Someone wrote, "Suppose, for example, that an ultra-rightist offshoot of the Nazi party decided to do what a number of other essentially non religious organizations have done, simply call themselves a religion for the two common reasons: tax benefits and freedom from official investigation." This is the common motif in criticism of the UC. It is not really religious but a front for a right wing political dictatorship that condones force and tyranny. Hitler was anti-Communist also and so it doesn’t’ mean anything that he is against totalitarianism. That he has said Christians took over the Roman Empire by love not guns is not mentioned. Critics pick only a few quotes that are taken out of context. It gets down to simple persecution. Black people look different, so lynch them. People, by and large, are still not educated as Allen shows. He considers himself an intellectual leader in America whose campaign in life is to get Americans to think clearly. Jefferson was disgusted by this type of bigot. There are Nazi groups in America who hate blacks and use violence and the police are onto them. There are gangs of predators in the projects and in rural America killing over drugs. Why the hysteria about Moon. It is from Satan. Who distorts the media and people to repeat history and kill the messiah.

Where is greed when he gives billions to organizations. What billionaire has given more? No one. They keep their money. Where is the sexism when he sends a woman as the first missionary to America, Miss Kim a Ph.D. . Where is the racism when he marries interracially and says he wants to end race by blending everyone together? Where is the hate when he constantly talks of family and love of God, country and family . Where is the meanness when he responds with forgiveness to Kim Il Sun who condemned his parents to hell in North Korea and when he carried the luggage of his Japanese dominators and torturers when his country was freed after W.W.II. Where is abuse of members when he works harder than anyone around him, when he carries a member 600 miles on his back to South Korea after walking out of a concentration camp where for three years he shared his meager food with fellow prisoners and works for ecumenical religious conferences and hires non member professors for this seminary and . Brainwashed followers. I dare MR. Allen go into any home of a member who is married and find one family who shows any sign of being dangerous, insane and depraved? As for bizarre. I find Mr. Allen bizarre for creating an atmosphere of violence against the UC. Go into any home and find someone who is a slave.? Out of excitement for the vision of winning America to God and returning it back to the ideals of the founding fathers that Mr. Allen fights against in this cultural war. Mr. Allen is like so many liberals who have a fear of the right to turn America into a place like the book and the movie it was based The Handmaid’s tale of religious nuts who talk love and then rape the bodies and minds of nice liberals like Him . Allen hates the Reagans too. They just aren’t’ "new" enough for him.

Where is the fake religion when almost every mainline denomination in America stood by Rev. Moon and asked the Supreme Court to throw out the judgment of the jury who persecuted Rev. Moon. They didn’t and he went to Jail and Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, a Mormon, held a special subcommittee hearing on religious freedom and Rev. Moon spoke in his own defense and Sen. Hatch a friend of Rev. Moon called him a "great Man." And mentioned that America killed the founder of his church. Even the liberals that Allen would have to like, such as Senator Eugene McCarthy supported him.

The constant theme of criticism is the comparison of Moon to Hitler.

"Suppose further that this new ‘religion’ preached that Jews, Communists, blacks and Catholics were agents of the devil and therefore rightfully prey to the new avengers of God. How many people would have to be killed before the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Congress and other agencies of public order decided that matters had gone to far? As the authors of Gifts of Deceit ask: 'Does freedom of religion give Moon the right to violate the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which outlaws slavery.'" This is intellectual sloppiness and he is the truly dangerous person for defining words and twisting words in such yellow journalism and tabloid journalism.

A couple of "cults" out of thousands commit suicide. Out of the tens of millions of Catholics there have been thousands of suicides and every depravity known to man and Hollywood makes movies out of these terrible abuses of every mainline church. To lump all Catholics with some crazed person is not done because it is established.

There is also the factor that Rev. Moon is Korean. An oriental. He looks different, talks different.

Too many members probably just live for the day. Be a good foot soldier, follow your leader like some private, seaman or airman and the generals will tell you what to do and they will win the war. That is natural in all organizations. But rev. moon really wants educated, geniuses who have a superior standard to the "outside world." The idea of suicide is ridiculous because it violates the basic tenets of faith that this world will be the first kingdom of heaven. Jesus was a utopian. Christians don’t know this. They think he was talking about the afterlife but he meant the building of the ideal world here on earth. Going to spirit world is not the answer. IT is a low realm and we learn in the Principle you can’t die. We can’t escape ourselves or our responsibility. Toynbee wrote that maybe a violent dictator might be good if he unites the world. Toynbee wanted unification so bad he missed the point that God does not want that now. The ancient Israelites were told to use force. Christians aren’t.

In the Canadian magazine Macleans, a former member raises the same charges. To do so shows that the church has not taught its own members Rev. Moon’s value system. It should be crystal clear. Under the title "Moonstruck" in the letters to the editor, we read: "Edward R. Schreyer and George Bush would have to be naive in the extreme to believe they could work for one of Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s organizations without lending credibility to his religious views (Ed Schreyer and the Moonies" Cover, Oct. 23, 1995) I was a follower of Moon from 1976 to 1986, and during that wasted decade I attended many religious services and public functions at which Moon spoke. The public should not be too quick to conclude the Moonies are merely a fringe group with no chance of achieving their aims. One need only consider the fateful turn in German politics in 1933 that led to Hitler’s taking power. Regardless of how bizarre Moon’s claims may seem, his bid for legitimacy is no laughing matter."

Hostage to Heaven

Betty Underwood says courts should "be brave enough to tackle head-on the fact of coercive persuasion applied not physically but psychologically." How about those grating furniture salesmen who yell at you on tv to come in and buy furniture on credit no matter how bad your credit is? Would beer commercials be coercive? How about the Republican Party that says the fate of the country lies in its hands. Then there are those who hate the republicans. The list is endless of people giving money and time to help their cause, sometimes incredibly long hours. Should we kidnap workaholics and make them spend time at home with their family? This is just persecution for heretics pure and simple.

Then she writes how the state should regulate religious groups writing "inhibitions should somehow be placed on proselytizing by coercive persuasion such as mandatory licensing of those who practice high powered behavior modification techniques, or requiring mandatory cooling-off periods for initiates." After a person changes from a Democrat to a Republican as some U.S. senators and congressman have done, or someone wants to fly to Italy to live in a Roman Catholic monastery and deny women forever (Is that bizarre or what?) And career (pray and do gardening for the rest of their life (Is that bizarre or what?) And family (solitude in chapel endless hours) (Bizarre!) Should be "required" to think about it. The word "required" is a euphemism for "force." Betty can’t talk straight. And who is going to be the people "requiring" this of all the people in America who get religious conversions? And how will they "require" that is force people to get rational? Will there be a department of religion and federal agents using guns and dogs to "require" people to "cool off " in a jail?

Then she has the audacity and illogic of saying in the next sentence after she has written her goal for thought police that when minority religions against people like her that (defend themselves from her hired thugs) aren’t waiting around for congress to form a thought police and has set herself up as a judge of what is good and bad religion --she says they have created a "chilly effect on free speech."

The UC is one of the "high intensity" cults because of their widespread use of severe, intellectually and emotionally disarming pressures on members and prospective converts." So is an Amway convention that whips up the people to go out and make a million. They have used "mind control."

Then she jumps to the treatment of prisoners of war in North Korea in the 1950s. [ And this is good because Rev. Moon is Korean. )] These men began as patriotic Americans and ended as hating America. "Many had no desire to return home to family and friends." Their personalities were scarred. She writes, "The Korean captors shrewdly orchestrated the use of violence and threats of violence, social; and emotional isolation ... unfamiliar environments in order to disorient prisoners .. Individual attention was monopolized by enforced participation in a rapid, exhausting schedule ... opposing ideas were ridiculed ... "etc. This is exactly what faith breakers and their goons do in motel rooms. Can the person walk out or is there threat of violence? Are they isolated? Is there a rapid and exhausting schedule? Are opposing ideas ridiculed? This is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

In Hostage to Heaven former member Barb Underwood and her mother, Betty write alternate chapters telling of their nightmare of having Barb be a member for four years much of that time spent on grueling hours traveling around selling roses. No one she worked with for those few years and are still in are not doing that now. It was a phase. The Mormons had polygamy for a while too. I don’t have time to get into a discussion of fundraising here, but there was no gun at her head and many thousands tried it and walked out. Betty did not honor her daughter or respect her by deprogramming her. Barb tells a little of her life before the church and the church has a higher moral standard than the one she lived and the church in my eyes has a better sense of politics than their liberal left wing version. These two women are staunch liberal feminists and that alone was too much for them.

Betty writes that the UC pushes for zombies like conformity and makes the person feel so guilty if they don’t follow blindly like slaves: "It’s not so much the deceit," Barb’s father says, a pacifist by politics, "the dictatorship, the exploitative hard work, or where the money goes, it’s the rape of the self. I think that when Barb was given a chance to step back, she sensed that." Let’s look at these words. It is sloppy and dangerous to call kidnaping "a chance to step back."’ It was really "forced to step back" and to get interrogated in a locked room until she broke. Might does not make right. What if someone were addicted to cocaine or potato chips or being a workaholic Catholic nun risking her life with Cannibals in Africa ? Do we kidnap them and give them a "chance to step back"?

The Libertarian party has as part of their platform a statement strongly condemning kidnapping for religious conversion: The Libertarian Party rightly puts in its constitution that government should leave religion alone and specifically condemns the sick socialist practice of deprogramming. They don't write this because they necessarily love so called cults; they write it because they believe deeply in freedom.

Jim Lewis was the vice-presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party in 1984. In his book, Liberty Reclaimed, he teaches that America must give up its tendency to turn to government force to punish non coercive people and groups regardless of whether they are businessmen or churches who are simply offering their services voluntarily. America, he says, must go to a "new level of tolerance for others. Our nation is made up of many diverse groups, nationalities, customs and lifestyles. For centuries the political process has been used by some groups to harass, imprison, and even murder other groups. It has been used by Catholics against Protestants, by Protestants against Catholics, by one nationality against another. It has been used to eradicate customs, languages, and beliefs.  And as tolerance was destroyed so was freedom because the two are intimately linked together. A free society must be a tolerant society because intolerance leads to crusades which need big government."

"As crucial as tolerance is to freedom, it is still very difficult for many of us. Sometimes we watch someone get wrapped up in a religious cult and lose his individuality. We may want to grab him by the arm and drag him off somewhere until we can get him thinking straight again. But if we respect that person's right to make decisions we can only try to persuade him. Or perhaps we see a friend gorging himself on pastry and candy. We know he is gaining an incredible amount of weight. We know that it affects his heart and can ultimately kill him, but still we have no right to forcibly wire his mouth shut or lock him up while we feed him health foods. Instead, we must limit our actions to non coercive means. Or perhaps a dear friend has started taking drugs which we feel will be destructive to him or he becomes an alcoholic. Do we have a moral right to call in the State and have him incarcerated 'for his own good?' No! All we can morally do is try to help him while respecting his right to be wrong.... This respect for the right to commit moral errors is the core of any philosophy of liberty."

Talk about guilt! The UC may say it has a total world view and to deny it is to deny God, but it is another thing when Calvin burned heretics at the stake and deprogrammers use bullies to violently imprison adults against their will and then screamed at as if he or she is a weak brained moron who can’t control themselves. There is no respect here or self-esteem or decency. We all put guilt on others. I’m trying to make deprogrammers feel guilty by writing this. But I’m not going to get a few muscular UC members and kidnap Betty Underwood even though she has used violence and I never have. I’m not afraid of freedom of religion and speech. Human history is one of using force to initiate against those who are considered evil. Jesus was killed in Israel and Joseph Smith was killed in America.  Rev. Moon himself has been beaten to near death and jailed many times for his beliefs and lifestyle that goes against the grain of people like the Underwoods. To them, he and Jesus and Joseph Smith are dangerous kooks and the followers should be punished. Christian radio pounds on the Mormons every day for being a cult. The Mormons have US Senators and a respected university and millions of members and have been around for close to 200 years and still they are a "cult"

Many people have joined and left the Unification Church as many have left and joined countless other groups in America and there is always some who felt their idealism and naiveté were used to become slaves. Many join the US Navy and army and walk out of boot camp. The Roman Catholic church is 2000 years old and has 500 million members and there are countless books and movies against them by non-members and former members. This does not mean the Catholic church or the Mormons or the Jehovah Witnesses or anybody else should be kidnaped.

The really sad thing is that in the case of the UC the years of service Barb gave was not in vain because Rev. Moon is the messiah. But even if he wasn’t, who can tell if they had made different choices their life would have been better. Some former members who joined were on a destructive course of drugs and immorality and confusion and not close to their family that the church stopped. The UC probably saved some lives. The UC is not made up of perfect people and some leaders and early members created some situations that probably were not truly religious and good. But, again, we must be careful here too, because what we just know in our heart is wrong sometimes turns out to be true and vice versa. We often misjudge people and events incorrectly and years later see our folly. And change our ways. The Church will continue to defend itself in print and in court after being attacked, but unlike Betty, will never stoop to using as Satan would use words of "coercive persuasion." Yes, I called her actions satanic. I also say I will defend her right to call me Satan also. Just not in a locked room with her goons holding me down as she brainwashes me.

It’s really sad that the Unification Church leadership has been too busy to find time to explain deeply the goals and values of Rev. Moon so that some people leave and think the wild thoughts that Barb Underwood writes of in her book such as the absurd statement: "Moon’s principles appear racist." He is seen as everything from being anti-Semitic and has "Hitlerian obsession with the superiority of Aryan ‘blood’" Moon is sexist because he is quoted as saying "when you are blessed in marriage, you women must be absolutely obedient to your husbands." Many mainline religions teach that. The Underwoods are deeply feminist and of course will have a hard time with Rev. Moon. She writes that "Moon flatly endorses the Asian extended family over the nuclear family and orders his women to be servants to parents and grandparents-in-law." Rev. Moon is very critical of American women for not wanting to care for the elderly in their home and putting them in a nursing home. The Underwoods are again wrong on this one and need to learn from him that there are some customs and traditions in Asia that are superior to ours.

They write that "Rev. Moon lectures to his young enthusiasts, are sprinkled with violent imagery." So does Jesus. So do coaches at a pep rally. Then she writes. "How literally this is to be taken, is not clear." After four years why doesn’t she know? It is crystal clear that there is no teaching to use violence as Cain killed Abel and its teaching is to restore that.

Time itself is all that is needed to show who is right. As I write Rev. Moon is approaching 80 and still not turned to violence. In fact, many people are beginning to see that. He believes his ideology is the absolute truth and will sweep the earth, but no, he is honorable and good.

No one fears seeing wholesome Salvation Army soldiers in uniform playing church songs and begging for money in shopping malls. No one thinks that its leader, a general, is a threat. Perhaps, it is because he and his troops do not think they can win the world. Rev. Moon is the first "guru" as he is called to come up with the idea that everyone will end up in heaven. On earth and in spirit world. Which truth sounds higher? The Salvation Army people don’t get scared responses of fear and looked at as dangerous but they teach that the vast majority of the people who put coins in their pot are going to burn forever in hell or the Moonie as they derisively call them who think that those who are hating them and fear that they will hurt them think that they will end up in heaven.?

Ephesians uses military language. Jesus used harsh language.

Culture of Disbelief

Stephen L. Carter is a professor of law at the Yale law school. In his book The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion, he is right on some points and wrong on others. Let's look first at where he has a message that everyone should understand and then I'll tie that in with this chapter's theme of patriarchy. He writes that America as well as the world has a "woeful history of oppression of disfavored religious groups." He says America should not only respect other religions but should "celebrate" "religious pluralism." Sadly, it does not. The state is more revered than religion. Our culture is predominately secular and believes that "religion is something that should be believed in privacy, not something that should be paraded." The culture "says that anyone who believes that God can heal diseases is stupid or fanatical" and have taken 'mystic flight from hard truths' and has nothing to do with the real world." Our culture, he says, "holds not only that religious beliefs cannot serve as the basis of policy; they cannot even be debated in the forum of public dialogue on which a liberal politics crucially depends .... Religion is like building model airplanes, just another hobby: something quiet, something private, something trivial -- and not really a fit activity for intelligent, public-spirited adults."

Our culture is hostile to religion. He says that if you "tell a group of well-educated professionals that you hold a political position (preferably a controversial one, such as being against abortion or pornography) because it is required by your understanding of God's will" everyone will scatter and if anyone says anything they will challenge you "on the ground that you are intent on imposing your religious beliefs on other people. And in contemporary political and legal culture, nothing is worse."

"That awful phrase -- 'imposing religious beliefs' -- conjures up images of the religious right, the Reverend Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, the Reverend Pat Robertson's presidential campaign .... We live in a secular culture, devoted to sweet reason. We aren't superstitious. Taking religion seriously is something that only those wild-eyed zealots do .... The message is that people who take their religion seriously, who rely on their understanding of God for motive force in their public and political personalities -- well, they're scary people."

"The message of contemporary culture seems to be that it is perfectly all right to believe that stuff -- we have freedom of conscience, folks can believe what they like -- but you really ought to keep it to yourself, especially if your beliefs are the sort that cause you to act in ways that are ... well ... a bit unorthodox. Consider our general cultural amusement each time the Reverend Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church holds one of his joint marriage ceremonies in which he weds thousands of couples simultaneously -- always including some who have never met before, but were chosen for each other by the church. In Korea in the summer of 1992, some 12,000 couples were joined. Television commentators poked eager fun .... The idea seems to be that taking one's religion seriously is one thing, but letting one's church control the choice of a mate -- a life companion -- well, there a hint of irrationality creeps in. It is fine to be pious and observant in the small things, but marriage is serious! No normal person, evidently, would allow a religious leader to make so important a decision; and anyone who does so is worthy of ridicule."

Deprogramming of Maria Trapp

He continues with a heading "The Deprogramming of Maria Augusta Trapp" saying that one of his children's "favorite films is the much-beloved family classic, The Sound of Music. They have watched the videotape so often that my wife and I sometimes wonder whether there is a single line of dialogue that they have not committed to memory. We are glad they like the film, because it tells a clear, clean, spiritually uplifting story, in which the protagonists rely on wits and faith for their survival, instead of the ruthless destruction of the opposition that is today a staple of 'children's' programming. Because the kids so enjoy the story and the music, we decided one fine June weekend to visit the Trapp Family Lodge, nestled in the rolling green hills above Waterbury, Vermont. There, we thought, the children might learn about the connection -- or, perhaps, the disconnection -- between art and life. So off we went on a grand family outing. The children got a kick out of seeing the place where the real Maria and the real Baron Von Trapp once lived and walked and presumably even sang -- and so, to top it off, we gave in to their pleas and bought Maria's autobiography."

"What we learned from the autobiography was that Maria's religion was even more important to her than the film lets on. Because (she says this, right in the book) after she fell in love with Captain Von Trapp, she didn't just visit Mother Superior for a bit of sung advice about climbing every mountain and then make up her own mind, the way it happens in the musical. Oh, no. She went to visit Mother Superior and asked her permission. Not her advice, mind you, but her permission; Maria needed a yes or no."

"The answer Maria received from Mother Superior took the following form: 'We prayed to the Holy Ghost, and we held council, and it became clear to us ... that it is the Will of God that you marry the Captain and be a good mother to his children.' Did I say 'permission'? This was virtually a command. Maria quotes her own nervous answer to the captain: "Th-they s-s-said I have to m-m-m-marry you-u!' Not I can if I want to -- but I have to. And had Mother Superior refused permission, so Maria suggests, she would never have married the Captain, which would have meant no spine-tingling escape from Austria following the Anschluss, no best-selling book, no singing career, no lodge in Vermont, no musical play, no Hollywood film. She would have had a different life altogether, all because of the decision (dare we say the whim?) of one individual, a religious leader, her Mother Superior."

"Let us for a moment take Maria out of the mainstream and place her not in Roman Catholicism but in, say, the Unification Church; now imagine that the decision on whether she may marry the Captain rests in the hands not of Mother Superior but of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. All at once her decision to consult with her religious superior before marrying takes on a cast either sinister or amusing, depending on one's preferences. At that point, Maria Trapp believes too deeply; she becomes a weirdo."

"Freud believed that deep religiosity was neurotic in nature, and many psychiatrists still do." He praises Robert Cole's "fine book The Spiritual Life of Children" because he "came to understand that religious commitments, whatever their characteristics, tend to be genuine expressions of human personality. Other therapists have not. That is why Stephen Arterburn and Jack Felton, in their 1991 book Toxic Faith: Understanding and Overcoming Religious Addiction, probably thought they were being progressive when they decided that some religious commitments were dysfunctional and others were just fine."

"What would Arterburn and Felton have thought of Maria's decision to seek the permission of her religious leader before marrying the Captain? They do not tell us, exactly, but they do give us this account of some of the goings-on in one church's 'toxic faith system': 'The pastor, or shepard as he was called, had final say in everything in the lives of his flock: whether to buy a house, take a vacation, get married, and even whom to marry.'" Even whom to marry. So if Maria really thought she could not marry without the approval of her Mother Superior, does that make the Catholic Church a kind of toxic faith itself, at least if people take it seriously?"

After going into the history of attacks on the Mormons where even the Supreme Court labeled them "subversive to good order" he says, "So, what does one do about the Mormons, Maria Trapp, and other people intoxicated by faith -- people who not only refuse to keep quiet about their beliefs, but actually place the demands of their religions above the secular society's demands of 'good order'? When mocking them doesn't work, we have another way to deal with them. In most of the world it would be kidnaping. In our media-dominated secular society, however, it is dressed up with the fancy name of 'deprogramming.'"

"...Even if (as is certainly true) some cults are every bit as evil as the culture paints them, our mainstream antipathy toward the religions we call cults has gone a bit too far. Our tolerance for the practice of deprogramming supplies the evidence. We must not make the error of approving illegitimate means -- kidnaping, psychological battering -- because of the importance we attach to the end. Perhaps more imperative, we must resist the pressure to define what is outside of the mainstream, what is eccentric, as necessarily 'subversive of good order.' For unless one views the purpose of religion as making the mainstream comfortable, there will always be religious people -- one hopes, lots of them -- who are guided more by faith than by the standards and demands of others, and who will therefore seem eccentric."

"This brings us back to Maria Trapp. Had she grown up in today's America instead of Europe between the world wars, and had her religion not been Catholicism, perhaps she would never have gone to Mother Superior seeking permission to marry; more to the point, she might never have been a person of the sort who would go to Mother Superior for permission to marry. But if she had been the type to ask, and if she had done it, she would likely have been ridiculed for letting some religious leader control her personal life, much like the Western press poked fun at the 25,000 people who were married by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. And if the ridicule did not persuade Maria to change, perhaps some well-meaning deprogrammer, hired by her worried parents, would have snatched her up and subjected her to psychological battering until she renounced her devotion to the eccentric, domineering Catholic cult. And this would have been sad, because it would have meant no book, no play, no film for our kids to enjoy."

"And, incidentally, no religious freedom either."

He says Americans should respect the power that religion holds over many people: "Religions are in effect independent centers of power, with bona fide claims on the allegiance of their members, claims that exist alongside, are not identical to, and will sometimes trump the claims to obedience that the state makes. A religion speaks to its members in a voice different from that of the state, and when the voice moves the faithful to action, a religion may act as a counterweight to the authority of the state."

He says "the Supreme Court was ironically right in 1879 to call the Mormons 'subversive,' and why segregationists were right in the 1960s to apply the same epithet to the Souther Christian Leadership Conference -- for a religion, in its corporate self, will often thumb its nose at what the rest of the society believes is right."

"Democracy needs its nose-thumbers" because they strengthen the nation. He says, "When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States early in the nineteenth century, he wrote, in Democracy in America, that the young nation's 'religious atmosphere was the first thing that struck me on arrival in the United States.' Indeed, Tocqueville claimed, America was 'the place where the Christian religion has kept the greatest power over men's souls.'" He saw this was a good thing.

"...in Tocqueville's view, this meant that liberty was tempered by a common morality: 'Thus, while the law allows the American people to do everything, there are things which religion prevents them from imagining and forbids them to dare.' Put simply, as political scientist Rogers M. Smith has noted, Tocqueville 'believed that the support given by religious to virtuous standards of behavior was indispensable for the preservation of liberty.'"

"For Tocqueville, religions provided Americans with the strong moral character without which democracy cannot function; but, perhaps equally important, they helped to fill the vast space between the people and the government created in their name -- a space, Tocqueville recognized, that the government might otherwise fill by itself. In many countries, Tocqueville noted, people relied upon the state to solve all problems, and concomitantly lost their liberty." And that is exactly the thesis of this chapter. America gave up religion, especially the Christian belief of men being the patriarchs in the home and in society, and now it has degenerated to President Clinton.

God had worked to elevate patriarchy to be more Godly but Satan won by abolishing it with the women getting the vote. Men became feminized and turned to government instead of religion. Tocqueville knew this would happen if America gave up its religion. By giving up patriarchy it gave up the core of Christianity. Religion was crippled when women got power. Tocqueville saw America strong because it was centered on men focusing on the local. God was in the process of raising men, but women were impatient and usurped their power. Carter writes that Tocqueville "was pleased to see that America had found in its plentitude of private associations, 'associations in civil life which have no political object,' a replacement for the aristocracy that once stood, in theory, as a bulwark against government tyranny: 'The morals and intelligence of a democratic people would be in as much danger as its commerce and industry if ever a government wholly usurped the place of private associations." America is in danger now because government has taken over.

God was working in the last 400 years to prepare the world to accept the Messiah by raising its understanding of patriarchy and the woman's role in the home. Satan corrupted it and eventually destroyed it. Because women do not obey men, religion is dead. Christianity is weak. God had wanted men to respect other religions and to respect religious leaders. Instead the Messiah has been tortured and jailed by Koreans, Japanese and Americans. He is laughed at as a joke. He is trivial to people because religion is trivial. And religion is trivial because it has been lobotomized. Socialist/feminists have won. Professor Carter writes in the hope that America wakes up and begins to respect religion. He, unfortunately, has been feminized and rejects Ephesians 5 that says men are the head of the house. He is blind like everyone else to what has happened. Sadly he has helped the very people he tries to fight who work to make religion weak. Still, I'm grateful for whatever people can offer.

He correctly writes, "To insist that the state's secular moral judgments should guide the practices of all religions is to trivialize the idea that faith matters to people. When Martin Luther King, Jr., declared in his 'Letter from Birmingham City Jail' that a 'just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God,' he was not bandying words he was stating a bedrock commitment to the authority of God as superior to the authority of the state .... Nowadays, such commitments are evidently suspect, the mark of the fanatic, especially when urged in the service of positions often described as right wing."

America, he writes, must respect religious people who feel "religion is more real, more alive, more vital than the good opinion of others, which is why Maria went to her Mother Superior for permission to marry and why many followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon are willing to grant him the same privilege. The essence of religious martyrdom is the sacrifice that comes from the refusal to yield to what one's society demands."

Religion is a very subversive force

People must understand, he writes, that "religion is really an alien way of knowing the world -- alien, at least, in a political and legal culture in which reason supposedly rules. The idea that a group of people will refuse to bow, either to law or to what some are bold to call reason, is, of course, a very subversive one in organized society. But religion, properly understood, is a very subversive force; subversive, at least, in a state committed to the proposition that religious ways of looking at the world do not count. No wonder, then, that our political culture seems to be afraid of it."

Americans fear the UC now. What will happen in the future when the Church has millions of members? The first candidate for high political office will have to do as John Kennedy did when he ran as the first major candidate for President who wasn't a Protestant. He was a Catholic and had to answer questions about his relationship with the Pope. Would he do as the Pope said? He answered saying he would not. What will a follower of Sun Myung Moon or whoever is in charge of the Church say after Father dies? Our connection to Father or Mother or the True Children are closer than the Kennedy families are to the Pope. I hope America grows spiritually to not fear the UC. I hope those who run and eventually achieve political power are only men, not women, and that they will legislate for limited government and not use government force to make people do what they think is right such as banning drugs and pornography, making abortions illegal, supporting big government programs like social security and taxing the rich more than others. Even though we speak strongly against homosexuality, we should not legislate against them in any way. We hate the sin, but love the sinner. President George Bush was one of the speakers who came to Father's inauguration of his organization Family Federation for World Peace in 1996. He repeated what his wife, Barbara, had said in a speech that it is more important what goes on in the houses of America than what is going on in the White House. It's more important what goes on in blessed couples homes than what goes on at Church headquarters.

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