History of Moonies

History * Sun Myung Moon was born in 1920 in what is now North Korea. At the time, Korea was under Japanese rule. Moon was raised in the Presbyterian church, one of many faiths persecuted by the Japanese rulers. The political upheavals caused divisions and new movements in Korean Christianity, including a group known as "spiritualists" who received new revelations from God and looked for a Korean messiah. * Moon says that on Easter morning at the age of 16, he had a vision in which Jesus asked him to complete his unfinished work as messiah, which is to bring the Kingdom of God to mankind and peace on earth. Accepting this call, Moon studied the Bible and other religious teachings and developed his complex doctrines about God, love, sin and the means of salvation. Moon began to preach his doctrines in Korea in 1946. * Two years later he was excommunicated by the Presbyterian Church, and shortly thereafter he was imprisoned and tortured by the North Korean authorities for reasons that are not entirely clear. In 1950 he was released and fled to South Korea, where in 1954 he founded the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity (HSA-UWC), or the Unification Church.One of Moon's early converts would come to be tremendously influential in the spread of Unificationism in America. Young Oon Kim, known as Miss Kim, was prone to seeing visions in her youth and came to believe she had a religious role of importance to fulfill in the world. She was especially interested in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (which influenced New Thought), and even reported receiving visits from him in visions. Miss Kim met Reverend Moon in 1954, converted to Unificationism, and became the first missionary of the Unification Church to the United States. She settled in Eugene, Oregon, in 1959, where she was student at the University of Oregon in order to stay in the United States. She worked to support her expenses and in her spare time proselytized and