Unification Church Sending Lectures, Books to 300,000 Clergy Across U.S.

About 300,000 clergy across the country are receiving gift packets from the Unification Church containing three videotaped lectures and two books written by the sect’s imprisoned founder, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

Unification Church officials emphasize that the unsolicited mailings were not sent for proselytizing purposes but to state their beliefs, via the videotape recorder, to priests, ministers and rabbis.

Unification Church officials said some pastors have “returned the charred remains of the tapes they burned.” But by mid-March, the officials added, of more than 550 recipients who telephoned or wrote to the church’s New York headquarters, 58% were “very open to positive,” 39% were “clearly negative” and 3% were neutral.

Last year, Moon began serving an 18-month prison sentence for failing to pay $150,000 in personal income taxes. His church has argued that the money belonged to the church, not to Moon personally, and that the conviction violated the principle of religious freedom.

Follow-Up Phone Calls

Several Southern California ministers reported getting follow-up phone calls from persons who said they were aligned with CAUSA, an anti-Communist organization founded by Moon that maintains a close working relationship with the Unification Church.

Joy Garratt, public affairs director for Unification Church headquarters in New York City, said any calls from CAUSA workers would be a separate activity by people working with different mailing lists.

The Unification Church spokeswoman said the packets were assembled with volunteer labor and declined to give the project’s cost.

The project “is an organized effort to enlist public support both for their church and for Rev. Moon,” said Gary Leazer of the Southern Baptists’ Home Mission Board.

The two-hour videotapes contain lectures by the Rev. Thomas McDevitt, a church member for 12 years and regional coordinator for Unification projects in the Washington, D.C., area.

Hope of New Messiah

The Korean-born Moon brought his international movement to the United States in the 1960s. He has taught that adultery is a major problem for humanity and that hope lies in a new Messiah, from the East, to unite Christianity. Moon himself was identified by followers in the early years as the Messiah, but that claim has been downplayed for the last decade.

Most of the Unification Church packets being sent to 13,578 clergy in California were delivered within the past several weeks.

Regional United Methodist Church leaders meeting this week in Pasadena agreed in discussions, according to a spokesman, that clergy should be advised not to become involved with CAUSA or the Unification Church because of the latter’s differences with Methodist theology. The Rev. David Scott, the church’s Pasadena district superintendent, said he has told several callers to ignore the offers.

Mark Anderson, director for the Unification Church in the Los Angeles area, said the church has about 300 members in the Los Angeles area, including 35 full-time staff members and missionaries.