Sun Myung Moon

Sun Myung Moon was a Korean religious leader who founded the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, commonly called the Unification Church, in Seoul in 1954. He was born Mun Yong-myeong on February 25, 1920, in what is now North Pyongan Province in North Korea, and he died on September 3, 2012, in Gapyeong, South Korea. His family converted to Christianity when he was about ten years old, and he later said that Jesus appeared to him on Easter morning 1935 and asked him to complete an unfinished mission.

His early ministry took place in northern Korea after the Second World War, where he was imprisoned by the communist authorities in a labor camp from 1948 until United Nations forces freed prisoners during the Korean War in 1950. He fled south, settled in Busan, and in 1954 formally established the church that would become his life's work. The movement grew through the 1960s in South Korea and Japan and entered the United States in the 1970s.

His public profile in America rose with mass rallies at Madison Square Garden in 1974 and the Washington Monument in 1976, and with the mass weddings — sometimes of thousands of couples — for which the church became widely known. He was convicted of federal tax evasion in the United States in 1982 and served thirteen months in federal prison in 1984 and 1985. The case was contested by religious-freedom groups across the political spectrum.

His business interests grew alongside the church and included The Washington Times, founded in 1982, the news agency UPI after 2000, and seafood, manufacturing, and construction firms in Korea, Japan, and the United States. His teachings, set out in the Divine Principle, drew on Christian scripture, Korean shamanic tradition, and his own claims of revelation, and his movement remained active worldwide after his death.

His name Sun Myung follows Korean convention with the family name Mun first and the given name Yong-myeong second; the romanization Sun Myung Moon is the form he used in English. The given name combines characters meaning "dragon" and "bright," and he kept the name throughout his ministry.