Unificationism, Scientology, and Baha’i
The continuing expansion of American religious life in the 20th century was apparent in a plethora of new movements that combined Christian, non-Western, metaphysical, and healing traditions into novel forms.
Three such movements—the Unification Church, Scientology, and Baha’i religion—illustrate these trends.The Unification Church—officially called the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity—was founded in Korea by Sun Myung Moon (b. 1920). Born in what is now North Korea, Moon was nurtured in Korean religions and a Pentecostally infused Presbyterianism, became a Christian minister, and was imprisoned by North Korea’s communist government. After being freed in 1953, he established the Unification Church and increasingly vocalized anticommunist views. Revelations he claimed from Jesus, Moses, Buddha, and others convinced him that God would send a new messiah—identified as Moon by his followers—to complete Jesus’ mission of restoring the “perfect” family state lost in Eden. Unificationists conceived of their church in this light, calling each other “brothers” and “sisters” and Moon their spiritual “Father.” Marriage, the key sacrament, is controlled by Moon, who promotes the unification of humanity by joining followers of differing cultural backgrounds in “group marriages” or mass weddings.
Moon began sending missionaries to the United States in 1959, and in the 1960s his message of the oneness of humanity, ascetic discipline, and strong community appealed to youth seeking an alternative to the counterculture. But the church experienced significant growth only after Moon immigrated to the United States in the early 1970s. Recruiting especially on college campuses, it attracted young, white, urban, well-educated, single, middle-class, mostly Northeastern Americans—eventually as many as 30,000 members—by offering spiritual grounding and quasifamilial ties amid the political, social, and economic turmoil of the 1970s.
But outsiders criticized its group marriages and labeled it a dangerous “cult.” The church in America suffered setbacks when Moon was imprisoned for tax evasion in 1982 and decided after his release to focus his efforts on Asia. Concerned to emphasize its socially and spiritually transformative function and end its public perception as a denomination, it dissolved and reorganized as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (USA) in 1997. Its current American membership of perhaps 5,000 to 10,000 remains mostly white, urban, Northeastern, and middle-class but increasingly middle-aged.
The Unification Church’s sanctification of marriage and family, conveyed in this couple blessing, appealed to many young Americans seeking spiritual stability in the turbulent 1970s.
The Church of Scientology—offering a metaphysical “science” of healing based on Eastern and ancient Greek thought, modern occultism, and psychoanalytic theory—was organized by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard (1911—86) in 1953. Hubbard taught that personal wellness—and material and social success—requires a mentally “clear” state achieved by purging the mind of painful unconscious images or “engrams” accumulated in one’s present and previous lives. This is done through consultation with “auditors” who use “E-meters” (electrometers) to detect engrams. Continued auditing can entirely liberate the individual’s powerful spiritual essence, or “thetan.” Scientology became a fad during the 1950s and, like Erhard Seminars Training (EST) and other therapeutic systems, surged amid the economic malaise of the 1970s. Churches appeared nationwide, especially—as with other American metaphysical movements—in urban areas and on the West Coast. It developed into a hierarchically arranged movement with an ordained ministry—it refers to auditors as pastoral counselors—and has sought legal recognition as a church.
But it has aroused the opposition of mainline religions, the medical profession, and the governments of the United States, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and (most recently) Germany. Public hostility drove Hubbard into isolation, sometimes at sea and sometimes in southern California, where the movement’s institutional presence remains most concentrated. Based in Los Angeles, Scientology now maintains about 700 churches and claims 8 million members worldwide (critics set the figure at 50,000).The Baha’i religion, established in Persia (now Iran) in 1863, is based on messianic and other aspects of Shi’ite Islam. Its founder, Husayn Ali (1817–1892), called himself Baha’u’llah (“the glory of God”), claiming to be a divine messenger offering a new post-Islamic dispensation of unity and peace based on the oneness of God, of humanity, and of all religions. He modified such traditional Islamic practices as daily prayer, the annual month of fasting, pilgrimage, and almsgiving, and replaced the Qu’ran with a new scripture that combined the teachings of Islam with those of Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and the Middle Eastern religion of Zoroastrianism. (Hindu elements were later incorporated.) This scripture emphasizes spiritual growth, healing, racial and ethnic integration, gender equality, and universal justice.
Lebanese convert Ibrahim Khayru’llah brought the faith to the United States, arriving in Chicago in the aftermath of the World’s Parliament of Religions and offering classes there beginning in 1894. The movement had attracted more than 700 adherents in the area by 1899, and continues to maintain its American mother temple in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette and its national headquarters in Evanston. But it spread to twenty-four states by 1900 and grew more effectively after an organizing campaign in the 1920s.
Spectacular growth in numbers and ethnic diversity came in the 1960s because of the appeal of its integrationist message to the young; a proselytizing campaign in the rural South that recruited some 15,000 African-Americans from South Carolina and elsewhere; the arrival in the 1970s of thousands of Baha’i refugees from political turmoil in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; and the flight of some 10,000 Iranian Baha’is, mostly to Los Angeles, after the 1979 Islamic revolution. Native and Latino Americans have also converted in growing numbers. The cumulative effect was that American membership rose from about 10,000 in 1963 to about 100,000 in 1987. By 2000, there were 137,000 American members in some 7,000 locales—with the largest number of both in California—and about 5 million members worldwide. Members shun partisan politics as antithetical to unity, but racial equality, social justice, and support for the United Nations remain paramount concerns of American Baha’is.