Raising Hell: Growing up 2nd

I believe most people I bonded with while growing up have also seen through a lot of the fucked up systems and teachings of the church. I hope I am able to express and share in this process with them (or you) and perhaps hope to lend in the processing of others who still may feel trapped or hesitant or unsure of their own feeling and conclusions.  This article isn't for people still interested in pursuing the ideals of the church. I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything but rather hope to convey my experiences in a healing process. I encourage comments but it is not likely I will respond to any trolling or useless debate.

While some ex-Moonies may find exposing Reverend Moon or members of his family for their hypocrisy and scandals personally vindicating and supporting their decision to leave the church, I am most interested in elaborating on my personal experiences—experiences I now view as injustices and direct harm, that I had growing up as a member of the Unification Church.

Social alienation and censored upbringing: It taught youth that they were “different” “special” “purified” people of a different quality and type than people “outside” the church.  This leads to an alienation with other people and a strange in-group out-group mentality that often lends to superiority-inferiority complexes and judgment of other people’s lives as not being as valuable as a “purified” person in the church.

Ex-post facto justifications: History is seen as god’s will as narrated through the teachings of the church, thus the genocide of native Americans, the holocaust, slavery, etc. are seen as the proper progression of history, and often is taught along with “moral justifications” for these events. The violence of Christianity is unexamined (mission system in the US, anyone?). Systems of oppression, sexism, racism, genocide are all normalized and rather than the movement being anything resembling a true critique or shift in these systems, they are replicated implicitly and explicitly in a myriad of ways. 

Explicit homophobia: I heard people I otherwise respected give the slippery slope argument against gay marriage (what’s next, marrying animals?), heard Rev. Moon’s translator stumble over trying to edit homophobic remarks (homosexuals are worse than dogs). I was encouraged to read a book by Richard Cohen (a “cured” gay member) featuring pseudo -sciencey case studies pathologizing homosexuality. 

Purity culture: Everything is about sex and the control of sexual desire. By mandating that we not be sexual, focus on purity, and talking about marriage we are constantly talking about sex and it is the central discourse of the movement. By teaching young people that their value is tied to their virginity, many people are put in harms way.  Paired with purity culture was abstinence only sex education, slut-shaming, and rape culture (if she didn’t do something to deserve it [which she probably did], I bet her ancestors did).

Lineage teaching: The focus on a pure lineage and “2^nd generation” did several harmful things. First, it gave parents a creepy entitlement to their children’s sexuality and sex lives, demanding that they follow a strict path of purity and ultimately end up in church sanctioned unions with a member of the opposite sex. Having premarital sex is then the dividing line between in-group and out-group, as once a persona has sex, they are no longer a valued member of their community and no longer “purified” under the lineage requirements. This is then accounted for by other ritual and purification processes to allow for a continued membership, but as a second class or demoted status person within the organization. Those who had sex before the sanctioned marriage in the church were designated “special category” and were encouraged to renounce what they did and get back on a path to purity in the hopes of marrying someone in the church, now only eligible to marry other “special category” church members.

Consent: Teachings about relationships and consensual sex are not present.  Sex is viewed as the ultimate payoff for purity and self-denial. Members are encouraged to forgo sex and follow a strict life of purity as a course to get to a state of sanctioned marriage with another person of equal purity and once that union is sanctioned and ritually complete, a relationship of “absolute sex” is permitted and ones partner’s genitals are seen as one’s own property. This is a problematic teaching as it lends to a sense of entitlement of another person and ignores issues of consent.

Dualism and Black/White binary thinking: Strict gender proscriptions and dualism teachings encourage black and white thinking and mentality about the world. Gender is viewed as inherent and of a specific type. There are specific ways that masculinity is to be embodied as well as femininity.

Racist essentializing: The “superiority” and “inherent purity” of Korean people plays into the myths around Asian women and supports racial superiority of Korean people. This is harmful to other races as well as Korean people, who are confined to boxes and put on pedestals within the movement.  Other racist or nationalist caricatures are supported (black people are entertainers, American women are individualistic bitches) and a true examination of race and its constructions and meanings is not attempted or acknowledged. This leaves dominant-submissive racial and cultural differences between interracial marriages to be navigated in isolation and leaves children to operate in the world without any real discussions about race and its impacts.

Misogyny: Rev. Moon only sees women living in a way he condones to be worthy of respect and safety. He often compares women to cows, where every piece of her biology has a purpose to serve others. In one speech her suggests if a woman doesn’t want to use her breasts to feed a baby it should be cut off. His abusive and withholding beginning of his marriage with Mrs. Moon is idealized and she is put on a pedestal for her undying submission to him and for “proving herself” during the first seven years of their marriage. Strict gender roles are prescribed and their subordinate status to men is affirmed through the teachings that men are “subject” and women “object”.

This reflection has helped me express a fraction of the processing it has taken for me to shift from my upbringing, where I thought I was a part of a revolutionary group and something special and transformative to now where I recognize the unification church as a fringe backlash movement of the 50’s and 60’s of women’s liberation. Far from being a liberating and uplifting movement, it offers very disturbing explicit messages about the natural order of male domination and female subservience, lack of autonomy and control of one’s body and consent, simplistic racial stereotypes, and explicit statements of violence toward women. These are all problematic and are not fringe statements of the movement, rather they are the core tenants of the doctrine that centers on prescriptions around sex. 

This reflection is for me, but I am sharing it in hopes to allow others to process and share in their own transformations through their upbringing in the Unification Church. I know and respect many people who I know through the Unification Church, some of which are still practicing members and this is not meant as an attack on them or their beliefs (though, if this upsets you a lot, maybe look into some of those things and work through that).  I opted out from the Unification Church and through that process experienced many shifts in myself. I write this in hope to give a voice to my experiences and articulate some of the problematic parts of growing up in the unification church that negatively impacted my life and put up roadblocks for my understandings of myself. 

*this post is a part of a multigenre project for a class. Feel free to comment and share.

Painting 

fridge magnet poetry