Prophets and Protons

New Religious Movements and Science in Late Twentieth-Century America

Benjamin E. Zeller

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780814797266
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion et sciences

By the twentieth century, science had become so important that religious traditions had to respond to it. Emerging religions, still led by a living founder to guide them, responded with a clarity and focus that illuminates other larger, more established religions’ understandings of science. The Hare Krishnas, the Unification Church, and Heaven’s Gate each found distinct ways to incorporate major findings of modern American science, understanding it as central to their wider theological and social agendas. In tracing the development of these new religious movements’ viewpoints on science during each movement’s founding period, we can discern how their views on science were crafted over time. These NRMs shed light on how religious groups—new, old, alternative, or mainstream—could respond to the tremendous growth of power and prestige of science in late twentieth-century America.

In this engrossing book, Zeller carefully shows that religious groups had several methods of creatively responding to science, and that the often-assumed conflict-based model of “science vs. religion” must be replaced by a more nuanced understanding of how religions operate in our modern scientific world.

Part I
Science and the Unification Church

Religion and science have been the methods of searching for the two aspects of truth, in order to overcome the two aspects of ignorance and restore the two aspects of knowledge.

—Sun Myung Moon, Divine Principle (1973)

Introduction

Boston, Massachusetts, Thanksgiving Day, 1978. Eugene Wigner, emeritus professor of physics at Princeton, Manhattan Project veteran, and Nobel laureate, placed his notes on the podium and began his address. His brief speech opened a conference dedicated, in his words, to fostering unity between the natural sciences and the sciences of life—that is, the social sciences—and the discussion of “the effects of religion on human needs, on happiness.”¹ Wigner added that he hoped to stimulate a conversation on the psychology of animals, which would benefit the scientific study of human psychology as well. A long table of VIPs dominated the front of the banquet hall, with Wigner’s podium in the center. At the physicist’s left sat the neuroscientist Sir John Eccles, another Nobel laureate; Fredrick Seitz, former president of the National Academy of Sciences and Rockefeller University; Kenneth Mellanby, the ecologist who founded and directed the British science establishment of Monks Wood Experimental Station; and the MIT sociologist Daniel Lerner. R. V. Jones, the wartime scientific adviser to Winston Churchill, Richard Rubenstein, a leading American Jewish theologian, and Michael Warder, journalist and conference director, sat to Wigner’s right. In the audience, four hundred and fifty scientists from more than fifty countries listened to the opening addresses of the Seventh International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences (ICUS VII, 1978). In the coming four days, they would speak on such subjects as Burkitt’s Lymphoma in Paraequatorial Africa, the supernationality of science, species selfishness, and theories of religious consciousness.

One small detail, however, distinguished the ICUS from the many other academic conferences that occurred in 1978. Also at the dais sat the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, founder and leader of the Unification Church, the controversial new religious movement known to Americans as “the Moonies.” The International Cultural Foundation (ICF), a Unification-funded organization, provided the half million dollars that sponsored the Seventh International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences, as it had done for the six preceding and fifteen following meetings of ICUS.² In the ICF’s words, “the purpose of ICUS [was] to provide an opportunity for scholars and scientists to reflect on the nature of knowledge and to discuss the relationship of science to the standard of value.”³ At the conferences scientists delivered papers on topics ranging from the technical and obscure to the nearly universal. Many extolled the conference as one of the few that encouraged true interdisciplinary conversation. Professor Max Jammer, president of the Association for the Advancement of Science in Israel, offered a representative comment, calling ICUS “a uniquely stimulating event by providing the rare possibilities of an interdisciplinary exchange on problems of profound significance for the intellectual situation of our time.”⁴ Previous conferences featured addresses and papers by sociologists, historians, theologians, and Nobel-winning scientists. For example, the fourth ICUS included presentations by the inventor of holographs, Dennis Gabor, as well as the chemist who first isolated vitamin C, Albert Szent-Gyorgi, both past winners of Nobel Prizes.⁵ In addition to the physical scientists, J. B. Rhine, the famous ESP researcher from Duke University, Theodore Roszak, academic spokesman for the counterculture, and the historian Oscar Handlin, the Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar of immigration, had all attended preceding ICUS meetings. But outside the Sheraton Boston Hotel demonstrators protested against the Unification Church as a dangerous cult and the conference as a publicity stunt and scientific sham. “These cultists must be destroyed, imprisoned—anything to STOP their mind control of society,” read the protestors’ leaflet.⁶ Responding to the ICUS conference, a former member of the Unification Church now affiliated with the anti-cult movement released a statement comparing the Unificationists to Nazis. The scientists, he warned, were “legitimating a demagogue and are lending credence to a movement whose goals and methods find their parallel in the National Socialist Movement in Germany under Hitler.”⁷ One possible explanation of the demonstrators’ fiery rhetoric: less than two weeks earlier, almost one thousand people had committed mass suicide at Jonestown, a commune in Guyana, South America, run by another new religion, Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple.⁸ “Dangerous cults,” as media sources referred to them, occupied Americans’ minds.⁹ Ironically, one ICUS panel featured the well-respected scholar of religion Ninian Smart discussing “Death and Suicide in Contemporary Thought,” which conference organizers hastened to explain had been organized long before the Guyana tragedy.

What would bring the Unification Church to sponsor a science conference, one at which, its attendees insisted, in the words of Sir John Eccles, “the conferences have been notable for complete freedom to all participants”?¹⁰ Scientists themselves determined the topics and subjects of their papers, sessions, and panels, and a committee of academics oversaw the process. Critics suggested that Moon and his church sought the publicity and legitimization that hobnobbing with savants brought. This does provide part of the answer. Certainly Moon enjoyed and benefited from the exposure, but the sources indicate that the Unificationists sponsored ICUS because the conferences forwarded the movement’s program of reconciliation between science and religion, and unity within science itself. Although the church set no limits on the participants or their papers, it provided the overall theme, always one that stressed the need for moral or religious guidance of science. The Boston conference considered “the re-evaluation of existing values and the search for absolute values,” or, as the conference’s organizer and Unification member Michael Young Warder explained to the press, ICUS “provide[d] an opportunity for scholars and scientists to discuss questions of values,” and considered “concerns about the crisis of values in the modern world.”¹¹ Other meetings of the international conferences considered such subjects as “modern science and moral values” (ICUS I, 1972), “harmony among the sciences” (ICUS V, 1976), “the responsibility of the academic community” (ICUS VIII, 1979), “absolute values and the new reassessment of the contemporary world” (ICUS XVI, 1987), and “absolute values and the unity of the sciences: the origin of human responsibility” (ICUS XX, 1995). Through such topical guidance, the Unification Church and its International Cultural Foundation sought to shepherd science toward working within a moral paradigm set by the church: a holistic quest for knowledge and progress operating under a religiously attuned set of absolute behavioral and philosophical guidelines that, in the view of the Unification Church, highlighted peace, piety, and progressivism.

The Unification Church in seeking to direct American science through conferences represented an extreme but representative religious approach to science: the desire to guide it. Thus, Unificationist leaders and members took a pro-science position. But they did so with the hope and aspiration that their religious movement would guide science toward what the movement considered its divinely mandated goal, the discovery of knowledge, the progress of human material life, and ultimately, alongside the efforts of religion, the creation of a heaven on earth. This included support of American’s scientific establishment, upon which the Unificationists looked positively. Like many other American Christians,¹² Unificationists believed religion to be compatible with a modern scientific worldview, envisioning science and religion as separate spheres that did not impinge upon the other. At times science presented problems to religion, for example the often thorny issue of human evolution and natural selection. Yet overall, Unificationism saw science as a powerful force for good. The Unification Church embodied a progressive millennialism in keeping with the American postmillennial tradition. Like the Social Gospelers a half century earlier, the Unification Church saw science and technology as tools of establishing a model Christian society. Believing themselves responsible for fostering a heaven on earth, Unificationists looked to science as a valuable asset and to the scientific community as a naturalally.

1
Science and the Foundation of Unificationism

Reverend Sun Myung Moon and the Genesis of Unificationism

Sun Myung Moon¹ was born on February 25, 1920, in a Korea that stood at the cusp of modernization. Ten years earlier the Japanese Empire had annexed Korea and begun a forced process of infrastructure and economic development. The young Moon encountered the same industrial and technological revolution that overtook the United States a few decades earlier: railroads, electricity, factories, and the advent of modern business and industry. The Korean historian Bruce Cumings places what he calls the “profound” transformation of Korea at “[t]he period from 1935 to 1945,” during which “Korea’s industrial revolution began, with most of the usual characteristics: uprooting of peasants from the land, the emergence of a working class, widespread population mobility, and urbanization.”² This era coincided with Moon’s formative teen years and early adulthood. Between Moon’s birth and his twenty-third birthday, his native Korea witnessed a 343 percent increase in industrial employment as well as profound social displacement due to falling agricultural prices and rising demand for industrial workers. The railroad in particular, Cumings notes, “penetrated” and “integrated” Korea, ferrying raw materials, finished products, and Korean workers throughout the peninsula.³

Moon’s early religious upbringing is uncertain, but then much in colonial Korea was uncertain. Alongside modernizing the Korean economy, Japanese colonial authorities also sought to “modernize” native Korean religious and social norms. Combined with the social and geographic dislocations owing to industrial development, Korea experienced what Adrian Buzo calls a “profound cultural loss.” Buzo argues that under Japanese colonial rule, “Koreans lost an entire edifice of faith that had undergirded the life of the country for 500 years, linking people and their daily thoughts and activities to [the Korean] monarch, country and beyond to the universe. … Sense of identity, purpose in life, and the significance of daily activities became crowded with unanswerable questions, and neither spiritual leaders nor colonial authority could offer guidance to people disturbed and uprooted by momentous change. For some, Christianity and other new religions filled the spiritual void.”⁴ Christianity held the allure of looking to the Occident, rather than Japan, as its spiritual center. The year before Moon’s birth, Korean Christian leaders joined with nationalists in a short-lived rebellion against the Japanese colonizers.⁵ The Moon family, and Sun Myung himself, were among the spiritually uprooted people of Korea, converting to Christianity when the future founder of the Unification Church was ten years old, one of many families to convert in Korea’s fastest-growing Christian regions.⁶ Moon adopted his new Christian religion with gusto. Later biographies chronicle that by the age of fifteen or sixteen Moon claimed the abilities of a religious visionary, communicating with spirits and receiving divine revelation. Moon himself taught that while praying as a young teenager, Jesus Christ manifested before him, asking him to pledge to end human suffering on Earth.⁷

Around the same time that Moon claimed to receive his first revelations, he also began scientific and technological training. Moon’s muddled experience of education in fact linked to his mixed religious experiences: the traditional Korean Confucian system during the winter and modern subjects under a Presbyterian missionary during summer.⁸ At the age of eighteen he left his parents to enroll at a technical high school in Seoul, where he took an interest in electricity. While in Seoul he also began to attend a Pentecostal church; his family reported that during his return visits he would pray feverishly and frequently.⁹ A Pentecostal emphasis on healing and works of the spirit would become prominent characteristics of his later movement. Deciding to pursue an advanced degree, Moon enrolled at the junior college associated with Waseda University, a prestigious private university in Tokyo, continuing his study of electrical engineering.¹⁰ Moon continued to experience religious visions in Japan.

The educational and religious trajectory of Sun Myung Moon encapsulated a number of cross-cultural flows and importations. Raised in Korea during Japanese colonial occupation, Moon encountered the scientific and technological modernization that the colonial power introduced to the peninsula. Japan itself had imported this modernist impulse from the West during its early Meiji period (1868–1912) before subsequently exporting it to Korea. During each step of cross-cultural flow, individuals and groups filtered science through native categories, such as Shinto nationalism in Japan and Confucian ideals of scholarship in Korea. Moon, unlike the Hare Krishna founder Swami Bhaktivedanta (see chap. 3), accepted the scientific modernism that he learned from the colonial power. Yet Moon combined his acceptance of the scientific worldview propagated by Japan with his embrace of another import, the religion of Europe, Christianity. Moon himself then filtered Christianity through his own Korean norms and sensibilities, which led him to create the Unification Church. Completing the cycle of transnationalism, Moon and his followers exported their understanding of religion and science to Japan and then to the West. The Unification Church’s perspectives on science reveal these global cross-cultural flows.

Having completed his scientific training in Japan, Moon returned to Korea and began a career as an electrician. Following the conclusion of the Second World War and freed from his wartime industrial assignments, Moon transitioned from the world of engineering to preaching. In June 1946, not even a year after the United States ended the war with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Moon left his wife and newborn baby to found a church in the northern Korean city of Pyongyang, obeying what he believed was a revelation directing him to do so.¹¹ There Moon gathered a circle of Christians through emotional public prayers and sermons wherein he preached the imminent return of Christ to Korea.¹² The outbreak of the Korean War and Moon’s open defiance of communist authorities led to two and a half years of imprisonment, starting in 1948. While imprisoned, Moon continued to preach, converting other prisoners to his own view of Christianity, which increasingly emphasized Moon’s personal revelations and hinted that Moon might serve some integral place in the coming advent.¹³ The chaos of the American invasion and the outbreak of the Korean civil war permitted Moon and several of his followers to flee to South Korea.¹⁴ Four years later in Seoul, in 1954 Reverend Moon founded the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity (HSA-UWS), the official name of the Unification Church. During the following decade, Moon and his growing Unificationist movement developed their ideas, texts, and understandings of their mission. Science came to occupy a growing role in this thought.

Science in Reverend Moon’s Korean Unification Church

Moon’s sermons during the first decade of the Unification Church’s existence offers a glimpse into his movement’s early thought on science and its relation to religion. They also reveal an underlying tension that later emerged in the Unificationist sacred texts, the Korean-language Wolli Hesul (“Explanation of the Divine Principle,” 1957) and Wolli Kangron (“Exposition of the Divine Principle,” 1966), and their English-language translations, notably Divine Principle (1973). In his sermons, Moon generally insisted that the best religion and best science operated as internally unified pursuits, two individually coherent spheres each considering a different aspect of life and the world. Moon, however, sometimes vacillated between this and another approach. The first, that of religion and science as separate spheres, showed Moon to understand the two as mutually valid but distinct approaches to the world. In his second approach to religion and science, Moon saw the two as parallel pursuits that needed to unify in accordance with his grand millennial vision for the future of Earth. Later, in their dealings with scientists Moon and his Unification movement would adopt the more moderate position that religion must guide science. Yet even during the ICUS era, the urge to unify religion and science persisted in the movement’s religious discourse.

One of Moon’s first explicit mention of science employed it as a point of comparison. A June 2, 1957, sermon represented this rhetorical use of science. In a reference not lost on a Korean audience deeply aware of the nuclear attacks (albeit utilizing atomic fission devices) on Japan, Moon declared, ...