During the Cult Scare of the 1970s-80s, the Unification Church, otherwise known as the Moonies, were a lightning rod for controversy. Their interface with the public was through proselytizers with glassy eyes and smiles that were a little too big to be true. Accusations of kidnapping, con artistry, teaching false religious doctrines, deceptive recruiting techniques, and brainwashing were common. Those last two issues are examined in an academic study by the sociologist Eileen Barker in The Making Of a Moonie: Brainwashing or Choice?
By the end of the 1970s, the Unification Church was spreading rapidly throughout North America, Western Europe, and Asia. Their belief system was ecumenical in its pursuit of uniting all religions into one under their leader Reverend Sun Myung Moon, a charismatic Protestant from South Korea. Church belief and ritual was syncretic, combining elements of Evangelical Christianity, Confucianism, Taoism, and Korean shamanism. Moon claimed to be the Messiah sent to Earth because previous leaders of world religions have failed to save humanity. The church was famous in those days for having mass weddings in which Moon chose brides and grooms at random to marry each other.
Sun Myung Moon had a colorful past. During the Korean War, he was tortured by the Chinese Communists in a prison camp. He claimed to have met Jesus Christ who told him that the crucifixion proved that he had failed as a messiah and it was Moon’s duty to pick up where he left off. After establishing the Unification Church in South Korea and Japan, Moon opened its world headquarters outside of New York City while overseeing a vast network of corporate businesses and real estate that included a weapons manufacturing plant and a newspaper with a right wing extremist editorial bias. Moon later went to prison in America for tax evasion and money laundering. Eileen Barker neglects to mention that Moon had worked for the Korean Central Intelligence Agency and liaised with members of the American CIA during the era when they were conducting brainwashing experiments in the MK Ultra program. She also doesn’t mention that the Unification Church has deep financial ties to the Republican Party through lobbying and campaign contributions.
Eilen Barker’s goal is to investigate whether accusations of brainwashing are accurate or not. “Brainwashing”, as she defines it, means erasing the contents of a person’s mind and filling it with the authority’s chosen contents thereby turning people into robots who do whatever they are commanded to withlut question. I have immediate suspicions of her definition. It isn’t hard to disprove her definition of brainwashing becase it doesn’t define what is done during thought reform conditioning.
A point of comparison could be made with the training of soldiers in the military when they are taught to obey commands from officers and to do so without thought or hesitation. This is necessary because anybody with common sense would be reluctant to walk into a battlefield with people shooting and bombing each other unless they have a death wish. But soldiers learn to do this on command. This could be considered a form of brainwashing and yet those soldiers still have the ability to make choices. The number of soldiers who go AWOL proves this as well as what they do during leisure time. Plus soldiers can and sometimes do disobey orders with the caveat that they suffer consequences for it. So I’m not convinced that brainwashing entails the idea of turning people into mindless robots. People inside high pressure control groups can still think for themselves and make choices. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t authorities setting the parameters of what choices they are allowed to make though. I’m not comfortable with the term “brainwashing” anyhow. I much prefer something like “psychological/social conditioning”. So right off the bat, there are problems with Barker’s study.
The fieldwork was done using two methods. One was participant observation in which Barker attended Moonie recruitment workshops. The other was having workshop participants fill in surveys. The workshops were held in attractive-looking buildings in rural areas outside San Francisco and London. Participants are brought in from cities on buses owned by the Moonies. Initial workshops run for three days with subsequent workshops running for one week or one month before a member commits to joining full or part time. Barker makes the observation that no one tried to leave the workshops, disproving the accusation that the church holds people against their will during the recruitment process. But I find her conclusion to be hasty as I think something more subtle was going on. It may be true that anybody could leave the premises any time they wanted. The doors weren’t locked as she pointed out. But being in a rural area without transportation was a factor she didn’t consider. Most people would be smart enough not to walk the long distance back to the city, especially when they didn’t have sufficient directions. Hitchhiking might be an option, but by the end of the 70s, violent crimes against hitchikers had made the practice almost obsolete. It would make the most sense to put up with the remainder of the workshop and be taken back at the end. So yes, the individual who wantsedto leave had a choice, but the parameters of the choice were limited, something that Eilen Barker never took into consideration.
The workshops consisted of group discussions, meals, walking, game playing, singing, group prayers, and listening to sermons. Sleep time was limited and potential recruits were woken up early to walk and play sports before breakfast. All activities were closely monitored and guided by Unification Church recruiters. Critics of the cult have made accusations of sleep deprivation being used to make members too fatigued to think clearly. But Barker dismisses this by saying she didn’t see any evidence that workshop attendees weren’t thinking clearly. Of course, the attendees weren’t allowed to have any in depth conversations during the workshops so it is hard to know what evidence she based her conclusion on.
Another accusation made by critics is that the Moonies brainwash people by inducing altered states of consciousness. Barker also dismisses this by saying she saw no evidence. But she never operationalizes the concept of “altered states of consciousness”. She doesn’t consider that singing or praying in groups could fall into this category. During the act of singing, for instance, the individual’s ego can get dissolved into the collectivity of the group, making the individual more susceptible to peer pressure and suggestion from outside. That doesn’t mean every time people sing they are being brainwashed; it means by submitting to the activity they can be softened up and made more receptive to suggestions, some of which may not be in their best interest. Singing and prayer can also be a way of creating an emotional bond between the individual and the group as well as being a means for controlling and regulating moods and emotions. Something similar can be achieved through group prayer or playing team sports, activities in which the group’s solidarity supersedes the importance of the individual in a goal directed task. Combine sport activities with sleep deprivation and some people can be turned into putty in the hands of an authority figure. Sleep deprivation works in the military and it is commonly used in cults too.
Also the constant supervision and guidance of recruiters was dismissed by Barker as being harmless, but it is easy to see another perspective. Aside from maintaining regulation of the groups through a daily organized program of activities, recruiters monitored and guided conversations so that potential members couldn’t discuss and evaluate their situation freely without someone watching over them and steering the conversations. Barker didn’t feel this direct control over the socializing of attendees had any influence over whether or not they chose to join. Even if you take the subjectivity of each workshop attendee out of the equation, the strict scheduling of workshop activities without sufficient time for unguided socializing indicates a high level of environmental control on the part of the Moonies.
Eileen Barker’s other method of data collection involved surveys of participants in the Unification Church’s recruitment workshops. These surveys were given accodring to rigorous scientific standards, including control groups and peer review, and were, in my opinion, the strongest and most interesting part of her study. One survey petitioned participants to explain why they chose to join or not to join the Unification Church after having attended the workshops. The most common reason for those who joined was that it potentially would fulfill the spiritual purpose they felt they lacked outside the cult. Most of them were spiritual seekers. For those who refused to join, reasons varied so widely that it was difficult to draw a definite conclusion. But for Barker, the larger point is that they didn’t join which to her means that they weren’t brainwashed and, further, this means that the Unification Church never brainwashed anybody or even had any intentions of trying to brainwash members.
Of more interest, from a legitimate standpoint from my perspective, were the second set of surveys which categorized the personality types of people who did join the church. The majority of recruits were white, middle class or working class young people. They came from stable and comfortable homes, claiming to have had happy childhoods. Contrary to public perception, none of them suffered from mental illness or trauma. They tended to be religious but not fanatical. Most of them were unhappy with the wider society, but were too conservative to become part of the hippy movement. The ambiguities of life outside the comforts of their childhood homes caused them distress and they sought comfort and stability in a protective and tightly structured group that sheltered them from that outside world with its conflicts and uncertainties. They were people with a low tolerance for ambiguity. You could say they were people who weren’t well-prepared or tough enough for the world the rest of us live in.
While Eileen Barker raises some interesting counter-arguments to the accusation that the Unification Chrch brainwashes its members, her study seems naive and short-sighted. You could say that her study proves her conclusion according to her definition of brainwashing, but her argument is based on a false premise if you don’t accept her definition of brainwashing to begin with. I find her definition to be too narrow to be of use in a study of this kind. Her fieldwork and collection of data yield some significant insights, but she draws some hasty conclusions without fully examining the full range of possible explanations. For example, she claims that the large number of people who decided not to join the cult after the workshops proves that no brainwashing took place, but she doesn’t take some things into account like the possibilities that brainwashing is not effective 100 percent of the time, or that some people are resistant to it, or that the workshops might even be designed to weed out the people who don’t fit into the church’s social dynamics. In other words, it is possible that they don’t want everybody to join and limit their recruitment to finding those who fit a certain personality type. The fact that potential recruits are monitored so heavily during activities like sports or group discussions makes me question whether they apply recruitment pressure equally on all members of the workshop. Maybe they target certain individuals or even alter their approach to nudge potential members into joining while simply letting those who don’t fit well to leave without a fuss. In a cult based around mass conformity and mind control, they don’t want people who are going to go against the grain. On top of all that, from what I have read about other high control groups, the process of mind control is incremental. Social conditioning isn’t something done instantly. Barker’s conclusion that brainwashing didn’t take place is based on observations made of two different workshops and doesn’t take long range membership in the Moonies into consideration. From my perspective, it looks like the workshops are designed to lay the groundwork for stronger, long range conditioning and control over time and she says almost nothing about what happens to members once they have joined. Her study is like judging the quality of an 800 pages novel after only reading the first two pages.
The Making Of a Moonie is limited in its scope. The subject of whether or not the Unification Church brainwashes its members can’t be conclusive on her testimony alone. She doesn’t gather enough information to have a final say. Even if the Moonies don’t practice mind control, there are plenty of reasons to stay away from them. Like so many other versions of corporate Christianity, the church has been wracked with scandals including sexual abuse, fraud, and ties to extremist right wing politics. Sun Myung Moon died a few years ago and now the cult is run by his two sons who are fighting over who should inherit their father’s kingdom in just the way that sons of the Messiah would. Considering that Moon claimed Jesus Christ failed because he died, I wonder how they explain that the church is legitimate now that the Messiah Sun Myung Moon is dead. One son has formed a subsect of the Unification Church called the Rod of Iron. No that isn’t the title of a cheesy porno movie from the 1970s. It is a church that worships guns. You can watch their sermons on Youtube. The preacher wears a crown made of bullets and talks about anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and the need to end democracy in America delivered in a voice that alternates between a conversational tone and hysterical screaming. This church sent busloads of members to Washington D.C. for the attempted coup on January 6, claiming that the Democrats are controlled by demons. It’s best to stay away from these kooks. Nothing good can come from this.
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