Unification Church

The Unification Church is a religious movement, often described as a cult, founded in South Korea by the late multimillionaire and self-proclaimed messiah Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Since its founding in 1954, the movement has attracted hundreds of thousands of members in more than 100 countries, mostly in Korea, Japan, and other East Asian nations. The church has been regularly accused of conning new recruits, holding them against their will, splitting families and forcing initiates to give over their life savings. The church and its adherents are sometimes colloquially and pejoratively known as Moonies.

The church is known for its mass wedding ceremonies and promotion of the belief that international marriages will bring about world peace. The Unification Church has also had involvement in both the unification movement of the Korean peninsula, as well as holding strong conservative and anti-communist tendencies.

In later years, the church built a business empire that included the Washington Times newspaper, the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan, Bridgeport University in Connecticut, as well as a hotel and a car plant in North Korea. It acquired a ski resort, a professional soccer team and other businesses in South Korea, and a seafood firm that supplies sushi to Japanese restaurants across the United States. Moon also developed good relationships with conservative American leaders, including Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior. However, he was found guilty of tax evasion in the United States, where he lived for 30 years, and served 13 months of an 18 month sentence. At the time of his death in 2012, Reverend Moon had a net worth of $900 million.

In February 2022, Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon, Reverend Moon's wife, co-founder of Think Tank 2022, hosted the 4th Think Tank 2022 Forum, played host to a number of leading conservative figures and members of the bourgeois class, such as Raytheon lobbyist and former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, to discuss the question of security and reunification of Korea. Among the keynote speakers listed for the event were Shinzo Abe, Donald Trump, Samdech Hun Sen, 8th secretary-general of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon, and multimillionaire investor Jim Rogers and also featured U.S. politicians Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence.

On July 7, 2022, while former Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe was giving a speech in Okayama City, he was shot and killed by Yamagami Tetsuya, citing the former prime minister's involvement in the Unification Church as his reason. Yamagami's mother reportedly had given large amounts of money to the Unification Church.