the Unification Church in France, offers us below his view of thirty years of his movement’s history.

From “la secte Moon” to “l’Empire Moon”

The image of Reverend Moon in France (1975-1987)

The development of the Unification Church (Moon) in France never had the same scale as in Korea, Japan or the United States. The French branch is today slimmer than its counterparts in Great Britain and Germany. But the French media reacted sharply to its breakthrough, giving several incidents that occurred between 1975 and 1987 a worldwide resonance: the spectacular abductions of two followers, Marie-Christine Amadéo (1976) and Claire Chateau (1982), had a planetary echo. Above all, the French press invented two expressions that hit home in worldwide popular imagery: in January 1975, Ouest France was the first press organ in the world to speak of “la secte Moon” (“the Moon cult”). In the 1980s, Jean-François Boyer, a senior reporter at TF1, signed a best-seller translated into multiple languages: “L’Empire Moon” (“The Moon Empire”).

“La secte Moon” and “l’Empire Moon”: two hard-hitting journalistic coinages, imprinting on the zeitgeist two images or two mental galaxies with their subsets: “la secte Moon” evokes images of a Korean messiah, collective weddings, deprivation of sleep and food, zombies, depersonalisation, brainwashing. “L’Empire Moon” is a universe of soldier-monks, of the spider’s strategy, of infiltration, of entryism. These two images applied to the same object are not compatible: the first evokes the subversion of an all-powerful Oriental figure come to “steal our children”, to prevent them from realising the ambitions and hopes their parents placed in them. The easy clichés would come thick and fast: “On one side, powerful organisations, rich, skilled at recruiting. On the other, individuals - often very young - in love with an ideal, who abandon family, studies, career to follow what they believe to be their spiritual path”.[1] The second image supposes that a multitude of Reverend Moons are among us, highly intelligent and motivated, working to subvert our elites. Certainly, these two images follow the objective evolution of the movement itself, which changed in nature and method. But these two images are also “snapshots” of passing time, two photographs of the France of the 70s and 80s. The image of “la secte Moon” is irrational and archaic, belonging to a psychology of crowds as in Fritz Lang’s “M” and “Fury”. The mental image induced by “l’Empire Moon” is more sophisticated. It reflects the Mitterrandian ideology and thus refers back to a modern State’s capacity to create mythology. The myth of “la secte Moon” is typical of the French collective unconscious, that of “l’Empire Moon” of the French State.

“La secte Moon” and “l’Empire Moon” are not words for naming things or phenomena, but verbal arrows secreting primary reflexes in the crowd. Fabricating archetypes is typical of a process of stigmatisation. Stigmatisation (literally branding) consists in strongly amplifying an anomaly. It becomes an idol that fascinates and terrifies. All stigmatisation supposes an interaction between an objective anomaly and a subjective will to stigmatise. If Reverend Moon’s movement is indeed an objective anomaly in French society, its outrageous stigmatisation says more about that society than about the stigmatised object. The manufacture of anti-Moonism borrowed other mental schemes in Germany (where the myth of a new Nazism was favoured) or in Great Britain, where the essential actors were the popular press and the courts.

Why this French fixation on “la secte Moon” and “l’Empire Moon”? Resituating these two terms in their context will enlighten us. Jean Séguy suggests it when he writes: “the recent sects themselves have characteristics that can only be understood through an analysis of the cultural or political - and no longer merely religious - context in which they have spread.” The author would have been better advised to say that it is “the image of the recent sects” whose characteristics need to be understood.

1. “La secte Moon”

“La secte Moon” corresponds to a precise stage in the history of the Unification Church’s development in France. The movement had already existed since 1968. It burst suddenly into the French news at the beginning of 1975 on the occasion of a series of circumstances that we shall set back in the scenery of the France of the 70s. Ten years later, the same movement would have evolved, France too would have changed: “la secte Moon” would become “l’Empire Moon”.

1.1 Individual, family, tribal, social, national, world levels

A first grid of analysis consists in deciphering the symbolic import of the expressions “secte Moon” and “Empire Moon” from Reverend Moon’s own theology. A constant of unificationist rhetoric is the notion of levels or spheres (gwon in Korean) of Providence. In other words, the human being must return to God by gradually widening the spheres of salvation. Starting from the individual level, he attains the family, tribal, social, national, world, then cosmic levels. If a person achieves individual felicity, it remains for him to conquer the sphere of family felicity, then tribal, etc. It is the roadmap of a human salvation that takes place on earth, in this world. Now, the passage from one sphere of liberation to another comes at the price of a sacrifice or an “indemnity” (tamgan in Korean) which can involve the opposition and persecution of the “adverse camp”. The persecution of “la secte Moon” thus corresponds to a moment in its historical ascension, the one where it moves its followers from the individual level to a family and tribal level. It then arouses a lightning adhesion in a certain profile of people who will not be found in the following phase, when its recruitment tends to stagnate. It also arouses a no less lightning rejection among many actors who will not be heard of afterwards. The persecution of “l’Empire Moon” accompanied the phase in which the movement was reaching a national and international audience. It then draws other actors to itself and arouses other rejections.

Reverend Moon’s disciples see themselves as the people of God who must free individuals, families, tribes, society, the nation and the world from evil influences. Each national branch of the movement sets itself the ultimate objective of “restoring the nation”, in other words of making it a country that accepts being guided by Reverend Moon’s ideas. The disciples are “in the Abel position”, in the light, and facing them are people “in the Cain position”, in the darkness, who strive relentlessly to demonise them. Holding firm, loving these enemies without yielding to the influence of their hostility, contributes to saving both Abel and Cain. So much so that phenomena of fraternisation are conceivable between the two camps, or the passage from one “camp” to the other.

One may of course not accept this unificationist theology, but it proves operational for two reasons. First, it illuminates the phenomenon of mimicry proper to phenomena of stigmatisation. Anti-Moonism ends up resembling the image it gives of “Moonism”. The demoniser, fascinated by the idol he execrates, tends to imitate it.

In the phase of “la secte Moon”, the movement is accused of “stealing” children from their parents, of “washing their brains”. Yet Marie-Christine Amadéo, though of age when she joined the Unification Church, would be abducted twice by her relatives. Likewise Claire Chateau would be held captive to be subjected to a “deprogramming” supposed to “free her”. We are thus in the case of two groups of influence fighting each other on equal terrain (that of the individual, the family, the clan), one of which intends to criminalise the other in public opinion. But the one who cries “crime” gets carried away and breaks the laws. The site “Prévensectes” gives an echo of this mimicry in the lucid confession of a repentant ex-Moonist called Roger. After describing to us how Roger was “indoctrinated” by the cult, we are told of his “deliverance”, during a visit he agreed to make to his Breton family: “His family decided that he would not leave again. It confiscates his papers. At the house, it is a procession: friends of the family, priest, pastor, psychologist… The whole entourage attempts a debriefing…”[2]

Moonist theology is also operational for explaining the passage from the fantasy of “la secte Moon” to that of “l’Empire Moon”. When Moon’s disciples make themselves talked about for the first time in France and find themselves called “la secte Moon”, this corresponds to a stage of development where they have just entered the “tribal” sphere, and their adversaries too. During this period, the French State (the national level) remains neutral. It does not arbitrate the struggle between the young “Moonist tribe” and the nascent “anti-Moonist tribe”. At this stage, hostility to the “Moonists” is at once affective and religious, it touches the ties of blood, not the social contract. Eloquently, the “anti-cult” association founded by the Champollions (parents of a Moonist who joined in Rennes in 1974) baptises itself “Association for the Defence of the Family and the Individual”, by a curious phenomenon of theological mimicry with the object of its execration. Questioned on the choice of these terms, Madame Champollion would moreover later express her embarrassment about this terminology.[3]

The Moonists then have against them people close to them: parents, brothers and sisters, extended kin, as well as various mentors and directors of conscience - teachers, spiritual guides, psychologists. They all know one another. The psychodramas are sometimes followed by reunions; people tell one another of the affection they continue to bear one another despite everything. But the stigmatisation would go beyond this relatively intimate framework, as we shall see, ending in a reciprocal demonisation.

Ten years later, the scenery has changed. The young Moonists are married, have founded their families, have often resumed a professional activity; many have by then normalised their ties with their families. The initial communal phase “of rupture with society” has come to an end. Freed from the family and tribal hostility of the preceding decade, the French Moonists will face a situation unique compared with their co-religionists in other industrialised countries. For the French State, which had remained neutral until then, takes the lead, after the election of François Mitterrand, of a curious worldwide crusade against “the cults”. Reverend Moon’s movement would be subjected to several years of fiscal and judicial harassment. In parallel, the movement had ceased to address itself primarily to young individuals in order to convert them, and aimed also to develop a national network of influence among intellectuals, journalists and politicians. The CAUSA Institute then organised high-level seminars throughout France and published a magazine. This whole strategy would culminate in the election of Pierre Ceyrac as deputy for the Nord in the National Assembly. The adversary of the unification movement had then changed in nature: it was the State.

In this French context of State persecution on the one hand and “national conquest” on the other, Jean-François Boyer published “L’Empire Moon”. The back cover presents it as “an explosive work, full of unpublished revelations, which reveals that the Unification Church is less a cult than an empire”.

1.2 The turning point of 1975

We have spoken of the evolution of the image as a function of the space occupied by Moonism. Let us now see the evolution as a function of time.

When “la secte Moon” makes its first entry into the French news in 1975, the movement has already existed for 7 years and has gained all or almost all its historic figures, without attracting attention. But for a year it occupies the front of the stage, with peaks in January-February 1975, June 1975 and January 1976. The persecuting hatred culminates with the abduction of Marie-Christine Amadéo and the bombing of the Moonist centre at the Villa Aublet. These twelve months would see the term “secte Moon” mark French and then world opinion in depth.

Let us resituate the first stigmatisation in its religious, political and cultural context.

For a year, the Élysée has had a new occupant. Breaking with Gaullism, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing speaks of an “advanced liberal society”. He very quickly lowers the age of majority from 21 to 18, right in the period when the recruitment of followers by the Unification Church is in full swing in France; a France where the birth rate is falling, where the middle classes are over-investing in the social advancement of their children. The “Family” of the “True Parents” comes to capture these young people just beginning their university studies. Among them, many are brilliant, come from middle-class or well-off families. Their families even have some standing. A great number of these young people have had a structured spiritual journey, generally in the Catholic Church, whose voice still counts in France. The president of the French branch, Henri Blanchard, is himself a former Picpus monk. Several Moonist cadres have a solid Catholic background. This movement thus attracts beings who are precious on the moral, spiritual and intellectual planes.

Convinced by the study of the “Divine Principle” that they are living “in the last days” and that Reverend Moon is the Messiah, these young people often abandon their studies, even if they resume them later. In the communal centres, the boys wear white shirts and ties, the girls are often in skirts. Curiously, they send back to their parents and to society the image of the traditional, polite and healthy France that is “going to the dogs”. Observers would be struck by the great idealistic freshness of these young people. All live a frugal, disciplined communal life in which sexual relations before marriage are inconceivable. Their life is at once monastic and very public. Many of these young people leave France for the United States. Reverend Moon is leading the Day of Hope campaign there, which culminates with the Madison Square Garden speech in New York on 18 September 1974: a turning point. The American press goes wild and the shock wave reaches France a few months later.

In the last months of 1974, “recruitment” in France accelerates, especially in Rennes, the city Henri Blanchard comes from, as do the first three members of the Association for the Unification of World Christianity (A.U.C.M.). Sometimes several members of the same family, or several friends from the same class, join. The “recruits” are younger and younger. Many attend the best schools of Rennes.

Cry from the heart, tom-tom effect and religious horror

If the family and tribal pain of the ADFI meets a national echo, it is through a chain of events well summed up by Gilbert Lebrun. In a report published for “Le Rennais” in 2004, on the occasion of the ADFI’s thirtieth anniversary and entitled “The fight against the cults began in Rennes”, he specifies:

“Determined to fight, Claire and Guy Champollion file, on 18 December 1974 at the prefecture of Ille-et-Vilaine, the statutes of the ADFI. On 21 January 1975, the journalist Joseph Fontaine publishes in Ouest-France the first article of a series entitled The Moon sickness, or the new messiahs, which would quickly find an echo in the national press. Testimonies flood in. A little more becomes known about Reverend Sun Myung Moon, founder of the new church.”[4]

The phenomenon of resonance between the cry from the heart of the relatives and the tom-tom effect of the local press would be incomplete without the entrance on stage of Father Pierre Le Cabellec [5]. In a Catholic Brittany, the word of a parish priest gives the crusade of the ADFI and Ouest-France the inquisitorial side that was missing to arouse a collective panic. It is here that one sees how aleatory the manufacture of the image is. In the phase known as “la secte Moon”, where the political power remains neutral, the adversary plays the card of religious horror: Moon is then a “guru”, “the Korean messiah” who abuses the credulity of the “followers” and “indoctrinates” them with a “heresy”.

Other “cults” are then making themselves talked about, such as the Children of God, Scientology or the Krishna Consciousness movement, but the trisyllabic term “la secte Moon” feeds the fantasies. This movement then appears as the purest archetype of the “cultic phenomenon”.

Later, the image of “l’Empire Moon” plays rather the card of political horror. The State, fearing to play Nero, seeks to deny the religious side of Moonism and of anti-Moonism. Whereas the established religions, in the days of “la secte Moon”, had shown some spiritual solidarity with the families and advised the ADFI, they will come to suspect the State of encroaching on a domain that does not concern it. The ADFI moreover renounces the confessional veneer of its beginnings, accepting the instrumentalisation of the government, which declares it of public utility and gives it subsidies. In the phase of “la secte Moon”, the ADFI attracted the parents of Moonists. In the phase of “l’Empire Moon”, it drives them away and the ADFI tends to become an empty shell: the parents of Moonists distance themselves from it, preferring to pacify their relations with their children. The State made use of the initial tribal hatred to settle its scores by taking the ADFI under its wing.

It is significant that Boyer dedicated his book to Madame Claire Champollion. After her husband’s death, she would campaign against Moonism only for ideological and political motives; on the individual and family plane, her relations with her son’s family had normalised. She would pursue her crusade against her favourite enemy almost until her death, but for motives less visceral than the defence of the family and the individual.

But let us return to the year 1975: the wave of Rennes Moonism suddenly strikes three reefs: the ADFI, born in Rennes, represents the resentment of the families who say they have been “broken” by the secte Moon. This cry from the heart and the guts, Ouest-France gives it a regional amplification: the daily (conscience of the west and voice of the Breton tribe) denounces the peril and alerts the whole of France. Finally, Father Le Cabellec brandishes the danger of heresy. Through his summary theological explanations, he leads the country to become passionate about christological questions: is Christ God or not? Is there a trinity? Did Jesus come in order to die on the cross? For years, these questions would return incessantly in connection with “la secte Moon”. They would disappear in the era of “l’Empire Moon”. The French phenomenon of the “secte Moon” is thus explained by a regional trio: the tribe of betrayed families unleashes the thunderbolts of the press and the local clergy against young heretics, in a country where the lowering of the age of majority had called into question centuries of relations between parents and children.

This cocktail explodes in January 1975, with a new peak in February. For the first time, indeed, a stunned France discovers on television the “mass weddings” celebrated by Moon and his wife. On 8 February 1975, 1,800 couples receive in Seoul the Blessing of the True Parents; among these new couples, there are six French people. PARIS MATCH publishes a long report on the event and does not hesitate to headline: “Moon, the living god, is taking our children.”[6]

Typical of the image of “la secte Moon”, the headline plays the cards of family horror (“taking” “our” children from “us”) and of the religious horror dear to Father Le Cabellec.

The Paris-Match article also mentions the first public meeting organised in Rennes by the ADFI, with parents of members of the Unification Church, on 16 February 1975. Claire Champollion modestly evokes the “stormy and impassioned” character of the meeting.[7] A sweet euphemism: when a Swiss mother dared to say that her three children were happy with Moon, she attracted not an adversarial debate but a din of indignation.

This meeting illustrates the phenomenon of mimicry depicted above: the blessing of 8 February marked for the French Moonists the passage from the individual-family level to the level of the great international tribe of the “blessed couples”. On 16 February, the ADFI, then only two months old, manages to federate into a European tribe the individuals and families who say they are victims of “la secte Moon”. In the following weeks, the ADFI opens provincial branches in all the French cities where the AUCM has centres. Each side marks the other.

But the French and particularly Breton context of “the Moon affair” does not suffice to explain its resonance. We have already underlined the role of the three principal actors in triggering the fear of 1975: the couple of Rennes notables, the local journalist, the parish priest. But another, international factor would amplify the panic.

Reverend Moon’s writings evoke a “21-year course” between 1960 and 1981 (three times seven years). If the years 1960-1967 correspond, for the Unification Church, to its individual, family and social implantation in Korea and Japan, they are also years when the movement does not yet exist in France. Henri Blanchard only encounters “the family” in March 1968 in Paris. Now in 1968 the Unification Church had begun in Korea its second 7-year course, which ends precisely with the blessing of the 1,800 couples in February 1975. During these seven years, Reverend Moon’s movement had on the one hand reached a national size in Korea, and on the other launched a powerful crusade on American territory. Moon himself arrives in the United States in 1971 and quickly obtains his green card.

At the moment when the ADFI stigmatises the AUCM in France, the public discovers a movement of planetary scale through the media. At once, the latter scent the spectacular and passionate side. For the blessing of the 1,800 couples marks, in the words of Moon himself, the beginning of the third and final 7-year course, in which the movement must reach the world stage. In April 1975, Moon sends Japanese, American and German missionaries to 120 countries. Many would remain 21 years in their mission nation. Now April 1975 is also the month that sees the fall of Saigon and Phnom Penh. Vientiane falls in December of the same year. In Africa, several countries fall into the communist purse. Faced with a communist international then in full expansion, the Western world does not react. The trauma of Watergate and the American humiliation in Vietnam leave the field free for Marxist-Leninist triumphalism.

The only international to defy world communism is then world Moonism, well before the moral reawakening of the 80s that would sweep away the red empire. Moon’s real strength is in fact insignificant, in money as in members, but he stakes everything on the great forgotten element of the fight against communism: the ideological offensive. And he launches the decisive slogan: “communism is not only the enemy of men, but the enemy of God”.

Just as the Marxists had first stupefied the world by the word, Moon declares an ideological war where the free world limits itself to scattered protests and to the humanitarian accompaniment of refugees. This verbal force suffices to create a legend attributing quasi-unlimited powers to the “Korean messiah”. It is this that would later fascinate Jean-François Boyer, when he described, dumbfounded, the zeal of the soldier-monks of “l’Empire Moon”.

At the beginning of 1975, Moon has mobilised the “International One World Crusade”, setting out from the United States and arriving in Japan and Korea. It comprises only five hundred young people of various nationalities, but the great rally of 7 June 1975 in Seoul gives them a planetary resonance: that day, a new peak of panic is reached in France, when the media reveal to the general public the Reverend’s power of action. He has gathered 1.2 million people in Seoul in a patriotic rally intended to counter the imminent threat of an invasion. In the crowd, Reverend Moon’s faithful are few in number, but they have managed to mobilise a whole people, and among them one recognises a few young Breton faces who, a few months earlier, were leading an uneventful life in Rennes. In the history of communism, never had such a rally taken place to oppose its expansion, and this rally marks the beginning of the 3rd and final 7-year course.

Abduction, bombing and auto-da-fé

The fight against Moonism in France then commits two derailments with grave consequences for religious freedom: a theoretical derailment, and a derailment of behaviour.

Anti-Moonist behaviour tips into a growing violence, which justifies itself: the authorities let it happen, on the grounds that these are “family matters”. Unpunished violence legitimises itself in the eyes of opinion. Given the passivity of the forces of order, everyone tells themselves that the only solution is probably to resort to force. The feeling of legal impunity would moreover be reinforced by a theoretical violence. We shall return to it. Ransacking of premises, abduction in broad daylight, a bomb placed to kill, the criminal acts are serious. Their impunity would mean that the AUCM, the victim, would definitively pass, in the eyes of public opinion, for the guilty party.

At the beginning of 1976, Reverend Moon sets his faithful an ambitious objective: a great patriotic rally at Yankee Stadium in New York, to celebrate the bicentenary of the American revolution and recall the role of the United States in Providence. The event would be a decisive stage in the strategy of conquering world public opinion. Now in January 1976, the European branch of the “International One World Crusade” arrives in France, and intensifies “recruitment” in the great cities of France.

Suddenly, stupefaction: the world’s televisions replay in a loop the abduction of Marie-Christine Amadéo by her parents. The cameras of the “third channel” filmed it live under the eyes of the gendarmes. Her mouth gagged by a powerful hand, the young Lyonnaise, of full age, struggles as hard as she can. The gendarmes observe the scene, doubtless ready to act if the Moonists tried to oppose force. The name Amadéo then goes around the world. A few months earlier, Paris-Match, sure of itself, had headlined: “Moon, the living God, is taking our children.” The shock of the abduction photos leads the editors to weigh the weight of words more carefully. On 31 January 1976, Marie-Christine is on the front page of Paris Match, smiling and arms crossed, slightly set back behind a fine photo of the Reverend, with this caption: “She is happy with Moon”.[8]

In the inside pages, one also discovers the photos of a young woman who is “less happy”. And for good reason: a few days after the failed abduction of Marie-Christine Amadéo (she would escape the surveillance of her “protectors”), a bombing smashes in the communal centre of the Villa Aublet in Paris. Gravely wounded in the arm, Ann-Britt Komedal, a Norwegian missionary, fights for months to avoid amputation: she would come out of it with a mutilated arm and lifelong after-effects. No investigation would ever elucidate this criminal affair.

In the days that follow, certain walls of Rennes are covered with inscriptions: “Moon assassin”. Ouest-France announces that a demonstration will be held in front of the AUCM’s headquarters, at 9 rue de Bertrand. The centre’s leaders alert the police station. When the day comes, an angry crowd shouts its slogans beneath the Moonists’ windows. The onlookers, the curious, the ADFI militants are marshalled by specialists in agit-prop; the groupuscular leftism of the Rennes campuses shouts the anger of the masses. No uniformed officer is visible, but plain-clothes agents are on the spot. Detailed photos would be taken from a building opposite. They show the leftists throwing photos and books out of the windows. Other shots show them burned on the spot in the street. Inside, the ringleaders who smashed in the centre’s front door have looted, broken, thrown. A young girl who had mingled with them leaves silent and in tears: the spectacle of the “brothers and sisters” praying serenely in one room while the rest of the premises is ransacked has moved her. A journalist from Armor Magazine would likewise be edified, and would write the first different article on Moonism in France.

The anti-AUCM violence profanes its image in public opinion. Wickedness towards the victim makes the victim wicked in the eyes of the city’s chorus: a classic of the procedures of stigmatisation. All the emotional arrows of the expression “la secte Moon” poison minds. A “cursed cult” attracts misfortune, there is the proof by nine. Yet the violence is only the armed wing of a theoretical anathema which must be understood.

This anathema consists in depersonalising the Moonists, to make of them “zombies” with whom all dialogue is vain, impossible. To arrive at this depersonalisation, reification, demonisation, the adversaries bring out a pseudo-science: “brainwashing” quickly becomes the last word of the Moon affair. The theory of brainwashing has little scientific credibility, but it would have an emotive credibility in the days of “la secte Moon”, Boyer would distance himself from it totally in order to defend the thesis of the soldier-monks in “l’Empire Moon”. To understand how so strange an idea could seduce public opinion and certain complaisant media, one must return to the context of the years 1975-76.

The first factor, doubtless decisive, is that quickly the procedure of “mimicry” between “rival tribes” dehumanises itself: once carried onto the public square and judicialised, the passion agitates an anonymous crowd, and no longer two tribes that know each other. Without arbitration between the two clans, a hardening takes place, an escalation.

Certainly, the AUCM would organise several meetings with the members’ parents, at the château de Mauny (up to 700 people in 1978). Bridges would be maintained between the members of the AUCM and those of the ADFI. On both sides, for some time, people try to avoid demonisation, the essential thing being to preserve family ties. While speaking of heresy and false doctrine, Father Le Cabellec was open to dialogue, out of pastoral concern. The Champollion couple themselves and other ADFI cadres knew how to debate; but new actors foreign to the affair would say that debate is vain. Mediatised to excess, internationalised, the affair escapes the parties involved. The escalation to extremes reflects the blockages of French society, the absence of places of mediation, of civil society.

This depersonalisation is theorised in various writings. In Les Nouvelles Sectes, Alain Woodrow, then a journalist at Le Monde, reports the turn taken by the ADFI:

“The ADFI of Rennes made a declaration to the Judicial Delegation of Rennes on 28 May 1975. After declaring that it refused to judge the doctrinal claims or the political aims of the (Moon) sect, the association formulates against it the following accusations:

• Deception as to the nature, aim and functioning of the movement. Brainwashing. Psychic terror. Rupture of family ties.

To which are added, according to the journalist himself, “refinements proper to this sect: frequent relocations, in the country of origin and then abroad, to cut the follower off completely from his milieu; confiscation, inside the communes, of shoes, to make flight materially more difficult; the practice of encouraging followers to hold back from urinating as long as possible - ostensibly to prove their ‘resistance to Satan’ - (in fact, the raising of the urea level in the body diminishes mental and physical resistance)”.[9]

Some, like Maurice Clavel, would denounce so crude a materialism and would recall, moreover, the rigour and asceticism of the evangelical precepts and of every authentically spiritual path. Others would recall the mysterious suddenness, the subjectivity of every conversion, its profoundly irrational aspect.

The second factor explaining the “brainwashing” theory: the Korean origin of this movement. As a young man, Reverend Moon lived through the concentration-camp experience of North Korea, the food deprivations and forced labour of the Heung Nam camp, the tortures to make Christians abjure their faith. His former torturers stuck the image of their crimes onto him. People have, on the other hand, forgotten what the Korean War was, and the genealogy of the idea of brainwashing. Until 1950, “brainwashing” did not exist in Western languages; it came to plaster onto a very brutal notion of de-braining and skull-stuffing the literal transcription of a Chinese ideogram xǐ nǎo (洗脑) which describes the reconstruction of the supposedly feudal or reactionary thoughts of the people; a figurative expression was taken literally by a crude scientism to describe something which, according to most specialists, is a myth.

According to the experts, brainwashing entered the language during the Korean War, in a military context it did not have at the start. In September 1950, the Miami Daily News publishes an article by the journalist Edward Hunter (1902-1978), the first to speak of “brainwashing”, a few months after the start of the Korean War. In 1951 he publishes Brain-Washing in Red China, and in 1956 Brainwashing: The Story of Men Who Defied It. Hunter’s theories are terrifying and have hardly been corroborated on the scientific plane. He himself, a CIA agent as much as a journalist, is said to have sought to accredit the idea of an effective brainwashing, the better to demonise a technique that was, all in all, primitive and did not deserve such regard. The “counter-brainwashing” developed by the CIA was a disaster.[10]

During the Korean War, the communists attempted to make Western soldiers docile to their cause. In The Manchurian Candidate [11], an American soldier, son of a family of prominent politicians, is captured by the Soviets on Korean territory and programmed to kill the future president of the United States. The film is so implausible that it empties the idea of brainwashing of meaning. The staging of the mental manipulation is caricatural and treated, moreover, in a comic mode. Yet the “Korean plot” is only the film’s first level. The film’s strength is to suggest the more disturbing, but more plausible, idea of the typical profile of a person who may one day let himself be manipulated; it is this classical psychology that is the most credible thing in the film, rather than the heavy artillery of brainwashing. Of the film’s two heroes supposed to have been brainwashed, only the fragile man will crack. The film’s assassin is at the start a man unbalanced by his mother. The staging shows that it is the mental torture she exercises that leads him to murder, far more than the North Korean plot.

Let us return to “brainwashing” in “la secte Moon”. “Moonist” psychiatric wrecks, there have been, as in every religious movement at its margins. But the clinical accounts evoke subjects who were very fragile at the start, who thought they had found in this movement a respite from their inner demons before sinking again. Objectivity would require that one also study the cases of psychically ill subjects who found in Moonism a relative spiritual and family flourishing that society would not necessarily have offered them. It is in both directions that psychiatry must investigate, as it does in the study of the other religious orders, which can just as easily structure as annihilate fragile subjects. A better knowledge of religious history shows that the great spiritual guides have always attracted a certain share of the sick. What would the Christ of the Gospels be without that cohort of paralytics, the lame, the blind, the possessed, the sick of every kind hoping for deliverance?

As for “brainwashing”, it is better to confine it to the context of the Korean War. It is, moreover, doubtless more a mystification of Hunter’s, amplified by the Manchurian Candidate, than a scientific reality.

Several serious studies by American doctors have shown that the techniques of “brainwashing” (sleep deprivation, harassment) had a superficial impact, aiming more at the stupefaction of the prisoners during their captivity than at their adhesion to a belief. Certain psychiatrists who worked on prisoners of war apparently very affected during their captivity showed that they quickly returned to normal, and evoked a remarkable “homeostasis” of the human mind. But myths die hard, and it is interesting to see how, 25 years after the Korean War, the myth of North Korean brainwashing was projected onto Reverend Moon.

However, the context of the Korean War does not totally explain the genealogy of “brainwashing”. To realise the psychiatric absurdity of this term, one must know Chinese, a language in which “brainwashing” is above all not to be taken at face value. Maoism borrows its “xǐ nǎo” from Taoism and its “xǐ xīn” 洗心 (washing of the heart), an inscription that adorns the entrance of many Chinese temples. The “political and ideological purification” demanded by Chinese communism is thus an allusion to the old tradition of asceticism of the heart widespread in Asia. The Chinese ideologues, to evoke ideological persuasion and re-education, also spoke of “sī xǐang gǎi zào”: reform of thought. We are very far from Hunter’s woolly idea in which brainwashing is a draining of the brain followed by a refilling with another programme. Hunter diverted the Chinese term from its meaning to apply it to his own fantasy of a Pavlovism that would succeed.

If the international scientific community almost unanimously rejects “brainwashing”, does it then retain the notion of “mental manipulation” applied to religious movements? Without rejecting the colleagues who believe in it, most professional psychiatrists ask them to give credible experimental proof of it. There is no point in rejecting a hypothesis a priori, for even badly formulated, it pushes reflection forward. The idea that seems to impose itself on everyone, and which meets simple common sense, is that the temptation of mental manipulation certainly exists in “the cults”, consciously or unconsciously. It is a trait of all cultures, a trait of human nature, and manifests itself in many domains of daily life. To see it only in the cults would be typical of a classic process of stigmatisation.

The third factor behind the brainwashing myth is the deprogramming network. The deprogrammers, often paid very dearly by parents to take their children back from the gurus and hold them captive, strive to bring the follower back to normal by a course symmetrically inverse to his conversion. Always the same mimicry already observed. As Massimo Introvigne and Dick Anthony report:

“The deprogrammers lure the members of religious movements, under various pretexts, then shut them up in isolated houses, bombarding them with information hostile to the group, in order to obtain a ‘deconditioning’ that is supposed to ‘reverse’ the effects of the brainwashing. (…) The 1970s and 1980s are strewn with episodes in which the deprogrammers are the object of grave accusations: use of drugs, physical violence, sexual relations, indeed outright ill-treatment. Almost all the best-known deprogrammers, moreover, ended up in prison.[12]

2. “L’Empire Moon”

How does one pass from one image to another? From “la secte Moon” to “l’Empire Moon”? These two myths are born in France, why? Why their worldwide resonance? How to explain that the cult obsession shakes so strongly the rational bedrock of the country of Descartes? “I detest what you write, but I would give my life so that you could continue to write”. This remark is attributed to Voltaire in a letter he is said to have written to an abbé: yet it is in the gentle Voltairean France that a good parish priest, Father Jacques Trouslard, can declare himself “obsédé sectuel” (“sect-obsessed”) and receive in 2002 the Legion of Honour in homage to his combat against the cults.[13] Blessed are the “obsédés sectuels”, the Legion of Honour is promised to them!

Is it State laïcité that drives the children of Descartes mad? Certainly, a certain French laïcisme, triumphant under Mitterrand after 1981, found in the cults a choice target, particularly Reverend Moon’s movement. In the 25 years that followed, there were 4 parliamentary commissions on the cults, and a list of 172 dangerous cults was even published by Parliament in 1996. In 1997, an “Interministerial Mission for the Fight against the Cults” came into being. These French exceptions have no equivalent in the other democratic States. According to Jean Baubérot, a specialist in laïcité, “This allows one to advance the hypothesis that the different social treatment of the cults in France, compared with the great majority of democratic countries, may be linked to the dominant overall functioning of French-style laïcité.”[14]

But State laïcité does not explain everything. It plays on a permeable French collective unconscious, on an inflammable public opinion with archaic foundations. During the period of “l’Empire Moon”, Jean-François Boyer conjures up a whole imaginary that pleases the French and would also seduce the Russian public, where the book would be a best-seller.

2.1 Fascinated by his subject

The book constitutes a turning point in the literature on Moonism. Massimo Introvigne, known for his concern to present the new religious movements with neutrality, is not tender with Boyer. Speaking of the literature that attacks the Unification Church, Introvigne specifies: “The most typical example of this genre of literature is doubtless L’Empire Moon. The author seems not, or very little, interested in the religious aspect of the phenomenon, about which he says a few enormities. He appears solely concerned by the anticommunist activities of the Unification Church and by the list of people who cooperate, even very distantly, with unificationism.”[15]

Introvigne’s judgement may seem unjust. Boyer conducted an international enquiry, had extensive contacts with the members of the Church, which is exceedingly rare among those who write, and became genuinely passionate about his subject. It was the enquiry of his life, which earned him an international renown. Boyer was not motivated by a brutal hostility. But he was too fascinated by his subject, and his book shows it.

Let us begin by seeing what is credible in Boyer’s thesis. L’Empire Moon appears in 1986, the year Pierre Ceyrac is elected, at the age of 40, deputy in the National Assembly, 20 years after the arrival of Reiner Vincenz, the very first Moonist missionary in France. Ceyrac is often cited in Boyer’s book. The French Moonist movement, despite the intense harassment it has been subjected to since Mitterrand’s arrival in power, sends one of its own to Parliament. He would later be a European deputy, then a departmental councillor of the Nord. In the 1980s, Moon is imprisoned in the United States, but his daily, the Washington Times, wins respect in the media world. Out of prison, Moon is acclaimed by more than 1,800 American pastors, and made doctor honoris causa of Latin American universities. He has a seminar held at the Hotel Intercontinental in Geneva on the end of the Soviet Empire. This is 1985, in the middle of triumphant perestroika, and few Sovietologists envisage the coming end of the “evil empire”. Five years later, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in April 1990, Moon enters Moscow at the head of a delegation of 1,000 personalities from all over the world; many former heads of State have made the journey. The meeting with Gorbachev would be followed by a series of seminars in which tens of thousands of Russian students would take part. Very few would join the Unification Church. But many would defend the parliament and the young Russian democracy during the putsch of August 1991. The collapse prophesied in 1985 had come to pass. Written in 1986, L’Empire Moon overestimates the real means of Reverend Moon. But it has the very great fault of underestimating the ground swell of which Moon is the most emblematic figure and which would engulf the Soviet empire. Boyer’s whole problem is to exaggerate the features of the prophet while minimising the content of his prophecy. Later, Boyer thought fit to say that with the end of communism, “Moonism” no longer had any reason to exist, precisely because he never took the trouble to study the totality of its teaching.

Be that as it may, L’Empire Moon reads like a documented enquiry into a structured international movement, endowed with a powerful network of influence and substantial means, and which aims at power. This first-level reading does not explain why this book was written in France and exercised such fascination there.

Another reading, at the second level, favours the hypothesis of mimicry. Boyer is carried away by his quasi-obsessional fascination for the object of his study. Never again would his career offer him such a subject, he would be orphaned by it. He seems to have put a great deal of himself into it and projected his personal fantasies.

The book often crosses the ethical limits of investigative journalism and turns detective. Starting from murky and often subversive methods, it is easy for him to project a disquieting aura onto the object of his study. He is to the Empire Moon what the deprogrammers are to “la secte Moon”: always a little police idea in the head, alas. Thus, one of the theses of “l’Empire Moon” is that this empire carries out an occult and sly work of infiltrating society, advancing masked. One may of course adhere to this content. Where prudence is called for is in the methods chosen by the author: to unpack all these revelations about L’Empire Moon, Boyer did not hesitate to infiltrate a spy who feigned conversion and therefore lied about his identity and his true intentions. Boyer also resorts abundantly to telephone taps complaisantly relayed by the police. He acts thus while doing everything to cajole and inspire confidence in the members of the Church, and to give pledges of his sincerity. The constant feeling of a double game is off-putting.

2.2 The Moon Empire and the Mitterrand Empire

Fascinated by the image he forms of the movement, Boyer piles it on and prefers to ignore all sorts of Moonist activities that do not fit his thesis. The fantasy of L’Empire Moon can thus only function in a French society accustomed to opacity, to anonymous denunciations, to the double game, to “film noir”, to a taste for dirty tricks, where the general public accepts a certain skulduggery in power relations. It remains to grasp the function of such a work in the French society of the time. We have seen how the French society of the 70s had been permeable to the fabulous myth of “la secte Moon”. To set the witch-hunt against heresy racing, it had sufficed to bring together the ADFI tribe, the Ouest-France tom-tom and the tribe’s priest.

These actors no longer exist in the 80s. The French Moonists pass from a communal and monastic life to long-term work to accomplish their family ideal. Their preoccupations are to find work, housing, and to raise their children, generally numerous. Henceforth the unificationists would invest themselves greatly in their family success. Sociologically, the movement is no longer the same and tends towards the model that already exists in Korea: a church gathered around its pastors, where the faithful pay a tithe and diffuse an influence in their neighbourhood. Many have been reconciled with their parents, who are no longer “clients” of the ADFI. As for the clergy in general, it recoils from ideas of “mental manipulation”. Abbé Trouslard, the “obsédé sectuel”, is an exception.

But the Moonophobia injected in high doses into French society has left a mental trace there. The country is in withdrawal from that sensationalism which is now part of its psychic landscape. The success of L’Empire Moon can be read as an answer to that lack, on the one hand; on the other, as a mirror of Mitterrandian France. Under Giscardian France, several actors of civil society had driven adhesion to the mythology of “la secte Moon”. Once these actors were forgotten, and with society still in withdrawal, the Mitterrandian State monopolises the cult-hunting drive. The cult obsession of this State intrigues. The 14 years of Mitterrandism are of course a continuation of the political game proper to the French Republic. At the margin, there is also a whole crowd of sorcerer’s apprentices of “changing life” for whom 10 May 1981 is “the frontier that separates night from light”[16]. This is the hour of social experimentation in which the new socialist clergy would lose its soul and lose the faith. The symptoms of this decay would include an art of controlling money, power and persons which is to politics what heresy is to religious orthodoxy. The corruption of power under the mitterrandie refers back almost to the typology of cultic power. The fantasy of the Moon Empire, mirror of the Mitterrand Empire, as well as its ritual scapegoat? Even if Boyer did not write with that intention, his book played that role on the sociological plane.

The 1980s come at a bad time for the social-messianism of the common programme. It is carried to power by Mitterrand, a man often suspected of imposture by his own camp; but this time the imposture worked. From a power at odds with the wind of history would come a dérive sectaire.

The 1980s see the emergence of moral figures standing up against the totalitarianism that still intimidated many democracies. Pope John Paul II, Václav Havel, Lech Wałęsa, and others make oppression retreat in Europe. The faith of the Afghans tames the Soviets. Many resisters of the shadows who knew prison, exclusion, banishment would finally take power. Now Moon is in that camp, as he was formerly in the fight against Japanese fascism; several of his missionaries clandestinely risked their lives in Eastern Europe, one of them perished in the Czechoslovak jails, the unificationist film-maker Lee Shapiro was killed by the Soviets in Afghanistan in 1987. In Tanzania, a Japanese missionary was assassinated by the political police. Boyer could have seen that Reverend Moon’s combat partook of the same fundamentally liberating logic.

In the same 1980s, a president accedes to power in France with a common programme that preaches rupture with capitalism, and undertakes his campaign of nationalisations as soon as he is elected. Many nationalised companies would later be at the heart of financial scandals without precedent under the 5th Republic. For several years, the French government governs with four communist ministers, even as the last Marxist-Leninist regimes to come to power in 1975 distinguished themselves by horrors rarely seen in human history. The great affair of 1984 would be the bitter fight against private schooling, finally lost, which empties the ideology of the common programme of meaning. The previous year, Alain Vivien had published a report on the cults in France, the beginning of a long war of the French State against religious minorities. Yet the 80s signal the powerful return of the religious in the art of steering history: Pope John Paul II, Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu, Lech Wałęsa.

Curiously, there exists a curious country where the president has himself called “God” or “Tonton”, has himself photographed with his courtiers on the pilgrimage of Solutré every year at Pentecost, and organises around himself a network of swooning Mitterrand-worshippers. France is under influence. The president is re-elected in 1988 with a “Génération Mitterrand” poster in which a baby gives its hand to the old monarch, of whom only a few fingers are visible. An involuntary parody of the creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel, an allegory of a power at once senilising and infantilising, the poster reminds us of the real state of France at the time of “l’Empire Moon”: a country adrift, with its Irishmen of Vincennes, its false Turenge spouses sinking the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour, its telephone taps to protect the president’s daughter. A scenario unimaginable in any democracy, but which stupefies the country for 14 years. And it is this power that wanted to bring down Moonism in France.

A little-known clue shows the scale of the phenomenon of mimicry. On 8 June 1982, a search takes place at 6 am at the headquarters of the AUCM, 18 rue Friant. Several sympathising university professors also receive early-morning visits. What are the forces of order looking for? Weapons, drugs. Who put them on the trail? Two deprogrammers, one of them a former member of the movement, Martin Faiers. In March 1982, the two acolytes had held Claire Chateau captive in a villa in the Doubs. On the prosecutor’s orders, the police would free the young Moonist. Faiers risks the assizes, but he then confides to the investigating judge that Claire was abducted for her own good and that the police will realise it by searching the cult’s premises. Nothing, of course, would be found. In the months that followed, the AUCM, harassed by a ruinous tax trial, leaves its headquarters at 18 rue Friant.

Now in 1985, a great affair of the first seven-year term holds the press spellbound for weeks: the Carrefour du Développement affair, linked to the ministry of cooperation: Yves Challier, chief of staff of the then minister, would be accused of having embezzled 27 million francs between 1984 and 1986 from the ministry’s coffers, with the help of forgery of public documents and breach of trust. Certainly, the sin of the Carrefour appears venial compared with far heavier financial scandals touching the Mitterrandian power. But he who steals an egg steals an ox, and fraud is one of the most frequent clues of a “dérive sectaire”. Now the sin was committed at a curious address in Paris: 18 rue Friant. The venal development company had set itself up in the very place the police had searched, looking for innocents, in 1982.

The Irishmen of Vincennes, the presidential wiretaps, the State crime against Greenpeace reveal a pronounced taste for parallel power, a drift of the public thing towards an oligarchic, brutal, cynical power, where men of the shadows devote themselves to the prince in order to harm others. The enslavement of souls in base tasks to protect a caste indicates a profound rupture with political orthodoxy and a pronounced taste for imposture.

The monarch’s twilight leads the weakest souls of the regime, the most dependent on the guru, towards death. Mitterrand finally gives the pathetic Bérégovoy the power he burned for, the Prime Minister’s interlude would be a descent into hell concluded by a suicide; the chagrin of no longer being loved by the prince seems to have played a fatal role. Another death bloodies the parallel alleys of “l’Empire Mitterrand”. François de Grossouvre, quintessence of the Mitterrandian courtier chilled by the manipulative indifference of his idol, was found dead in the very Palace of the ageing “God”, his .357 magnum in his hand. Suicide or assassination, no matter, the heart had been spurned, the brain was carried off: a man of the shadows dead of and for “l’Empire Mitterrand”.

That was in 1994. Many of those who then lived for “l’Empire Moon” celebrated that year, with joy and solemnity, the 40th anniversary of a movement ceaselessly persecuted since its foundation in 1954, and many of whose adversaries lapsed into imposture.

[1] Alain Woodrow, “Les Nouvelles Sectes”, éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1977, back cover

[2] “La lutte contre les sectes a démarré à Rennes”, http://prevensectes.com/moon32.htm

[3] In “Bulles” of the first quarter of 1992, to the question “why this name ADFI?” she replies: “The one that was chosen did not please us all that much: the family was rather ‘retro’ at the time. But it was true that each departure to the AUCM had been a family drama, and that the individuals in question passed under the hold of a force that deprived them of all personal liberty, of all critical spirit, at least with regard to that decision. So, ADFI it was.”

[4] On the origins of the ADFI, one may read the detailed testimony of Madame Claire Champollion at http://prevensectes.com/moon17.htm

[5] Moon ou Jésus, 1977, Le Dossier Moon, 1983

[6] No. 1344 of 1 March 1975

[7] http://prevensectes.com/moon17.htm

[8] Paris-Match 1392, 31 January 1976

[9] Alain Woodrow, op. cit. p. 108

[10] Project MK-ULTRA was the name of this project

[11] Film by John Frankenheimer, 1962, with Frank Sinatra, Janet Leigh, Laurence Harvey

[12] Massimo Introvigne, Dick Anthony, Le lavage de cerveau, mythe ou réalité ?

[13] Pourfendeur de sectes, Grégoire Amir-Tahmasseb - L’Union, Sunday 30 March 2003

[14] Jean Baubérot, during a lecture at the MIVILUDES, early 2004

[15] Moon et l’Église de l’Unification, CESNUR, 1996, pp. 19-20

[16] Jack Lang, National Assembly, 17 November 1985