I NTRODUCTION T O S ECTION

Boston, Massachusetts, Thanksgiving Day, 1978. Eugene Wigner, Emeritus Professor of Physics at Princeton, Manhattan Project veteran, and Nobel Laureate, placed his notes on the podium and began his address. His brief speech opened a conference dedicated, in his words, to fostering unity between the natural sciences and the sciences of life and the discussion of “the effects of religion on human needs, on happiness.”1 Wigner added that he hoped to stimulate a conversation on the psychology of animals, which would benefit the scientific study of human psychology as well. A long table of VIPs dominated the front of the banquet hall, with Wigner’s podium in the center. At the physicist’s left sat the neuroscientist Sir John Eccles, another Nobel Laureate; Fredrick Seitz, former president of the National Academy of Sciences and Rockefeller University; Kenneth Mellanby, the ecologist who founded and directed the British science

establishment of Monks Wood Experimental Station; and the M.I.T. sociologist Daniel Lerner. R.V. Jones, the wartime scientific adviser to Winston Churchill, Richard Rubenstein, a leading American Jewish theologian, and Michael Warder, journalist and conference director, sat to Wigner’s right. In the audience, four hundred and fifty scientists from over fifty countries listened to the opening addresses of the Seventh International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences (ICUS VII). In the coming four days, they would speak on such subjects as Burkitt’s Lymphoma in Paraequatorial Africa, the supernationality of science, species selfishness, and theories of religious

One small detail, however, distinguished the ICUS from the many other academic conferences that occurred in 1978. Also at the dais sat the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, founder and leader of the Unification Church, the controversial new religious movement known to America as “the Moonies.” The International Cultural Foundation (ICF), a Unification funded organization, provided the half million dollars that sponsored the Seventh International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences, as it had done for the six preceding and fifteen following meetings of ICUS.2

In the ICF’s words, “the purpose of ICUS [was] to provide an opportunity for scholars and scientists to reflect on the nature of knowledge and to discuss the relationship of science to the standard of value.”3

At the conferences scientists delivered papers on topics ranging from the technical and obscure to the nearly universal. Many extolled the conference as one of the few that encouraged true interdisciplinary conversation. Professor Max Jammer, president of the Association for the Advancement of Science in Israel, offered a representative comment, calling ICUS “a uniquely stimulating event by providing the rare possibilities of an

interdisciplinary exchange on problems of profound significance for the intellectual situation of our time.”4

Previous conferences featured addresses and papers by sociologists, historians, theologians, and Nobel-winning scientists. For example, the fourth ICUS included presentations by the inventor of holographs, Dennis Gabor, as well as the chemist who first isolated Vitamin C, Albert Szent-Gyorgi, both past winners of Nobel Prizes.5

In addition to the physical scientists, J.B. Rhine, the famous ESP researcher from Duke University, Theodore Roszak, academic spokesman for the counterculture, and historian Oscar Handlin, the Pulitzer Prize winning scholar of immigration, had all attended preceding ICUS meetings. But outside the Sheraton

Boston Hotel demonstrators protested against the Unification Church as a dangerous cult and the conference as a publicity stunt and scientific sham. “These cultists must be destroyed, imprisoned – anything to STOP their mind control of society,” read the protestors’ leaflet.6

In protest of the ICUS conference, a former member of the Unification Church now affiliated with the anti-cult movement released a statement comparing the Unificationists to Nazis. The scientists, he warned, were “legitimating a demagogue and are lending credence to a movement whose goals and methods find their parallel in the National Socialist Movement in Germany under Hitler.”7

One possible explanation of the demonstrators’ fiery rhetoric: less than two weeks earlier, almost one thousand people had committed mass suicide at Jonestown, a commune in Guyana, South America, run by another new religion, Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple.8 _{“Dangerous cults,”} as media sources referred to them, were on Americans minds.9

Ironically, one ICUS panel featured well-respected scholar of religion Ninian Smart discussing “Death and Suicide in Contemporary Thought,” which conference organizers hastened to explain had been organized well before the Guyana tragedy.

What would bring the Unification Church to sponsor a scientific conference, one at which, its attendees insisted, in the words of Sir John Eccles, “the conferences have been notable for complete freedom to all participants”?10

Scientists themselves

determined the topics and subjects of their papers, sessions, and panels, and a committee of academics oversaw the process. Critics suggested that Reverend Moon and his church sought the publicity and legitimization that hobnobbing with savants brought. This does provide part of the answer. Certainly Moon and his church enjoyed and benefited from the exposure, but the sources indicate that the Unificationists sponsored ICUS because

the conferences forwarded the movement’s program of reconciliation between science and religion and unity within science itself. Although the church set no limits on the participants or their papers, it provided the overall theme, always one that stressed the need for moral or religious guidance of science. The Boston conference considered “the re-evaluation of existing values and the search for absolute values,” or, as the

conference’s organizer Michael Young Warder explained to the press, ICUS “provide[d] an opportunity for scholars and scientists to discuss questions of values,” and considered “concerns about the crisis of values in the modern world.”11

Other meetings of the international conferences considered such subjects as “modern science and moral values” (ICUS I), “harmony among the sciences” (ICUS V), “the responsibility of the academic community” (ICUS VIII), “absolute values and the new reassessment of the

contemporary world” (ICUS XVI), and “absolute values and the unity of the sciences: the origin of human responsibility” (ICUS XX). Through such topical guidance, the

Unification Church and its International Cultural Foundation sought to shepherd science towards working within a moral paradigm set by the church: a holistic quest for

knowledge and progress operating under a religiously-attuned set of absolute behavioral and philosophical guidelines that, in the view of the Unification Church, highlighted peace, piety, and progressivism.

Fundamentally, Unificationist leaders and members took a pro-science position, meaning support for the goals, means, and members of the scientific community, but they did so with the hope and aspiration that their religious movement would guide science towards its divinely-mandated goal, the discovery of knowledge, the progress of human material life, and ultimately, alongside the efforts of religion, the creation of a heaven-on-

earth. This included support of American’s scientific establishment, upon which the Unificationists looked positively. Like other American Christians,12

Unificationists believed religion to be compatible with a modern scientific worldview, envisioning science and religion as separate spheres that did not impinge upon the other. At times science presented problems to religion, for example the often thorny issue of human evolution and natural selection. Yet overall, Unificationism saw science as a powerful force for good. As demonstrated here, the Unification Church embodied a progressive millennialism in keeping with the American postmillennial tradition. Like the Social Gospelers a half century earlier, the Unification Church saw science and technology as tools of establishing a model Christian society. Believing themselves responsible for fostering a heaven-on-earth, Unificationists looked to science as a valuable asset, and the scientific community as a natural ally.

1

International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences, The Re-Evaluation of Existing Values and the Search for Absolute Values: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences, November 24-26, 1978, Boston, Massachusetts, 2 vols. (New York: International Cultural Foundation Press, 1979), 13-15.

2

The International Cultural Foundation sponsored the twenty-second ICUS conference in November, 2000, the final year of the twentieth century and second millennium. Brian Gruber, “World Scientists Launch Assault on Global Problems,” World Student Times, 12 December 1978, Alan MacRobert, “Moon Science Conference: Walking into 1984,” The Real Paper, 9 December 1978. The exact cost of the Boston conference has not been publicized, but the Boston Globe provided estimates in its coverage, Robert Cooke, “Moon Conference: Demonstration That Jargon Is Universal,” Boston Sunday Globe, 26 November 1978, 32.

3 _{International Cultural Foundation, “What ICUS Is,” (Booklet, 1978) New Religious} Movements Organizations: Vertical Files Collection, GTU 99-8-1, The Graduate Theological Union Archives, Berkeley, CA, 3.

4

Ibid., 16. The What ICUS Is booklet provided dozens of similar quotes by major scientists, all intended to present to outsiders that the International Conferences on the Unity of the Sciences offered social and scientific value and operated independent of Reverend Moon.

5

Ted Agres, “Science & Values: Turning Point?,” Industrial Research 18, no. 1 (1976): 24.

6

Richard Bevilacqua and Earl Marchand, “Moon Eludes Pickets at Boston Conference,”

Boston Herald American, 25 November 1978, 1. See also Howie Carr, “Anti-Moonies to Picket His Science Conclave,” Boston Herald American, 23 November 1978, Robert Cooke, “Foes Ask a Boycott on Moon Meeting,” Boston Globe, 23 November 1978. 7

Allen Tate Wood, “Statement by Mr. Allen Tate Wood, Former Member and Official of the Moon Organization, 22 November 1978,” (Typewritten Note, 1978) Cult Awareness Network (CAN) Collection, ARC Mss 19, Department of Special Collections, University Libraries, University of California, Santa Barbara.

8

For more on Jonestown, see David Chidester, Salvation and Suicide: An Interpretation of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

9

On the media response to Jonestown and treatment of “cults,” Ibid., 24-45, Sean

McCloud, Making the American Religious Fringe: Exotics, Subversives, and Journalists, 1955-1993 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 127-59.

10

Sir John Eccles, “Letter to Participants, October 15, 1976,” (Personal Correspondence, 1976) Warder [Michael] Collection, ARC Mss 31, Department of Special Collections, University Libraries, University of California, Santa Barbara.

11

Robert Cooke, “Scientists Defend Role at Moon Parley,” Boston Globe, 25 November 1978, 3.

12

There is some debate over whether the Unification Church is Christian. Much like the situation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Unification Church envisions itself as Christian, but the majority of other Christian groups, be they liberal, mainline, and evangelical, reject it as such. Such a theological determination is beyond the scope of this study. Historically, Unificationism emerged from a Christian context and roots itself in Christian history and theology, as I demonstrate. Because this study considers the Unification Church historically, I will refer to it as Christian, though recognizing that it may not satisfy some theological definitions.