"Heaven is saying two million yen" (Chapter I)

Here are two factual statements:

Jerry Falwell, Gary Bauer, Ralph Reed, Richard Viguerie, and Tim LaHaye are among the prominent American Christian right leaders aiding and abetting a conspiracy to wipe Christianity from the face of the earth. And political leaders including George H.W. Bush, Jack Kemp, William Bennett, and Dan Quayle are among those who've lent aid and comfort to a conspiracy to end American democracy.

I've been writing professionally for thirteen years now, most of those years in the service of the struggle for progressive political change. In all that time, I've never read a book I more wished I had the power to will onto the bestseller lists than the one I'm about to publish a series about on this blog. I remember precisely where I was when I started reading John Gorenfeld's Bad Moon Rising: How the Reverend Moon Created The Washington Times, Seduced the Religious Right, and Built an American Kingdom. I remember what I was eating at the time, and even the temperature of the room. The experience was exactly that riveting.

From time to time I've felt a pang of guilt, even embarrassment, at the name my colleagues and I at Campaign for America's Future chose for our blog on the failures and follies of conservatism: The Big Con. Wasn't it, I would think, a little bit much? Just how compromised by bad faith, boodling, and malignancy can a historically great political movement, one subscribed to by millions of Americans, truly be?

After reading Bad Moon Rising, I'll never ask that again.

*****

The story begins with a tale from Japan. It's so moving I'd like to quote it at length.

We are in Kukuoka, a southern metropolis where a bereaved mother is attending a séance. A seer, the Great Teacher Nagayoshi, is concentrating before a statue of Maitreya, the future Buddha, and with great strain, he says, the father of her child is coming into focus.

"'Your husband is descending," the Great Teacher says. '"can see your husband's body suffering in Hell. I cannot stop myself from shaking,' the teacher says, now really racked with emotion. 'Your husband is saying he wants you to donate five million yen."

When her husband had died of a heart attack in the fall, the housewife could not have guessed that half a year later, he would return from the Beyond to ask for the equivalent of $40,000. That winter, she and her daughter were alone and distraught. Then one day a visitor knocked on her door, a stranger who extended the deepest of sympathies and persuaded the lonely widow it would be best for her morale to get out of the house and see an art exhibit across town together.

So the new friends strolled the gallery. Then the friend asked the widow, Why not spoil yourself and buy a painting? 'That one would look perfect in your child's room,' she told the widow. The widow hesitated at the price tag—about $1,600—but felt it would be rude not to play along. So she agreed, the friend beckoned the sales staff, and the widow wired the cash to a mysterious company—Miyabi Co., Ltd.—whose name was the Japanese word for refined, courtly elegance, the qualities found in those with a discriminating eye for color.

A friendship developed, in which they watched movies together, films with an afterlife theme, and the widow fretted about whether her own husband would mirate into heaven or hell.

In spring, cherry blossoms bloom in Japan, and thoughts turn to the fragility of life. It was then that the widow (Plaintiff A, as she would be known for privacy) learned through the friend of a rare chance to meet a supposedly revered Buddhist sage, Nagayoshi, who could ease her fears about her husband's fate. When she hesitated to pay the five million yen to the Great Teacher Nagayoshi, the guru left the room, troubled.

"'Hang in there," her new friend told her after she offended the Great Teacher Nagayoshi. "Just believe."

She did. But when she returned home, doubts nagged, so she phoned up and refused to pay the money, until they convinced her that the screams of the damned would fill her sleep. She relented. So now they helped her violate banking rules by claiming the huge withdrawal was for an insurance policy. She then laid the cash at the feet of the Maitreya statue.

"Soon Plaintiff A met a second"'great teacher," this one offering her a special deal on a "holy trinity" of religious items for just twelve million yen, including a Maitreya statue she could call her own and two sets of Catholic rosary beads. She was also persuaded to enroll in classes in the Divine Principle of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, newly revealed to be the guiding light behind her spiritual journey. Soon the Moon disciples told her that the dead husband was requesting yet another fifty million yen from beyond the grave but would settle for thirty million—the payout on his life insurance policy.

An argument broke out. They weren't making this up this up, a Moon priestess named Endo insisted emotionally. Endo whipped out a chart demonstrating, as plain as day, that the 'karma of sexual lust' had fouled the family legacy and that in her stinginess she was willing to watch as her husband's family name, built for generations, went up in smoke. 'Your daughter's life, too, will be taken,' the Moonists said. And now the widow hesitated. 'I will do it,' she finally said, and they cried in thanks but suggested to keep quiet about the money, or else 'Satan would close in.' Soon, at a shopping center parking lot, outside a retail shop called Goody, she approached a parked car and handed over the cash.

But later, as Plaintiff A considered her free gift—a photo of the Washington Times publisher and his wife in a pose of beatific matrimony—she felt ripples of doubt. Would her husband have wanted his life insurance payout given to Moon? In 1989, she hired an attorney and learned that her case was one of tens of thousands like it, sometimes with an element of physical coercion.... Plantiff B was given until midnight to save her family by stripping herself of the corrupting influence of money: "Heaven is saying two million yen," a soothsayer named Gondo revealed.

*******

These are the people to whom large chunks American conservative movement, the American Republican Party, and, yes, a few wayward Democrats as well, have sold its soul.

For here is the next part of the story. That was 1989. An extraordinary coalition of 300 prominent Japanese lawyers banded together to pursue the "Spiritual Sales" cases for another five years. On May 27, 1994, they won a verdict; Plaintiff A, for one, got her thirty-six million yen back.

Four months later the forty-first president of the United States gave a boilerplate speech at the Tokyo Dome under the auspices of Rev. Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church, and walked away one million dollars richer, as Rev. Moon's wife took the stage to implore the tens of thousands, "I sincerely encourage you to study my husband's teachings." From which they would learn, if they did, that Eve misued the love organ by fornicating with Lucifer and that therefore men should punish their penises with pliers; that individual freedom is "what Satan likes best"; and that "I can do things even God can't. That's why God hated me more than Satan hated me."

George H.W. Bush could not plead ignorance of just who it was he was working for. The three hundred Japanese lawyers had pleaded with him to acknowledge that the "Women's Federation for World Peace," the sponsor of the rally, was a Moon front, and cancel the engagement. So did a coalition of American mothers whose children ran away with the Moonies, to sell flowers 18 hours a day. Bush went on to make several more such apearances and several continents. Explained a Bush family spokesman, "The sense the Bushes have is that these are about family and building bridges of friendship between the Japanese and the American People." That wasn't the sense Barbara Walters got. When she was approached by the lawyers and learned of the nature of the commitment she's innocently stumbled into, she cancelled her booking at the Tokyo Dome in horror.

The Moonies, charging between $80 and $196 at the gate, pulled in $5 million that night at the Tokyo Dome, minus expenses. The expenses, though, couldn't have been too hard to cover. Despite the May verdict, the "Spiritual Sales"—thieving from grieving widows, convinced by Moonie operatives posing as Buddhist monks that their dead husbands would suffer eternal torment unless they signed over their life insurance checks—continued, and continue, more or less abated; by one estimate, Moon's annual profits in Japan amount to some $400 million a year, most coming from just such "donations."

And where does all that money go? Much of it to the daily newspaper whose $3 billion in financial losses comprise no less than an in-kind contribution to the continued health of the conservative movement in America—the Washington Times's most recent journalistic coup was laundering the smear that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim.

There's more, much more, but there's only so much I can think about this stuff in a day without being overwhelmed by a manic compulsion to purchase a plane ticket to Dulles Airport, rent a car, and show up on the doorstep of the offices of some of the most "respected" conservative organizations in the United States, look some people in the eye, and ask them what moral right they think they have to claim be working in the best interests of the United States of America, let alone look themselves in the mirror every morning.

It's that bad, it really is. Buy John's book. Follow his blog. And stop back here on the regular to learn more, because we haven't yet even scratched the surface of the crazy.

TOMORROW: "Why Does God Need a Newspaper?"

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