Some Reflections on the Passing of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon

by Richard L. Rubenstein (October 2012)

It was immediately obvious to me that Rev. Moon was a religious leader of extraordinary charisma. I recall that at a number of the ICUS conferences, I was invited to join a small number of senior scholars and scientists including some Nobel Laureates at a private dinner hosted by Rev. Moon. No matter how great their reputations, his charisma was the strongest personal and psychic force in the gathering.

Thirty-five years have passed since that first ICUS. Many of the young men and women who were new converts to the church then have married, raised families and are now senior leaders of the American church. One of the developments that surprised me was that Rev. Moon encouraged a number of his brightest young disciples to work for their PhDs or other advanced degrees. They earned their degrees at Harvard, Vanderbilt, Claremont School of Theology, the University of Chicago, Yale Divinity School and elsewhere. Initially, I Ihought that their conversions might be reversible and that Rev. Moon would hesitate to send his disciples to institutions in which critical methods of scholarship were applied to the study of religion, but such was not the case. Encouraging his disciples to pursue advance study at elite institutions was consistent with establishing and maintaining ICUS.

I visited Rev. Moon when he was in the Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury, Connecticut. Like others who visited him there, I was struck by his quiet dignity and his good humor. He was charged with three counts of willfully filing false Federal income tax returns (for the years 1973, 1974, and 1975). The prosecution charged that Rev. Moon failed to pay taxes on $112,000 in earned interest in a Chase Manhattan bank account and not reporting receipt of $50,000 of corporate stock. The church claimed that Rev. Moon was holding both the money and the stock on behalf of the church and that the money was not his.

In 1992 the Professors World Peace Academy (PWPA), an organization founded by Rev. Moon entered into an agreement with a financially troubled University of Bridgeport that in effect enabled it to survive. In exchange for the right to nominate sixty percent of the members of the Board of Trustees, PWPA contributed $50.5 million to the university. The trustees had tried diligently to seek other funding sources but to no avail. They were faced with the choice of coming to an agreement with the PWPA or see the institution go bankrupt and fail altogether. In addition, the university was the object of a two and a half year faculty strike, the longest in American academic history. At least one Connecticut newspaper counseled the trustees to let the university fail.

When that same rabbi learned that I had joined Congregation Beth El in Fairfield, Connecticut, he demanded that our rabbi deny membership to us. Happily, our rabbi refused and Betty and I have been loyal members of Beth El ever since. The angry rabbi also picketed the ceremony when Rev. Moon received an honorary doctorate on September 7, 1995.

The University of Bridgeport is growing and Mayor Finch, regardless of his personal belief, should be pleased and wishing for the University nothing but the best.

Richard L. Rubenstein is President Emeritus of the University of Bridgeport. His latest book is Jihad and Genocide (Rowman and Littlefield: 2011).

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