Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon has long been under fire from traditional religious groups for his arranged, mass marriages of church members.
Now, a situation in Mobile, Alabama, has some cult-watching organizations asking whether Moon has gotten into the business of arranging children in families as well.
According to detective Lark Dodd of the Mobile County Sheriff’s Department, within the past six months five situations have occurred in which couples have traveled to the United States, given birth to babies, and then given or attempted to give their babies as gifts to families living in Mobile. Dodd, who conducted an investigation for the sheriff’s department, said all persons involved were members of the Unification Church.
Dodd said the sheriff’s department was notified about the situation in September by the Alabama Department of Human Resources. At that time, Dodd said a Canadian couple gave birth to a boy in a local hospital and told authorities they wished to give the baby as a gift to the vice-president of Master Marine, a Mobile-based business owned by the Unification Church. Dodd declined to give the prospective adoptive parents’ names, but said both were about 60 years old.
During the course of the investigation, Dodd said she discovered the couple already had a baby that had been given to them by an Austrian couple.
In addition, Dodd said she learned that the president of Master Marine and his wife—who live in the same residence as the vice-president’s family—had also been given a baby from a French couple.
In interviews, the Canadian couple told Dodd they “solely conceived the child in order to give it as a gift to the people here in Mobile.” Dodd said the Austrian couple also “specifically conceived their first child in order to give it to the couple in Mobile.”
Dodd further said that according to the vice president’s wife, the couples were giving their babies because they owed the Mobile families “so much for bringing them into the truth of the [Unification] church.”
No Laws Broken
Dodd’s investigation could not determine any criminal activity surrounding the adoptions. “There is no law locally, statewide, or federally that keeps a person from giving a child away as a gift for private adoption,” she said.
Alabama law prohibits private adoptions orchestrated by a third party, but Dodd said despite the fact that both the natural and adoptive parents are members of the Unification Church, she could not prove direct church involvement.
Yet, during the investigation, David Hager, an attorney who does work for the Unification headquarters in New York, went to Alabama to aid the parents.
In an interview with CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Hager denied official Unification Church involvement in the adoptions. “I became involved at the request of the attorneys for the parents down there,” he said. “It was a personal favor.”
Hager said there is nothing unusual about the adoptions occurring among Unification Church members. “You have to realize that whenever there is any kind of close-knit community of people, they will tend to deal with each other,” he said.
Hager also denied any national trend in these types of adoptions. “I know of one or two other circumstances where, within the church, couples have offered another couple a child for adoption,” he said. “I find it somewhat unremarkable when you look at the numbers of people in this country, the number of children born, and the number of children that are adopted through private or agency adoption.”
Hager is very critical of the Alabama investigations. “The blatant kind of bigotry they displayed against these people just based upon their religion was just reprehensible,” he said.
Nevertheless, Craig Branch, Alabama director of Watchman Fellowship, an evangelical ministry to the cults, said his organization is viewing the adoption situation with concern. “Nothing really happens of significance in the Unification Church without Moon’s direct orders,” he said. “Because of their doctrine of the church being a unified family, there is no barrier for him to also begin to dictate the arrangement of families.”
According to Branch, the Master Marine vice-president is Paul Warner, the former head of the Unification Church in Germany.
Branch said his group is attempting to discover whether the adoptions are taking place in other areas of the country.
