Christianity Today

The imprisoned Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church continue to crusade for a place of honor in America. The organization's latest public relations effort consists of a package that was mailed to some 300,000 pastors and other Christian leaders across the country. The package contains three videotapes, two books, a booklet, a pamphlet, and two letters from Mose Durst, president of the Unification Church of America.

"It is not the intent of the Unification movement to make you change your beliefs or to proselytize your members," Durst writes in one of the letters. "We hope this material will be helpful in sermon preparation, and in other areas of your ministry."

Joy Garratt, the organization's public affairs director, said the mass mailing is an attempt to answer the "thousands of requests for information about our faith" received since Moon's imprisonment last summer. He is serving an 18-month sentence for income tax evasion. Said Garratt: "[The mailing is] far less expensive than buying national television time and doing a series of shows."

It is estimated that the Unification Church spent from $4.5 million to $10 million on the mailing, but that expense won't "break the bank," said David Bromley, chairman of the sociology department at Virginia Commonwealth University. Bromley estimates that Moon's organization has withstood $100-million-a-year losses during the 1980s. His study of the group's business ventures will be published this fall in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

Included in the recent mass mailing are two books, God's Warning to the World and Divine Principle. (In some packages, Divine Principle was replaced by Outline of the Principle Level 4.) Divine Principle is Moon's key "theological" ...

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