History & overview · every faith gets one
Finish what the cross left undone — and do it through a family.
Founded in Seoul in 1954 by Sun Myung Moon, who said Jesus appeared to him on an Easter morning in 1935 and asked him to complete an unfinished mission. The Divine Principle reads history as a chain of failed restorations and puts marriage, not the crucifixion, at the place where the fall is undone — which is why the movement's public face is the blessing ceremony, thousands of couples married at once. Renamed the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification in 1996.
Moon was convicted in New York in 1982 of filing false federal tax returns, sentenced to eighteen months and served thirteen. In Japan the National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales, formed in May 1987 and now around three hundred attorneys, has documented decades of complaints about coerced donations and the sale of religious objects. After the assassination of former prime minister Shinzo Abe in 2022 brought the matter into national politics, the Ministry of Education asked the courts to dissolve the Japanese branch, and on 25 March 2025 the Tokyo District Court granted the order — the first dissolution of a religious corporation in Japan on civil-code grounds. The church denies the findings and has appealed.
Why it is filed this way
On 25 March 2025 the Tokyo District Court ordered the dissolution of the Japanese branch as a religious corporation. The church has appealed to the Tokyo High Court and the order is not final. The movement continues in Korea, Japan, the United States and elsewhere.
The founding
Moon, sixteen and praying on a hillside on Easter morning in 1935, said Jesus asked him to finish the work the crucifixion had left incomplete. After the Korean War he founded the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity in Seoul on 1 May 1954.
Its founding is bound to Sun Myung Moon (문선명) — 1954 CE.
What it holds
Reality. A creation designed to become one family and interrupted at the first one.
The divine. God is one and is described as a parent — with a masculine and a feminine nature, and with a heart broken by the fall rather than a wrath satisfied by it. Moon and his wife Hak Ja Han are addressed as True Parents, a title members distinguish from worship..
Death and after. The spirit world is real, populated and worked with; ancestors are liberated by ceremony performed here.