Former Unification Church Member Lisa Kohn Publishes Memoir of Childhood in the Church

On July 1, 1982, during the summer between her freshman and sophomore years of college, Lisa Kohn watched her mother marry at Madison Square Garden. The wedding was one of more than 2,000 couples married in a mass ceremony, with pairings handpicked by Reverend Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church. Lisa and her mother, whom she calls Mimi, were members, known colloquially as “Moonies.” By then Lisa had already begun pulling away from a group she had belonged to since childhood, though she says leaving after years of intense indoctrination was not easy. Her new memoir, *To the Moon and Back: A Childhood Under the Influence*, recounts joining, living in, and eventually breaking free from what many believe was a cult.

Lisa entered the church in 1974, at age 10, a few months after Mimi first heard Moon preach. She says she initially liked the rigid structure, which offered an escape from home, where her divorced parents lived in a chaotic environment. “By the time my mom brought us to the church, it was a haven for me and for my brother,” Lisa says, now 55. “Both my parents were hippies. There was lack of structure at home, and my mom had an abusive boyfriend. It was not a safe environment.” Lisa describes the church as a kind of asylum, and she and her brother quickly began to idolize its leader.

According to the source, Moon, whom members called “Father,” founded the church in 1954 in Korea after reportedly having a vision in which Jesus told him that he had been crucified before completing his mission on earth and that the only way to erase original sin was to unite all the world’s religions. The church’s *Divine Principle*, written by Moon, teaches that God sent a second Messiah to Korea in the 1930s to lead this mission, and that Moon accepted the task. Moon died in 2012 at age 92. The church, still active, is now formally called the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, and some sects have split from the main branch. The source states that Moon’s wife is generally now considered the leader of the Unification Movement.

Lisa says Mimi, who had explored different religions throughout her life, found Moon’s preaching simply “made sense.” The family drove on weekends from their home in New Jersey to the church’s compound in Barrytown, New York, to hear sermons on hard floors for hours. Mimi later went to work for the church full-time and left the children in the care of their grandfather and then their father, Danny, in a Lower East Side apartment that Lisa describes as grimy and filled with parties, drugs, and men who would “jokingly” offer to buy her. Lisa says weekends with her mother offered the only respite from weekdays with her father.

Members of the church, according to the *New York Times* as cited in the article, were expected to live in “monk-like purity,” with no alcohol, no drugs, no premarital sex, and limited physical contact between genders. The source reports that members made “no choices, no decisions,” and rarely had to think for themselves, instead following orders and performing chores. Lisa says the church made her feel safer with her mother and more distant from, and frightened of, her father. “I viewed him as evil and satanic,” she says. Lisa also describes the church’s “True Children,” the offspring of Moon and his wife, who were revered at the compound and watched closely by bodyguards.

Lisa later embraced her new family and even traveled to Seattle one summer in high school to proselytize. Over time, however, the pressure to be a perfect follower grew, and her commitment began to waver. She says strict guidelines kept members from the outside world and that she suppressed her feelings toward boys, since dating was prohibited. She first questioned the church’s teachings at nearly 17, after a summer arts camp where she made friends who were gay. “For the first time, it started to not make sense,” she says. “For the first time, it started to crack everything in me.”

By the time of her mother’s wedding two years later, Lisa said, “I no longer wanted to be there.” She describes the decision to step away as painful: “Leaving was so hard for me because I knew it was still right and I was not strong enough to carry it out.”

Source: Read the original report