Unification Church of the United States

The Unification Church of the United States is the official branch of the Unification Church in the United States of America. It began in the late 1950s and early 1960s when missionaries from South Korea were sent to America by the international Unification Church's founder and leader Sun Myung Moon. It expanded in the 1970s and then became involved in controversy due to its theology, its political activism, and the lifestyle of its members. Since then, it has been involved in many areas of American society and has established businesses, news media, projects in education and the arts, as well as taking part in political and social activism, and has itself gone through substantial changes. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, missionaries from the Unification Church of South Korea came to the United States of America. Among them were Young Oon Kim, Sang Ik-Choi, Bo Hi Pak, David S. C. Kim, and Yun Soo Lim. Missionary work took place in 7 Mid-Atlantic states (including New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey) and Washington D.C., 3 Midwestern states (including Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan), and 3 West Coast states (including California, Oregon, and Washington). In 1965, Moon visited the United States and established what he called "holy grounds" in each of the 48 contiguous states. The Unification Church first came to public notice in the United States after sociology student John Lofland studied Young Oon Kim's group and published his findings as a doctoral thesis entitled: The World Savers: A Field Study of Cult Processes, which was published in 1966 in book form by Prentice-Hall as Doomsday Cult: A Study of Conversion, Proselytization, and Maintenance of Faith. This book is considered to be one of the most important and widely cited studies of the process of religious conversion, and one of the first modern sociological studies of a new religious movement. By 1971 the Unification Church of the United States had about 500 members. By the end of the 1970s it had expanded to about 5,000 members, with most of them being in their early 20s.