Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: Episode 115
Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: A Selection of True Parents’ Speeches
Book 3: The Mission of Religion in Achieving God’s Ideal
Speech 6: In the Hope that You Will Participate in the Unification Movement, pg 398-401
In the Hope that You Will Participate in the Unification Movement
February 28, 1985, Federal Correctional Institution
Danbury, Connecticut, USA
Letter from Prison to the American Clergy
Dear Pastors, I send my sincere greetings to you and your congregations from Danbury.
I am Rev. Sun Myung Moon. You may be surprised to receive this letter, which I am sending you from here in prison.
Revelation from Jesus on Easter morning at age sixteen
I believe you may have heard about the religious movement I founded almost thirty years ago in Korea. What you have heard or read about it is, in all likelihood, a distortion of the truth, tinged with ill feelings. This misunderstanding breaks my heart terribly, and I very much want to resolve it. But more important than that, and setting aside the opinions you may or may not have about me and the Unification Church, I earnestly wish to discuss with you my heartfelt views with regard to this United States, which is a global nation and at the same time a Christian nation. I do not expect you to agree with everything I tell you; all I hope is that you will carefully consider and deliberate on what I have to say.
I was born into a devout Confucian family in a village in what is now North Korea. When I was about ten years old, my entire family converted to Christianity. My conversion changed me profoundly. I became attached to this new faith and loved Jesus more than anyone I had ever loved before. At the age of sixteen, I went through a singular experience. On Easter morning, I had been praying tearfully for a long time when Jesus Christ appeared before me and gave me revelations and teachings. He spoke a long time about profound and amazing things. He said that God is sad because of humanity suffering in anguish, and he asked me to play a special role in God’s work on earth.
Many things have taken place in the forty-nine years since then. As I continued my study of the Bible, Jesus imparted profound words that he wants all people to hear and understand. As a result of teaching those words to others, I was arrested several times, imprisoned, and even tortured severely. For three years, I was in a North Korean death camp. Most of this prison’s inmates did not last a few months before they left as corpses, yet the Lord protected me for three years, allowing me to survive extreme suffering. After my escape, I again had the chance to propagate the Word to many others for a number of years, and the Unification Church has come to have roughly three million followers in more than 120 nations.
Today, God has three major headaches. The first is atheistic totalitarianism, especially the expansion of communism. Communism is a false religion, an institutionalized ideology that opposes traditional religions and works to eradicate belief in God. During the past sixty years, it has taken the lives of a staggering 150 million people. As I mentioned, I personally endured torture and hard labor almost to the point of death in a communist prison. Communism is spreading worldwide and is threatening to obliterate religion and those who believe in God.
The second headache for God is moral decline, in particular the degenerate state of young people across the entire world. The downfall of the traditional family and the influence of a corrupted mass media lead young people to abandon any sense of duty. Millions of American youth are losing faith in God, respect for values, and even self-respect. Drug abuse and sexual immorality are rampant. Young people represent the future of this world. If they are corrupted, who in the next generation will believe in religion and serve God?
Last, what makes God most sad is the rancor and disunity within the Christian faith. There is only one God, and there is only one Jesus Christ. However, this day and age is inundated with hundreds, even thousands, of competing Christian denominations. In some parts of the world, people who claim to be Christians are killing one another in the name of God. In some cases, churches live together in peace, but the power of Christian faith is diluted, and its impact on the world deteriorates as the days go by. The Christian faith languishes and is unable to meet the challenges and address the problems of this present world.
In the universal fight between the forces that are good, merciful, and just, and the forces of evil, God has bestowed special blessings on this nation, the United States. He established the United States as the place where Christianity is to recapture true faith and form families of the kingdom of heaven centered on God’s love. He loves the United States exceedingly. The greatness of the United States lies neither in its vast natural resources nor in its remarkable prosperity. It lies in the very founding principles of this nation. Brave men and women came to this United States to found “one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.” The United States is the only nation in the world where people from various ethnicities and backgrounds have come together to form a harmonious whole. All people, be they white, red, black, brown, or yellow, are brothers and sisters in the one family of humankind. We can realize this ideal when we recognize God as our Father.
The reason God called me to the United States
To resolve these headaches, in 1971, God called me to come to the United States and guide a movement to revive the vision of Christianity. Following Him, I spread the Word of God and stirred the American people in order to unite Christianity, restore morality and destroy atheistic communism.
The United States is truly a nation chosen by Heaven, a nation chosen as an example of Christian love and unity, as well as a nation chosen to sacrifice for and serve others in a world immersed in anguish. However, today’s United States is at a perilous crossroads. On the one hand, there is the voice of God, calling for the revival of Christianity, the restoration of God-centered family values and morality, and resistance against atheistic communism. On the other hand, a malicious intolerance of religion is also rooted here. Throughout this great United States, people of faith are continuously persecuted, fined, arrested, imprisoned, and judged guilty. Paradoxically, this great society is reviving the ideals of religion while at the same time succumbing to the forces of evil and rushing toward atheism, immorality, and corruption.
You may be surprised to hear this, but I am grateful to God even though I am in prison today. I am absolutely sincere in saying this. It is because, through this difficult course of imprisonment, I have been given a chance to say these words to you, to warn you about the crisis you are facing, and to share with you the blessed opportunity that has been given us at this historic moment.
I would like to explain to you very briefly how I came to be in this prison. I don’t care about my own happiness and comfort, and if my imprisonment can in any way help the Will of God, I could ask for nothing more. However, what is clear is that the American government persecuted me and discriminated against me. What we have is the American government showing alarming signs of increased animosity toward the religious impulse.
FFWPU, USA. All Rights Reserved.