DIARY OF AN EX-MOONIE

The Boston Globe

Date: Friday, December 18, 1981

By Kay Longcope Globe Staff

In retrospect, he should have been suspicious at the start.

Short hair? In the early 70s? At the University of California at Berkeley?

Those lectures and workshops. All about a Second Messiah? From Korea?

And those 19-hour days. Selling candy. Flowers. Candles. Getting only four or five hours' sleep. Pocketing $300 a day. Keeping nothing.

For what?

For The Master. For the True Father. To keep him in mansions and expensive cars, says Steve Kemperman who, at age 26, has just published the first book written by an ex-Moonie - "The Lord of the Second Advent."

Sound crazy? Yeah. But that's how crazy it was, says Kemperman, who can talk about it now. How he spent three and a half years, age 18 to 21, in the clutches of Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church. That short, chunky Korean whose followers bag young kids off college campuses, pretending to be really terrific, really friendly, really warm and caring, really nurturing and supportive. Love-bombing the hell out of them! Or so Kemperman says.

"Love-bombing is a fantastic technique," he said in a recent Boston interview. "Love-bombing makes it hard to question the group, the people who are showering you with affection, warmth, concern, compliments and support. You feel very comfortable, very attracted to the group. It really diminishes your critical faculties. They use deception to get you in the community. And it was a community, a real community. That's one of the elements of mind control, an effect of what they do. But they don't see it that way."

Community - just what college-age kids need and are looking for when they're trying to find their feet, away from home for the first time in their lives - as Kemperman was in 1973, his freshman year at UC-Berkeley. The year that the Moonies eclipsed his plans for a college education.

"I had no idea I would be taken out of school and sent to Boston to recruit." And put in the baking sun and the frigid temperatures fundraising. Selling the candy, the flowers and the candles. From 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. In shopping plazas, bars, supermarkets, executive offices. Talking up The Father, The One True Church, the only religion trying to change the world, to other young people. Hanging out at Harvard Square and on Storrow Drive. Being really friendly and agreeable - and deceptive - with young people at Tufts, Northeastern, BU and Boston State.

"You have to be brought into the group at all costs," Kemperman said. "Lying and deception is OK because time is running out', these are the last days'. That's what Moon preaches and how the recruiters view recruiting . . ..A lot of what they said made sense. I didn't want to reject something that could be true."

So he did to others exactly what had been done to him the first week he was 3000 miles away from the bosom of a loving, upper middle-class, Roman Catholic family of seven. Telling other young people, as he had been told, that the only spiritual truth, the only spiritual path, lay in embracing Moon. Joining the cult of Moonies. (Moonies claim 7000 members in the United States, and 30,000 worldwide.)

Kemperman, who's a graduate of a Jesuit high school in Rochester, N.Y., believed the lectures. He believed the workshops. He believed that Great Community Spirit. He believed he held THE TRUTH in his hands.

But not at first. That's why, after a month of socializing and intellectualizing with the group at Berkeley, he moved into their house. To "investigate" them, he says. To find out what they were really up to. How that beaming Korean face adorning the walls, that face they all worshipped as Father, could really be the world's "second Messiah."

Once in the Moonie house, Kemperman said he had no time to "investigate." Or go to college. Or think for himself. Or be alone for a minute.

"Even in the bathroom," he said. "They believe that evil spirits place negative thoughts in your mind. They don't want to give you a minute alone because that's a minute with Satan.' You go along with this because they say it's the way to learn loving more, giving more. They say, give it a break, go along with it, put away your conceptions.' If the leaders say jump,' you jump. It's humiliating to admit I let it happen, but I became a child. People regress as cult members."

Before Kemperman was of voting age (21 in those days), he had swollen eyelids and bags under his eyes. No sleep. Clear heads make clear thinkers. Clear thinkers might not buy the package being peddled.

"They debilitate you through lack of sleep and fatigue," Kemperman said. "They had us going through an incredible melee of activities. If you go along with what they do, there is positive group enforcement. If you ask questions (show you have doubts), group reaction is negative. That's the age- old way of conditioning and manipulating people's behavior."

You're put, he said, on "emotional overload." As Kemperman was when his parents in l977 tried to reclaim him, resorting to kidnaping. He was in an Ohio shopping center fundraising - selling candy.

"Fundraising is holy," said Kemperman. "You're taking money away from Satan and giving it to God, giving the contributor the opportunity for spiritual blessing by giving money to establish a financial empire for the kingdom of God. Moon's kingdom on earth,' of course.

"He's building a financial empire. He'd like to build a political empire, but a financial empire is easier. The Internal Revenue Service demanded statistics last year. Figures show Moonies raised $38 million in 1980. Moon says he's building the natural foundation for the kingdom of God, physically restoring the world.' " Moon owns two estates in Tarrytown, N.Y., property on Beacon street in Boston, two yachts - one used for tuna-fishing in Gloucester. He drives a customized Lincoln Continental. He is under indictment of the US government for income tax evasion.

Moon also says he is "the Perfect Father married to the Perfect Mother." Even though current wife is number three, says Kemperman. "The first two failed their missions,' " he continued. "Of course, it wasn't his fault. Nothing is ever his fault. The Perfect Father and the Perfect Mother are raising Perfect Children - 12. They're all in private schools. They don't fundraise, they're privileged. The oldest is a real jerk. He was kicked out of school for shooting people with a BB gun."

Kemperman has been out of the cult since the 1977 kidnaping and months of deprogramming at an anti-cult center in New Hampshire.

He was of two minds about leaving "The Family." On the one hand, enormous relief. On the other, terrible fear and guilt.

As a Moonie, he said, "my own life was over because there were no more major decisions left to make." Answers to all meaning-of-life questions are contained in Moon's "Divine Principles," the cult's Bible. "Master Speaks" addresses male-female relationships. "It's a sexless cult until Moon picks your mate and blesses you," said Kemperman.

If you think of leaving, he said, "they instill fear by saying you will die a spiritual death. They describe this graphically. You become haggard, with black rings under your eyes, you're constantly depressed because you have lost the connection to God. They say you stay like that up to 1000 years."

The best day in his life, he said, was the morning he was able to race through the fields in New Hampshire, shouting "I'm free! I'm free!"

Kemperman graduated last May from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with a degree in social science. This year he is traveling, promoting his book. Next fall he will return to the University of Michigan for postgraduate work in economics.

In the meantime, he is hopping around the country, trying to tell young people to beware of easy answers, to beware of the Moonies and other religious cults, to beware of putting themselves in the hands of spiritual dictators whose chief interest is exploitation of youth toward their own ends.

Ends that are never explained until a recruit is sucked in, captured, committed and fed terrifying principles so they will remain a part of the group. Told that any thoughts of leaving, rejoining family and friends, are the work of Satan and desertion of The Father is spiritual suicide.

"I have realized that these kids meant so well, they wanted to change the world and live for God, and what happened is so evil," Kemperman said.

He suggests that young people attracted to cults, such as the Moonies, the Hare Krishna or the Children of God, ask themselves these questions:

- Are they asking me a lot about myself, getting a lot of information without giving any back?

- Why are they offering me free dinners, workshops, using vague excuses?

- Are "front groups" being used for recruiting purposes? What do the groups actually represent and do? -

Are group members asking me to go to isolated places before I know who they are or the motives of the group (the Moonies took him to Booneville, Calif., 150 miles north of the Bay Area for three-day workshops).

- Do they discourage chances for privacy, a time for reflection?

- Do they ask for quick decisions and commitments?

"You can't make quick decisions and commitments in terms of lifelong endeavors," said Kemperman, who is now living with his parents and back in the fold of the Catholic church.

"Real religious groups give converts a chance to make intelligent evaluations and commitment to the group," he stressed. For example, "if you join the Lutheran Church, they want you to know what you're joining and what is expected of you. That's not true in cults.

"There's not open religious conversion, there's not free experience.' They just go whammo!"