Religion: Moon Landing in Manhattan

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How does a preacher with murky credentials draw a crowd in jaded New York City? Simple. You field a corps of 2,000 tireless, polite young buttonholers who spend weeks offering people free tickets. Invest $300,000 on publicity for the one-night stand—far more than Billy Graham has ever spent for an eight-day crusade. Along with the radio and TV spots and full-page newspaper ads, plaster posters of the smiling preacher on all conceivable wall space.

It all worked for the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, 54, South Korea's crypto-Messiah, who packed Madison Square Garden to overflowing last week. The happening, complete with numbers by the Korean Folk Ballet, kicked off an eight-city tour that climaxes his drive to build a base in the U.S. just seven years before the Messianic Age is to begin. Moon, through an interpreter, told the Garden-goers in guttural shouts, "The time of the Second Coming of Christ is near, and America is the landing site!" Half the crowd filtered out during the 2½-hour oration, but for many of those who stayed, there was little doubt that the Messiah is Moon himself.

Since his New York appearance a year ago (TIME, Oct. 15), Moon has spoken in all 50 states, typically drawing only several hundred people. Meanwhile, his church has bought a former Catholic seminary to expand Moon's schools for training outsiders. With a previously purchased estate and the lavish mansion where Moon lives, this gives the movement $3 million worth of property in the Hudson River Valley. The Moonmen say income for U.S. operations ($7 million last year) comes mostly from street peddling of flowers, peanuts and candles—which is possible, given the fervor of his international corps of disciples. (As salesmen minus work visas, the aliens among them are now threatened with deportation.)

While Moon was on a brief trip home to Korea last November, God revealed to him that Americans "must love Richard Nixon." For weeks the well-scrubbed Moon-people demonstrated in the capital with GOD LOVES NIXON signs. Many politicians, including four Nixon loyalists on the House Judiciary Committee, endorsed the hang-in-there campaign.

Moon is a man of many faces. To some, he is a Korean exemplar of Americanism and anti-Communism who merits fond words from the superpatriotic Sons of the American Revolution. To others, he is an international educator who lures students to indoctrination seminars with guest lectures by such big-name academics as Political Scientists Roger Hilsman and Samuel P. Huntington.

Moon's public religious face is that of a brotherhood-minded Christian clergyman and founder of the "ecumenical" Unification Church. At a Waldorf banquet in his honor last week, a monsignor offered the opening prayer, and another Catholic, Seer Jeane Dixon, gushed, "Bless you, Reverend Moon, for your message."

In private meetings, he is the authoritarian "Master" Moon who claims to be "greater than Jesus himself" and says, "God is now throwing Christianity away and is now establishing a new religion, and this new religion is Unification Church ... We have only one way." Other in-group speeches have proclaimed, "I am your brain" and "The whole world is in my hand, and I will conquer and subjugate the world."