Founded in Korea in 1954 by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, espousing millennial and messianic doctrines plus some revelations that Moon claims to be received direct from God. It is also known as the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, and its members as “Moonies.” The movement quickly started to spread and found a foothold in Japan. The church had little success in the Western world until Moon moved to the United States in the early 1970s; now the full-time membership in all Western countries is estimated to be 10,000, although some critics believe this is an underestimation. A favorite recruitment area for the Unification Church is California; recruits are usually young, middle-class, well educated, and celibate.
Moon advances theories of the origin of humanity that are so far from scientific truth that they ought to be contested. His whole story is a fabrication without any evidence to support it; thus it is pseudoscience. Not only biologically unscientific, it is sexist, proclaiming that all the ills of mankind are attributable to the first woman, Eve. Christians and Jews find Moon’s interpretation of Judeo-Christian teachings distasteful, distorted, and degrading. Moon’s ideology is spread through “workshops” and the publication of a daily newspaper News-World, as well as through proselytization.