Sun Myung Moon Biography

Sun Myung Moon was a Korean religious leader, a self-proclaimed messiah who was the founder of the Unification Church. He was a leading figure in what Eileen V. Barker, a professor emeritus of sociology at the London School of Economics, called “the great wave of new religious movements and alternative religiosity in the 1960s and 1970s in the West”. He built a religious movement notable for its mass weddings and authored ‘The Divine Principle’, the main theological textbook of the Unification Church. Born into a family of farmers in Korea, he converted to Christianity as a young boy along with his family. From an early age he observed his surroundings and was distressed by rampant injustice and sufferings of the people. He believed that religion addressed the fundamental human condition and only religion could provide a way for easing the sufferings of the people. He once had a vision of Jesus asking him to continue the work which he had begun on earth nearly 2,000 years before. In order to fulfill the Lord’s command he plunged head on into religious studies in order to understand the deeper questions of life. Eventually he moved to the United States and became a leading figure of the new religious movement. With time he also branched out into political activism and business.