Akina Cox - Part 1: Unification Church, Mass Weddings, and Unpaid Labor

Artist and writer Akina Cox shares about her childhood growing up in the Unification Church, also known as the Moonies. They discuss the background of the church and its late leader Reverend Moon, how her parents both joined after hitchhiking in the 70s, and what it was like growing up in the group.

She shares how it felt participating in a mass wedding ceremony, moving to the border of North and South Korea, and the stark contrast between Reverend Moon’s lavish lifestyle and the unpaid labor demanded of members. Plus, how going to college sparked her first real doubts about the church, and the Unification Church’s surprising financial ties to American politics.

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AKINA COX

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Trust me? Do you trust me? Would I ever lead you?
Wish your trust? This is the truth, the only truth.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
If anybody ever tells you to just trust them, don't
welcome to trust me. The podcast about colts, extreme belief
and manipulation from two future brides who've actually experienced it.
I am Lola Blanc and I am Megan Elizabeth. Today
our guest is Aqina Cox, artist and writer who grew
up in the Unification Church also known as the Mooney's.

(00:29):
In Part one today, we'll talk to her about the
background on the church and leader Reverend Moon, how her
parents both joined by getting rides from members in the
seventies and getting a subsequent invitation to dinner, and what
it was like being a member of this group growing up.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
She'll tell us about the mass wedding ceremony that she
participated in, how her family moved to the border of
North and South Korea, the lavish lifestyle the Reverend Moon
was living while its members were often working long hours
without pay, and how she began to question the church
when she went to college.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
And next week, in part two, we will talk more
about our current political landscape and the Salon article she
wrote about the parallels she sees between her upbringing and
a cult and the Trump administration's ice crackdowns.

Speaker 1 (01:12):
Before we get to our guests, we do have a
big announcement. What is it, Lola?

Speaker 2 (01:18):
Well, Megan, I think you already know this, but for
our listeners, we have transitioned to a new home and
we are now at.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
Exactly Right Media. So exciting.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
This has been our dream network for so long. We
are so excited to make this move and so happy
to be back with y'all listening to us.

Speaker 3 (01:36):
Lola, do you know how we got on Exactly Right Media?
Tell me, Meghan, I put exactly Ray on.

Speaker 1 (01:41):
My vision board. So here we are, and I think
that's magical thinking.

Speaker 3 (01:45):
And I think you're wrong, and that's what we do
a lot on those podcasts.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
We think each other are wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
Indeed, which is maybe a good transition to explain to
y'all who we are. I am Lolablanc Residence scip and
I am somebody who believed in a cult leader myself
as a child. I was originally a mainstream regular Mormon,
and then a man swooped in and manipulated my mother,
and then I believed that he was a prophet of God.

(02:15):
And it was a scam. It was a very harrowing
experience for my mother. He did prey upon her LDS beliefs,
and he has continued to do that with other people
until we got out of it, and ever since that experience,
which you can listen to the full story of on
episode one of his podcasts. My mom was our very
first guest, but ever since then, I have been extremely

(02:38):
interested in how people's beliefs get preyed upon by manipulators,
and how we are all influenced to believe crazy things,
and how it happens to people who are incredibly intelligent
and wise and thoughtful and curious, because so many of
our guests really are like that. So I decided that
I wanted to create a podcast that centered the survivors

(03:02):
and centered the human experience of it, and didn't make
it this like scary thing, but like really showed people
what it's like to have that experience. And I was
looking for somebody who could share that with me, and
I fortunately was introduced to Megan by a mutual friend
and I got to hear a little bit about her story,
which she can tell you about.

Speaker 3 (03:21):
Yeah, I mean, the beginning of this podcast is really interesting.
I was sitting with our mutual friend who was very
we're very good friends with him, but we'd never met before, Like,
for example, year, we're both going to his birthday tonight.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
How did we never meet? It so weird.

Speaker 3 (03:33):
Anyway, I was sitting with him and he got a
text and he was like, Oh my god. My friend
just asked if I know any therapists who grew up
in a cult. And I was a therapist at the
time who grew up in a cult, and I grew
up in the two by twos. It's really exploding into
the news right now because it's somehow been kept a
secret for more than one hundred years. But some people

(03:55):
call it the Truth, the Way, the Worker religion, Kuniyites,
whatever you might call it.

Speaker 1 (04:01):
Oh, I've never heard that one. Yeah, there's a lot
to it.

Speaker 3 (04:04):
We actually have an interview with two x two by
twos Carrie and Kyle Hanks that you can go listen to.
So I'm fourth generation on both sides of my family.
My parents met through.

Speaker 1 (04:14):
It and.

Speaker 3 (04:17):
Very odd growing up experience because it's kind of like
being amish, but you have to live in the normal
world and go to normal school, but you just have
to kind of look weird, Like you have to be
weird enough in the world, but people are like, there's
something special about you, is it?

Speaker 1 (04:31):
Jesus?

Speaker 3 (04:34):
So No television, long skirts, long hair really.

Speaker 1 (04:41):
Scared a hell lots of religious trauma.

Speaker 3 (04:44):
And this podcast has been such a gift because I
just keep getting to deconstruct with every episode that we do.

Speaker 2 (04:51):
It's so amazing to be able to hear our guest
stories and connect with them and be able to joke
about our experiences, because that's very important. It can't just
be we can't just live in the darkness, although sometimes
a little darkness is necessary.

Speaker 1 (05:03):
Yeah, sometimes a lot of darkness, sometimes a little darkness,
But I.

Speaker 3 (05:06):
Think we always come back to being very life affirming
and hopeful and kind of the opposite of what cults
teach us to be.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
Yeah, we're all about that post dramatic growth, baby silly
and Yeah. So for the next segment that we do
on this show, the Cultiest Thing of the Week, I
ask Megan what the most cult like thing that she
experienced that week is. So, Megan, I would love to
know what your cultiest thing of the week is.

Speaker 3 (05:33):
Well, my cultiest thing was actually something that I read
about in one of Aquina's articles, which is this woman
known as the Maga Grammy. You've heard of her, of course.
Her name is Kamala hemp Hill. And she went and
rioted on January sixth, and Trump pardoned her, and she
said no to his pardon. She said that she was

(05:56):
being led by something that was not her critical mind,
and that she wants to serve her time and not
be pardoned. I mean, she did serve her time, but
she still, you know, doesn't want the pardon.

Speaker 2 (06:07):
That is so interesting and I want to have her
on so badly. I know me too, I mean, yeah,
I'd be so curious to know. I mean, and I
did read a little bit about that when she first
spoke out about that. I'd be so curious to know
more about, just like what was going on for her
when that happened.

Speaker 1 (06:24):
How she thinks.

Speaker 2 (06:25):
About everybody else who's gotten the party, you know, like
there's just so much there I want to know more about.

Speaker 1 (06:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (06:30):
One of the interesting things she said that makes it
my cultiest thing of the week was that what got
her out of her group think was that she started
engaging with people on x that had different thoughts than
her and they were like just being kind of conversational
and not accusatory, and she had you know, interesting good
faith dialogues.

Speaker 2 (06:49):
So that's actually also how Megan phelps Roper I believe,
who was a member of the Westboro Baptist Church. That's
also how she began to question and eventually leave that
horrible family. Yeah, I mean, yeah, she was his daughter,
So yeah, great story. She was also just engaging with
people who were having good faith conversations with her. Yeah,
not to say that always happens, no, but it is

(07:10):
really interesting and gives me hope when it does happen.

Speaker 3 (07:13):
Yeah, And I think next week's episode, when we talk
to her more, she kind of calls.

Speaker 1 (07:17):
Back to stuff like this.

Speaker 2 (07:18):
So during it out this week, what about you, what's
your cultiest thing in the week. Well, this is another
thing we will actually talk more about next week. But
I feel I would be remiss in our first proper
episode back if I didn't address our current political landscape.

Speaker 1 (07:32):
Of course. So okay, we.

Speaker 2 (07:35):
All know that Trump blames immigrants for all things in
the world, and you know, generally anyone on the left
and trans people, he uses fear mongering language about them.

Speaker 1 (07:45):
And now there have been.

Speaker 2 (07:46):
These horrific ICE crackdowns in which people are getting deported
on mass at higher rates than ever before. And I
will say, like Democrats were also engaging in too many
ICE deportations, but this is now happening at a new
level where people are being targeted simply for being brown,
and people who have the quote wrong perspective or think

(08:08):
differently from what Trump wants are also being targeted. These
are all extremely culty things that are happening when you
are demonizing a group of people and trying to eliminate
anybody who is critiquing you. He has used language like
wanting to deport the worst, has used all this really yeah,
like fear mongering language. And I just want to shout

(08:29):
out some statistics here because seventy two percent of the
people that have been recently detained by ICE have no
criminal convictions.

Speaker 1 (08:37):
Using their own.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
Scale that rates the threat of each detainee, eighty four
percent of people detained by ICE were deemed to be
level one, which is no threat. Of course, if somebody
is committing a violent crime, sure, but that's not what's
happening here. And I will mention this next week as well.
But the idea that immigrants are somehow more criminal than

(08:59):
other people is false, and it's actually the opposite, because
data consistently shows that undocumented immigrants commit less crimes than
people who were born here. A National Institute of Justice
study examining data from the Texas Department of Public Safety
found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half
the rates of US born citizens for violent crimes and
to quarter the rate of US born citizens for property crimes.

(09:23):
Another report found that immigrants have consistently had lower incarceration
than people that were born here for the last one
hundred and fifty years.

Speaker 1 (09:29):
This has been true.

Speaker 2 (09:30):
And meanwhile, the daily average of people being processed into
the system has doubled since the beginning of this year
because of an arbitrary quota coming from Trump, who wants
to enact the biggest mass deportations in history. And now,
of course, with this big, stupid fucking bill, we've expanded
ICE funding to unprecedentedly high levels, and it is very
it's very alarming. I like, I would just would encourage folks,

(09:55):
And I know that if anyone listening as a Trump supporter,
I probably probably already lost the but I would say, like,
what I've been trying to do more of is look
at some of what he writes and examine the language
and the purpose of that language. He did this like
crazy Memorial Day post that's just using like rapist, criminals,
evil murderers, the horrible, you know, like, look at the

(10:18):
language and what the goal of that language is and
then what is the result that's actually happening. Because what's
happening right now is just that, like people who are
working in farms and paying taxes are being sent away
for no reason. Right that is not the America that
I want to live in.

Speaker 3 (10:32):
Well, as she says, some clueless doesn't say RSVP on
the Statue of Liberty.

Speaker 2 (10:40):
That is the correct way to end that comman to
end my brand. Yeah, I have no good conclusion.

Speaker 1 (10:47):
That's the truth. I have no good conclusion. It's very scary.

Speaker 2 (10:50):
I hope that we all can work together to combat this.

Speaker 1 (10:54):
Well.

Speaker 3 (10:54):
I think Akina gives us a lot of good perspective
on how she grew up and what we can do
moving forward. So please listen to this week's episode, enjoy it,
and listen to next week's as well, because she gives
some really great ideas.

Speaker 2 (11:05):
Yeah, we will talk more next week about how to
sort of manage our emotional state and also feel like
we're contributing something.

Speaker 1 (11:13):
But for now, let's dig in.

Speaker 2 (11:15):
Let's talk to Aquina about her childhood and the Unification Church. Welcome,
Aqina Cox to trust me. Thanks for being here in
the studio with us today.

Speaker 4 (11:35):
Yes, thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 (11:36):
Okay, So we have you here with us today because
you wrote an incredible article for Salon right about how
you are seeing parallels between your childhood and occult and
our current administration and some of the behaviors with ice.
Let's just start out talking about how you grew up,
because we have not done an episode on the Unification

(11:57):
Church aka the movies since Steve Hassen, which years ago
at this point. So tell us how did your parents
end up in the Unification Church.

Speaker 4 (12:05):
Okay, So I'm a second generation member of the Unification Church,
or I was before I left, which means that my
parents joined, which is the situation for like a lot
of people my age who grew up in the church.
A lot of our parents joined in the seventies or
late sixties, and then we were born a lot of

(12:27):
us in the eighties. Because Reverend Moon, who was the
leader of the Unification Church. He did a lot of
arranged mass weddings. Both my parents were hippies and they
were born in the mid fifties, so my dad barely
escaped getting drafted into Vietnam, and he was just hitchhiking

(12:50):
across the country and he met someone who was chatting
with him and told him about world peace and you know,
all these great things they could do together. And then
he went to get some free dinner with this guy
and then ye, yeah, then went to that second location.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
Yeah, what a like quintessential. What year was that? Do
you know it was?

Speaker 4 (13:17):
I'm guessing like seventy three?

Speaker 2 (13:20):
Yeah, I mean when people were hitchhiking, a guy picks
you up hitchhiking, tells you about world peace and feeds you, yeah,
and feeds you.

Speaker 4 (13:28):
And you eat the food they give you.

Speaker 3 (13:30):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.

Speaker 1 (13:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:33):
I mean, do you know, like what was going on
for him at that time was that something he was
really like searching for was a message of peace.

Speaker 4 (13:41):
Honestly, I feel like his story is kind of emblematic
of a larger story of like a bunch of kids
who grew up right after World War Two, like my grandparents,
my granddads on both sides, were in World War Two,
and you know, they came home and didn't really want
to talk about it, and there was pressure to be perfect.

(14:04):
And then all of a sudden, they're supposed to go
off and fight in this Vietnam War, which sounded crazy,
and I think there was they felt like they couldn't
trust the dominant culture, Like they don't want to trust
this government that's sending them off to war to die.
So then they're like more open for these other groups

(14:26):
coming along, right.

Speaker 2 (14:28):
Yeah, I mean it makes so much sense, and it
makes me think about how this is such We're in
such a cool era again right now because there's such
that like resistance to the establishment is very prevalent right now,
understandably because the establishment isn't doing terrible things on so
many levels. But yeah, I mean we'll get into that later.
But like, just hearing you say that, I'm like, yeah,

(14:50):
that's now.

Speaker 3 (14:51):
I know.

Speaker 4 (14:51):
I feel like when I first left the church and
I would talk about my experiences with other people, there
was this attitude of like, oh my gosh, that was
so like an exotic time, you know, and you just
kind of see it through the lens of a film camera.
You know, like hippies in La wearing flowy dresses and
talking about world peace and you know, eating vegan food

(15:14):
or whatever. And it felt like such a time that
was inaccessible, but it now feels like it's come back again.

Speaker 1 (15:21):
Where Yeah I do? I feel like, what about your mom?
How did she get.

Speaker 4 (15:39):
So she joined in a similar way. Okay, so she
I don't think it's been formally diagnosed with anything, but
she sees spirits.

Speaker 1 (15:50):
She's using air quotes. Yes, So.

Speaker 4 (15:54):
My theory is that she was off to college. I
think she was starting to have some like mental health issues.
She came home to Berkeley, California. She didn't really want
to talk about it with her family. Understandably, I'm sure
she was like not sure how to explain it, Like
seventies mental health treatments were not that great. Yeah, right,

(16:18):
So then she was like doing homework at the local library,
met some guys who wanted to give her a ride home, and.

Speaker 1 (16:27):
She told a lot of rhymes.

Speaker 4 (16:30):
Yes, and they invited her to come by their house
for dinner.

Speaker 1 (16:35):
And then yeah, I'm the.

Speaker 3 (16:37):
Kind of the perfect couple. They love rides and dinner.

Speaker 4 (16:44):
Just suddy because they're like not great cooks, better food lucky.

Speaker 1 (16:50):
I really I cannot cook and I do not cook.
And if someone was like, I will give you food,
I always say yes. So that must have been a
common tactic to look for people who need rides.

Speaker 4 (17:01):
It was a common tactic. I heard that they often,
like recruiters would look for people with wearing backpacks because
it meant you were like going somewhere or in school
or in some period of transition. And I mean they
tried this like all day every day, So I'm sure
they talked to like one hundred people that day, right,

(17:22):
And my mom is the one that fell for it.

Speaker 2 (17:25):
Wow, and before you were born, presumably was one the
mass wedding.

Speaker 1 (17:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (17:31):
So they were supposed to back in the day work
for the church for many years before you have the
option of getting married. It was something like three or
seven years. One of those where you're supposed to like
essentially work for free, and you're like volunteering twenty for
seven living out of a van, either going from like

(17:52):
city to city fundraising, selling little choch keys and trinkets
and saying it's you know, for your world peace or
for your youth group or whatever or they were living
out of these church centers and just recruiting people from
the nearby city. And so they did that for several years,
and then they got married in the famous Madison Square

(18:15):
Garden blessing what we call a blessing, it's a mass
wedding ceremony. I think that was nineteen eighty two. I mean,
it blows my mind how big it was. Can you
tell how big their blessing was? Several thousand couples, I
want to say, three thousand or three thousand people.

Speaker 1 (18:34):
That's so crazy.

Speaker 2 (18:36):
Yeah, can you just like, for those not familiar with
the Unification Church, also known as the Moones, they apparently
say now that saying the Moonees is a derogatory No.

Speaker 4 (18:46):
I've heard they sometimes go or they used to go
after people for saying that, like it's a slur or something.
But you can call it whatever you.

Speaker 2 (18:56):
Want to me, right, I mean it was this group.
Paint a picture for those guys who don't know.

Speaker 4 (19:03):
Yes, So the Unification Church was started by Reverend Moon
Reverend Sun Young Moon in I want to say the
nineteen fifties in Korea. So after World War two there
was the Korean War. I think it started around nineteen
fifty and he grew up in North Korea. He escaped
by essentially walking down to the end of South Korea

(19:26):
because you know, it's kind of like this very long peninsula.

Speaker 1 (19:30):
So we have an exciting origin story from this.

Speaker 3 (19:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (19:32):
Wow, And I want to say, there's like a million
asterisks I'm laying in here because a lot of what
he said was obviously not true, right right, right, Like
I heard this story that he like crossed the Han River,
which is or no, maybe it's the Engine River. Anyway,
he crossed this river with a man on his back

(19:52):
that he carefully carried him down because this man wasn't
able to walk. And there's like a picture of it,
like in a bunch of church centers, because that was
not the same guy, like not Reverend Moon in that picture,
Like it's like someone else.

Speaker 1 (20:07):
But I'm just relying on white people's racism.

Speaker 4 (20:10):
Well it was like is a very blurry like black
and white picture from the ninety Well so yeah, so
like everything is wrong. Yeah, but from his perspective, From
his perspective, he went to the South Korea, he started preaching.
There were a bunch of random cults in that area

(20:31):
because my area is again when like there's crazy upheaval,
then there's more room for these cults to come about,
and so there were a bunch of other ones. He
seems to have gotten some ideas from some cults. He
starts to get popular. He's getting in trouble with the

(20:53):
law because he says he's anti communist. Maybe the problem
was big and me so anyway, but he is getting
bigger and bigger. He moves to the States in nineteen
seventy one and starts like going on these big speaking
tours and getting lots of people to come, and kids

(21:15):
just start dropping out of high school joining. It kind
of started a moral panic, and we have people like
Depprogrammers who started kidnapping people who are in the cult
because they're you know, their parents were just like where
did these guys go?

Speaker 3 (21:31):
That was one of the most interesting things about your
story to me was that the Deprogrammers for your parents
became kind of a repeatable story of like we escaped
to the deprogrammers. Can you say a little bit more
about that? Okay, So I.

Speaker 4 (21:44):
Grew up with these stories of my mom trying to
smooth things over with her family, being like it's fine,
I'm in this group, don't worry about me, Okay, I'll
meet up with you. According to her, my grandmother did
high deprogrammers to come and kidnap her, and she like

(22:05):
acted like everything was fine, and then my mom ran
away as soon as she could and made her way
back to a church property.

Speaker 1 (22:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
The thing I'm just finding so fascinating with this story
and also with everything these days, is in North Korea
obviously very cult like culture.

Speaker 1 (22:24):
You escape that, you start a cult.

Speaker 2 (22:26):
Depprogrammers getting people out of the cult in that era
were very much their own project dynamic were you know,
like in essence, like very abusive a lot of the time.
Why can't we just respond to a cult culture by
not creating a new one?

Speaker 1 (22:43):
So it's so hard for us. It's a cult within
a cult within a cult within a cult. It just
never ended. We react, Yeah, and.

Speaker 3 (22:50):
It's just so interesting the narratives that we make about
what happened, because to your mother this was like a
heroic story, like I escaped the programmers.

Speaker 1 (23:00):
Probably was partly jaligy, Yeah, totally.

Speaker 4 (23:05):
I later heard from another family member that it happened
like according to them, like much more relaxed, and you know,
they just wanted to talk to my mom. But my
mom saw them and thought I'm about to be kidnapped, right,
And so they were actually like on a boat, and
I jumped over the side, according to her, and just
like swam away when no one was looking.

Speaker 1 (23:27):
Wow. But yeah, so but that was before you.

Speaker 4 (23:30):
That was way before I was born. I think when
I came along. Well, first of all, when people got
married in the church, if you're if you're legally married
to someone, then if they have like a psychotic break
or if there's something wrong with them, then their spouse
is in charge of them.

Speaker 1 (23:48):
Right.

Speaker 4 (23:48):
So once my mom got married, my grandparents couldn't really
try and kidnap her anymore, because I think what they
were doing with the Dow programmers was they were kidnapping them,
bringing them to a favorable judge who would say this
person can't make decisions for themselves, and then they would
have to get treatment, I see, or you know, they

(24:10):
would have to at least be under their parents' like
legal in a good way or something. Yeah. Yes, so
you can't really do that if someone is married, because
then it's just their partner that's becomes.

Speaker 3 (24:24):
Now the part the group. So they're Okay.

Speaker 4 (24:28):
So between that and then me being born, I think
my grandparents were like, Okay, we just want to like
let's see if we can like not be I'll be friends,
but you know, not try and kidnap so that we
get to see our grandkids sometimes.

Speaker 1 (24:43):
Right, So, what were some of the beliefs of the group.
So it's kind of Christian and kind of weird that
tries like almost all of them.

Speaker 4 (24:56):
So many, Like I feel like that's like very like
more many adjacent where you're like, oh, we have the Bible,
then we have this other book, right, and this other
book says this other guy is the new Yeah, because
he was prophety. He was so Rebermon said he was
a messiah.

Speaker 3 (25:13):
He was Jesus back in a new form because Jesus
took a time out when he got crucified.

Speaker 1 (25:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:19):
Yeah, so he was picking it back up from there.

Speaker 1 (25:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (25:22):
Jesus pleaded with him to take over when he was
a teen, and he graciously accepted.

Speaker 1 (25:29):
So sweet. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (25:32):
So he said everyone has to be married because that
is the way to erase original sin. And then you
can if you go to a blessing and you have babies,
then your kids are going to be born without original sin.

Speaker 1 (25:48):
Oh, perfect way to create more members.

Speaker 4 (25:51):
Yeah, So that was the gist of it. There's like
a lot of other stuff, like there's evil spirits everywhere
and we're in a battle between good and evil. And
there was a sociologist who coined the term doomsday cult
and it was about the Unification Church. It's just it's
a very kind of a textbook cult and a lot

(26:14):
of textbooks were actually written about it in the seventies
because I feel like it came into prominence, like while
sociology like was kind of really having a moment. So also,
the term love bombing was invented by the church. It
was like really into like being really nice to people
and getting them to join the cult.

Speaker 2 (26:34):
So these marriages were arranged, they were all arranged in
the church. What were other forms of control that the
church had over people's lives.

Speaker 4 (26:43):
I'm like, what wasn't it was like I mean, in
the beginning, people all lived together and like communes kind
of when I was like a baby, they started people
started to move out because we were all supposed to
like move away and start our own like little outposts essentially.

(27:05):
But like we all woke up really early on every
Sunday morning to recite a pledge at five in the morning,
where we you know, like reiterated. It's almost like the
Pledge of Allegiance, but it was longer, and it was
to the church or to Reverend Moon.

Speaker 1 (27:22):
Do you remember it?

Speaker 4 (27:24):
It changed around a little bit, so like every five
or ten years it would change the words. There was
something about blood, sweat and tears. There was something about
vanquishing your enemy.

Speaker 1 (27:39):
Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. It was like it was a.

Speaker 4 (27:42):
Little bit more hardcore when I was a kid, and
then I feel like it tried to get a little
softer when I was older.

Speaker 2 (27:48):
But you know, wow, interesting and like were these instructions
coming from Reverend Moon or was there local leadership?

Speaker 4 (27:56):
There was local leadership, but it was very much a
top down situation where we weren't supposed to really differ
in any way from each other. What what were your
thoughts about it? How did you like, yeah, how did
you feel about it? I feel like when I was
a kid, there was just so many opportunities to do
something wrong that I was really caught up in the like,

(28:21):
you know, you weren't supposed to date, you weren't supposed
to you're supposed to not really talk about the church
to most outsiders, it's.

Speaker 3 (28:29):
Just like the group I grew up in. It, just
like the two by twos. Yeah we're not We're supposed
to act so different that people go, what group are you?

Speaker 4 (28:36):
Like, Oh my God, saying okay, so yeah yeah. And
then there was this whole idea that there's like evil
spirits everywhere and you have to appease them or you're
or you're like fighting them or whatever you know you
have to do.

Speaker 3 (28:54):
Would scare you evil spirits. Yeah, I'm talking about my
sleep real demons.

Speaker 1 (28:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (29:00):
And I feel like there's something similar with Mormons, where
Mormons they baptized dead people, but we would marry dead
people married.

Speaker 1 (29:10):
Yeah, I'm sorry, what do you mean?

Speaker 4 (29:13):
So ostensibly you would like go and pay for them
to get blessed, like you would say, oh, my grandparents
died before they could get married in the church. I
will pay money and then in the spirit world they'll.

Speaker 1 (29:27):
Be married and so they'll be saved.

Speaker 4 (29:30):
So I say, because they can go to heaven.

Speaker 1 (29:32):
Are dead people marrying other dead people?

Speaker 4 (29:34):
So mostly, but.

Speaker 1 (29:41):
Because you know what's coming.

Speaker 4 (29:42):
When I was like eight, I went to a mass
wedding I was in the nosebleed section because it's often
happens in stadiums.

Speaker 1 (29:50):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 4 (29:52):
And I saw like, you know, rows of big girls
wearing pretty dresses, which was exciting. And then at some point,
I you're the announcer saying like so and so is
getting married to Buddha, so and so is getting married
to Saint Francis, so and So's I don't know, just
like listing off all these famous dead people that are

(30:13):
getting married. Two women who were on the stage. Wow,
And I was so far away I didn't see that
these were like eighty year old women who were just
like getting married to a dead person.

Speaker 1 (30:26):
Oh my god, I thought.

Speaker 4 (30:28):
I thought, like I was like, oh, is that an
option for me? Am I going to like apply to.

Speaker 1 (30:34):
Be lass als or something?

Speaker 4 (30:36):
Yeah, and they'll be like here's I don't know, General
Patton or something, you know, Like I was like, are
they gonna, like, I don't how do you check a
box to make sure you're not given a dead person?

Speaker 1 (30:48):
Because I don't want that. That would have kept me
up at night. Yeah, that was a little scary.

Speaker 2 (30:53):
Yeah, aside from that, was it exciting? Like what was that.

Speaker 1 (30:56):
Like seeing those ceremonies. They were long. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah yeah. It wasn't like going to a pop concert. Okay.

Speaker 4 (31:05):
So apparently Whitney Houston was supposed to sing at one
of the blessings in Washington, d c. In like the
late nineties, and she backed out last minute, and I
was there and I would have been so excited to
see her. I'm so sorry, frickin jerk.

Speaker 1 (31:20):
Yeah, that might one of our happened in history. Just kidding. No,
it's so traumatic. I mean, how is he choosing who
marries who?

Speaker 4 (31:32):
So for my parents, it was like everyone who was
eligible and whose central figure or like their local pastors
said it was okay. They would go to a big
room and there'd be like women on one side, men
on the other, and you just go down bang bang
bang bank bank kind of just like be like you
and on you or maybe you and like just take
a second. And then when I came along, it was

(31:55):
supposed to be well, he still arranged people in person sometimes,
but he was like kind of retired from that. You
could also just send him your picture and they would
like pick out a picture of a dude and send
it back to you.

Speaker 1 (32:09):
How many of these marriages were successful. Do we know?

Speaker 4 (32:13):
Well, according to the church, they were all very So
I did end up going to one when I was
twenty one, I want to say. And of all my
friends who were in one, most of them have gotten divorced.

Speaker 1 (32:32):
Obvious that makes sense.

Speaker 4 (32:33):
Yeah, and there's like a couple of us left, and
then there's like a couple of people who are like
still really in the church and have a bunch of kids.

Speaker 1 (32:43):
Wow, yeah, we went to one. Do you remember that? No,
you went to a don't remember? No? Wow? Wait you
went to what?

Speaker 2 (32:51):
We went to a Unification Church Sunday service out of
curiosity because it was like when we first.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
Podcast and we had yeah, Pasadena.

Speaker 2 (33:02):
Possibly it was in like I thought it was in
more of like an outskirts town maybe, but it might
have been. Yeah, Like we were thinking maybe we would
do an episode on it, but it was so boring
that there just wasn't enough.

Speaker 1 (33:13):
To talk about.

Speaker 3 (33:14):
That's a tactic, don't you think where it's just like
because I feel like again the two by twos kind
of do that. They make it so boring that you're
like hypnotized and somehow they're not really saying anything, but
you think they've said something smart. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (33:27):
Well, that's what I talked about in the essay, was
I was noticing that Trump kind of also does that.
It's called the shotgun argument, where they just tell you
a lot of random points all at the same time,
and the point is not to overwhelm you with their intellect,
but just to kind of stun you and so you
don't have a foothold of like how.

Speaker 1 (33:48):
To argue back. It's so fascinating.

Speaker 3 (33:52):
Yeah, yeah, and it works because you just disassociate so
much and it just goes straight into your brain.

Speaker 2 (33:59):
That's so interesting to me though, because I feel like
the people who seem to want to stay in the
culture the most are the ones who are having more
heightened emotional experiences.

Speaker 3 (34:07):
But mine was like the fear was going straight into
my anxiety. The anxiety was but like the thoughts going
through my critical mind. I was just beamed with fear.
But it didn't make sense what they were even saying,
because it doesn't make sense.

Speaker 2 (34:20):
Mormon church used to be three hours long when I
was growing up, and it was so fucking boring. But
sometimes like a missionary would go up, or you'd have
an engaging bishop and he would like start crying and
I don't know why I'm saying he I feel like
I only.

Speaker 1 (34:35):
Remember it being mean, vertilized.

Speaker 2 (34:37):
Yeah, but somebody would go up and bear their testimony
and it'd be really moving, and those would be the
talks that I'd be like, I believe in this church.

Speaker 1 (34:44):
It wouldn't be the boring guys. Ever, give me a testimony.

Speaker 4 (34:47):
When I was a kid, when I was like time
for that at camp, I'd be like, yes, tell me
your life story.

Speaker 3 (34:53):
Were you into it? Were you like I want to
give my testimony? I love this church.

Speaker 2 (34:57):
Well.

Speaker 4 (34:58):
So when I was a kid again, I I feel
like I was just mostly anxious all the time because
there were so many ways to sin or do something wrong,
you know, and my parents were like you know, had
anger issues and were abusive in different ways. So I
was more like just like survival mode and like, okay, yeah,

(35:18):
let me try and do everything perfectly to you know,
fit in here. And when I was sixteen, I did
have a moment where I was like, oh, I think
there's something to this church interesting and I like got
really into it for like I feel like a year
or two. That was also a time where so we're

(35:39):
skipping aheat a bit, but I had been raised on
the Jersey Shore mostly, and then my parents, because my
mom had a vision from God, decided to move us
to Korea. This was in the year two thousand and
she moved us to the border of North and South Korea,
so so close that we could like hear the North

(36:00):
Korean speak loud system.

Speaker 3 (36:03):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (36:03):
Yeah, it was very close. And we were in the
middle of nowhere, like absolutely in the middle of nowhere,
and like you had to walk two miles through rice
patties to get to a bus station. And I think
part of me was just like almost had this moment
where I was like, Okay, I need to like belong here,
otherwise I'm.

Speaker 1 (36:21):
Going to lose my mind, right, that makes sense.

Speaker 4 (36:24):
So I got really into it. And then I went
to college and I heard a lecture about critical thinking,
about like how to tell what kind of arguments people
are using against you, like the straw man fallacy or whatever.
It was just like a one hour lecture, but I
remember reading it, or like listening to the lecture and
being like, oh my gosh, this is great. I will

(36:46):
understand more about the church through this because I'll be
able to make these critical arguments in support of the church.

Speaker 1 (36:54):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (36:55):
And then I went back to my dorm room and
I tried to read church material and I was like, oh.

Speaker 1 (36:59):
Oh, oh shit, oh no, what did that feel like?

Speaker 4 (37:03):
I just I took my books, my church books, and
I just threw them in the back of my closet,
and I was like, I'm not going to think about
this for a little bit.

Speaker 3 (37:10):
And that sounds like a good That sounds like a
good plan to be honest.

Speaker 1 (37:13):
Yeah, that's what I would did take for later. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (37:17):
So then it took me a few more years and
then like finally there was a moment like in my
mid twenties where I was like, Okay, now it's time
to leave.

Speaker 1 (37:24):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (37:25):
Wow, what a great argument for having critical thinking classes
in school.

Speaker 3 (37:29):
I know.

Speaker 2 (37:31):
I want to go back a little bit though, because
before you moved away, you were in New Jersey.

Speaker 1 (37:36):
Were you on like a compound or no.

Speaker 4 (37:38):
So when I was born, my parents lived in the
New Yorker Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, which is a building
owned by the church, and like a bunch of church
families lived in it at the time. And then Reverdmon
was like, you all need to leave because you need
to like start your own outposts, because if we're all together,

(37:58):
we can't get more people to join the church. So
my parents moved in our south to the Jersey Shore,
and I grew up mostly there, but then we would
do church stuff on the weekends or in the summers.
But then during the week I sometimes was going to
public school and just had to like pretend I was normal,
which was impossible.

Speaker 1 (38:18):
Wow, yeah, it was impossible. It was like.

Speaker 4 (38:21):
Hard, hard, Well, at least you have a normal name.
My name is Aquina. And this is the nineties on
the Jersey You know how many laurens I went to
school with. And I was like and they were like,
what's your name? Why are you wearing like weird baggy
stained clothes like or like just like big clothes to

(38:44):
hide your body because you're modest, And oh was that
a thing? Yeah, girls are the devil and you know
we ya blah.

Speaker 1 (38:52):
Blah as we all know.

Speaker 2 (38:55):
Yes, So would like if I were walking down the
street in the seventies, would I be able to identify
who the Moonies were?

Speaker 4 (39:01):
You probably wouldn't, okay, But there were giveaways. There was
like a lot of times they were selling flowers on
street corners of the city or Yeah. That was the
biggest thing was they were like selling things like little trinkets.
But I feel like I can I'm like I can
tell because oftentimes if someone was getting blessed, they would

(39:24):
wear a blessing ring, and so it's like there's like
little tells.

Speaker 1 (39:29):
If you are a church member.

Speaker 3 (39:31):
I can also tell, and no one else from your church. Yeah,
and other members wouldn't be able to tell. But I'm like,
oh that yeah, and I'll ask and the usually be
I was convinced I had that power as well. For Mormons.

Speaker 2 (39:43):
I did identify successfully other Mormon children in random.

Speaker 1 (39:46):
Places, like I'm sure, I'm sure they loved that. No,
it was like a bonding thing. Oh okay, that you
were a child as well. Yeah, yeah, oh I thought
this was your child parents are calling the coup.

Speaker 2 (40:03):
That would be like, hey, you fell a twelve year
old who was softwered here.

Speaker 1 (40:07):
Yeah. And they often had CTR rings too.

Speaker 2 (40:09):
That was one of our giveaways, choose the right every
kid oud a CTR ring.

Speaker 3 (40:13):
Amazing well, I mean in the two by twos they
say that we can tell each other because of the spirit,
and it's not because of the bun or.

Speaker 1 (40:19):
The or the long dress.

Speaker 3 (40:21):
Long dress and the like very specific type of long dress.

Speaker 1 (40:24):
That's sure the spirit, So keep that in mind.

Speaker 2 (40:27):
Yeah, uh, so you were allowed to go to college.
So what was the policy on or the thinking on
outsiders versus us?

Speaker 4 (40:38):
So outsiders were being controlled by Satan, sure, and we
needed to like win them over, but they needed to
be approached very carefully and they were essentially our enemy,
but they didn't know that, and so it was very
confusing for a kid to navigate. Yeah, I was allowed

(41:02):
to go to college, you're right, but it was frowned
upon and a lot of my friends went and did
like a two year program at least in between, very
against similar to Mormons. It's like Mormons with the Asian
twist or something, but they were doing a two year
program where they were going out not so much to proselytize,

(41:25):
although that did happen, but again to fundraise and make
a shitload of money for the church because they were
just like q eighteen year olds. They were just sending
out to random street corners in random cities with like
a bucket of wind chimes or flowers and being like
you know, selling them in cash for twelve hours, sixteen

(41:47):
hours a day. So a lot of people were pushed
to do that. My parents are a little bit strange
in that they were very devout, but they did not
want me going on that program. There were kids who
were badly injured and in a couple of cases were
killed on that program. How So, there were a few
fatalities because they were sending out teams of these teens

(42:11):
in vans and they were working sometimes we're twenty four
hours like they would sometimes do like it was almost
like a fasting thing where they would instead of fasting,
they would be just fundraising for twenty four hours. They
were insanely sleep deprived driving these large vands. So there
were a couple, at least one or two car crashes.

(42:31):
Then they had also sent out a teenager and she
was murdered because she like knocked on the wrong door.

Speaker 1 (42:38):
Oh my god. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (42:40):
So I had at the time been trying to get
my parents to let me go on this mission because
like all my friends were going, and I was so
tired of being like the only church kid at a
school and not knowing anyone, and I'd wanted to go.

Speaker 1 (42:53):
And then I was like, oh, they're never gonna let
me go.

Speaker 4 (42:57):
But yeah, so to my knowledge that program is still
going on today.

Speaker 3 (43:03):
Oh really Yeah, well that leads me to a question
I have about the.

Speaker 1 (43:06):
Money, like we're yeah, well that happening.

Speaker 4 (43:09):
I feel like that's a really good question, and I
feel like this story is undertold, even though it's been
like right under our noses the whole time. So basically,
ever since the seventies, when Reverend Moon was here, he
was like starting businesses and like putting his henchmen in charge.
So there was like nominally not super related to the church,

(43:31):
but definitely related to the church, and so he was
like plowing this money back into the church and back
into these businesses, and then with those profits, he was
also donating them to politicians to think tanks. Really, he
started a right wing newspaper decades ago called The Washington Times.

(43:55):
So he's like kind of the story behind MAGA, in
my opinion is that, like I don't think MAGA would
exist without Reverend Moon because he started the Washington Times.
He gave a voice to these Republican conservative politicians. He

(44:15):
gave them tons of money. They would do things like
I even noticed we spoke about January sixth. I even
noticed on January sixth, Matt Gates got up in front
of Congress and said, oh, it's Antifa, who was in
charge of January sixth. The Washington Times said so, and
he had an article from them with him. And so

(44:36):
I feel like they've done that a lot. Like they
would write an article and like either Rush Limbaugh or
Sean Hannity would pick it up in the nineties or
the eighties or and then like some congressman would use
it as something they could point to, and it feels
like to give them as evidence ye validity.

Speaker 3 (44:55):
It feels like family values were really at the core
of the passage.

Speaker 4 (44:59):
It was very much anti communism, and then it became
like yeah, traditional family values and anti gay, anti feminist.
Just there's a bunch of boring dudes screaming yeah really
and just like causing a lot of trouble, not only
in America, but they've done this to other countries as well,

(45:23):
where they just like, really, I feel like are responsible
for a right wing lurch.

Speaker 1 (45:29):
Like by buying up a media.

Speaker 4 (45:31):
Yeah, by buying it up, by starting it. Like Reagan said,
the Washington Times was his favorite newspaper and he read
it every day.

Speaker 1 (45:37):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (45:38):
Yeah, the amount of influence that you can have when
you buy a freakin' newspaper.

Speaker 1 (45:43):
Yeah, it's wild.

Speaker 4 (45:45):
Yeah, and for a long time, Like they were there
before Fox Media. They were there before Ohn started in
their offices Fox News, like they have Washington Times contributors
on there. They kind of like were the Mama Newspaper
to like birth all these like shitty conservative like media companies. Yeah,

(46:08):
so they're all connected.

Speaker 1 (46:10):
Wow, that is fascinating.

Speaker 4 (46:12):
And more than that, he like gave money to Reagan.
He was like very involved with the Bush family, Reverend Moon.
He gave them tons of money, even though Reverend Moon
died in twenty twelve. The Unification Church, like they paid
Trump to speak at one of their things just like
a few years ago. Like the Bush spoke a lot. Yeah,

(46:35):
like they were locked and they were locked in with Bush.

Speaker 3 (46:39):
Was he taking money for himself? Was over men like
living lavish?

Speaker 4 (46:43):
He's very much a Trump guy, like in that he
bought up a crap load of properties in the seventies,
like a whole university in Connecticut, farms in in Hawaii,
a seminary in upstate New York, a skyscraper in midtown Manhattan,
as one does. Yeah, he and a family had property everywhere.

Speaker 2 (47:07):
And like was he enriching, Like was he living a
very lavish lifestyle himself?

Speaker 1 (47:12):
Yeah, yeah, old toilet.

Speaker 4 (47:14):
I don't know about the toilet situation. I know you
like helicopters, and you know his wife was always head
to toe like designer gear.

Speaker 1 (47:23):
But the members were not living lit.

Speaker 4 (47:26):
No, the members were working for nothing. Like I heard
from someone who did work at the Washington Times when
it started that they were osensibly paid quote air quotes.
They were paid for their time working. But they would
be handing out the checks on a Friday and be like, hey,

(47:46):
does anyone wanna like money is tied paid speed? Yeah,
does anyone want to tie? And like so you'd have
to like tie in front of your co workers. So
you're all church members. So they were just like a
lot of church members who are working for nothing wow,
or either volunteering their time or working for church businesses,

(48:08):
you know, making hardly anything.

Speaker 1 (48:11):
Which is so common.

Speaker 2 (48:12):
And I wonder, like, was there any chatter about that
disparity and that being was that a problem for anyone?

Speaker 4 (48:19):
I don't remember hearing about that, because I remember hearing like, well,
Reverend Moon is like the biggest king of them all,
so he should like, and he's meeting with presidents, he's
meeting with kings and queens. He needs to like be
at their level.

Speaker 3 (48:34):
Oh of course, is that what makes you're like, where
do I sign I take all my money, I will
live in poverty?

Speaker 1 (48:41):
Yes?

Speaker 3 (48:41):
Right?

Speaker 1 (48:42):
Wow? So interesting? Okay, So did your parents did they
remain in the church.

Speaker 4 (48:48):
They remained, but around when Reverend Moon died in twenty
twelve and a couple of years leading up to that,
his large family kind of exploded into factions, and my
parents went with the youngest son, whose name is Hung
Jin or he calls himself Sean in America Sean Moon.

Speaker 3 (49:08):
So the reverend's youngest son, your parents decided to follow.

Speaker 1 (49:12):
But the wife also was a leader, right wife.

Speaker 4 (49:17):
Yeah, he was trying to pass her and give like
the power to his sons at first. And she seems
to have taken over the like kind of main church branch.

Speaker 2 (49:31):
It was photos of her on the wall, and they
were talking about the mother when we went.

Speaker 4 (49:34):
Yeah, so people probably call her, they call her true mother.
And so she's I think living in Las Vegas or
South Korea or both, and she's taken over the main
church branch and my parents are part of a splinter
cult now called Sanctuary Church or also a rout of
Iron Ministries, And they got in the news a few

(49:56):
years ago because like, do you guys know this? They
they got in the news a few years ago because
they were all had a bunch of ar fifteens and
had this big like marriage rededication ceremony. But bring your
assault rifle.

Speaker 1 (50:10):
Whoa, Yeah, Okay, this sounds familiar.

Speaker 4 (50:13):
Yeah, if you go, yeah, if you google Sanctuary.

Speaker 1 (50:17):
Church, I'm looking for a pictures rifle. Oh my, oh
my god.

Speaker 4 (50:22):
It's probably a picture of my dad.

Speaker 1 (50:23):
You're probably looking at a picture of my dad. It's
a bunch of old ladies. Okay, maybe my mom. This
is wild? Yeah, why did they choose him? Do you think?

Speaker 4 (50:35):
Okay, So when my parents moved to South Korea with
me when I was a teenager, my dad started English
speaking service in Seoul. There were like a few ex
pat church members out there, but there wasn't really a
place for them. And then Sean Moon moved to Seoul
and he started his own and then they combined, and

(50:57):
so by the time this break happened, my parents and
him had been working pretty closely for I want to say,
like almost ten years, like more than five, and so
it was very natural for them to go with him.

Speaker 1 (51:14):
I see.

Speaker 2 (51:15):
Splinter groups are endlessly fascinating to me. There's so many.
There's some Mormon offshoot, like, yes, there's just there are
so many.

Speaker 3 (51:23):
How do you decide just started as we're st Yeah,
and it should be.

Speaker 4 (51:28):
A BuzzFeed article that's like which.

Speaker 1 (51:30):
Off sheet, which off shoe?

Speaker 3 (51:32):
Would you which kind of sour dough Brederio please pitch that.
I'm curious if when the Reverend died, if there was
any legend around him being immortal, or if this was shocking,
or if.

Speaker 1 (51:46):
It changed anything.

Speaker 4 (51:47):
So not a ton Okay, there was this idea that
like he had really wanted North and South Korea to
unite before he died, and there was like this big
church event that happened around then that they were hopefully
trying to work for. So it's like, no, it wasn't
one of those cults where they were like, he's never
gonna die, okay, Okay, but I think there were I

(52:10):
think if they weren't lying to themselves, they would have
said they had a hope for something more to happen
before he died, that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (52:18):
Yeah, so you have this crack when you go to college. Yah,
was there something specific that led you to like revisit
some of those doubts?

Speaker 4 (52:29):
So I tried to ignore it because even though I
had been like friendly with outsiders, I didn't have anyone
I like really relied on anyone like I was so
used to just like faking my life around them. So
it was like, oh, if I believe this, I lose
my family and my community, and I did not want that,

(52:50):
so I ignored it.

Speaker 1 (52:51):
I got married in the church. Was it a mass wedding? Yeah?

Speaker 4 (52:56):
Oh, but my husband and I were supposed to have
an arranged marriage. We already knew each other and we
already liked each other, and so that when our parents
were like, how about this person, we were like okay,
we were like secretly making out, and then we went
through the blessing and everyone was like, you guys, like this,
this is a sign that the blessing really.

Speaker 1 (53:17):
Worth really worked America.

Speaker 4 (53:20):
Yeah, well, because when we came along, sometimes your parents
could also bless you. So our parents they like chose us.

Speaker 1 (53:29):
But I see how many couples were there.

Speaker 4 (53:32):
So they said four hundred million because they were counting
dead people.

Speaker 1 (53:36):
Oh cool.

Speaker 4 (53:39):
I don't know how many. I was looking this up
the other day because I was like how many were there?
And I was like, were there even four hundred? I
don't know, and uh so I I think there was
like a couple thousand, maybe a thousand.

Speaker 1 (53:57):
That's wild, yes, wild.

Speaker 3 (54:01):
Photo.

Speaker 1 (54:02):
Do you have a photo of it?

Speaker 4 (54:03):
I do have some photos. They're like blory and you
can be like there's a Kina like in that row.

Speaker 1 (54:11):
What did it feel like?

Speaker 4 (54:12):
It felt kind of terrible. I've been thinking about it
lately because now I'm forty, and you know, I got
blessed when I was twenty one, and I thought I was.

Speaker 1 (54:22):
An old maid.

Speaker 4 (54:23):
I thought it was a spinster. You guys, there were
girls who were getting blessed that I had babysat. They
were like sixteen.

Speaker 1 (54:31):
Wait, girls were getting married at sixteen. Yeah, just a
few of them.

Speaker 4 (54:37):
I know. It was one of those things where like
I've been sitting with him thinking about a lot lately,
and I'm like, that was like way more traumatic than
I remember, which is like, is not all of our
child yeah, like especially the cult life. But you're like, oh,
we were all coerced into that, like even though I

(54:59):
loved the person of getting married to I was like
getting married with all these people, A lot of them
I didn't know, and he and I I don't think
we would have ever chosen to be married at that
young age, even though we liked each other a lot.
And then all the all the girls the night before
I was like we were in a dormitory and I
just remember girls running around and like cry, like just

(55:22):
they were gone, like they didn't know their partner. They
were like twenty or nineteen and had just gotten off
of a van where they were fundraising for a year
and they were told like this is the guy, and
some of them, some of them were crying. So yeah,
and then there were like sixteen year olds or you know,
nineteen year olds. I don't remember anyone like older than

(55:43):
us that was like, you know, even in their mid twenties.

Speaker 1 (55:46):
Wow. Yeah, it was really brutal. Yeah, that's devastating. What
if you get someone with bad breath?

Speaker 4 (55:52):
Also, Yeah, there was like so many jerks and like
just so many and like you're wearing like there's so
many ugly dresses.

Speaker 1 (56:00):
Too, could you pick out your dress?

Speaker 4 (56:03):
I actually what we were able to I've heard now
you can't pick out your dress. You just have an
ugly dress that your mother picks out for you.

Speaker 1 (56:10):
Terrible.

Speaker 4 (56:11):
Okay, my dress was kind of cute. It was like
asymmetrical routing.

Speaker 1 (56:16):
Oh my god.

Speaker 3 (56:17):
Yeah, okay, okay, well then I guess it's all yeah. Well,
I mean, do you still keep in contact with people
some I still keep in contact with some of my
good friends, like the girl who was sitting like to
my right when we were getting blessed.

Speaker 4 (56:37):
We still talk. So when we were growing up, they
called us blessed children because we were from the blessing,
and we were told that we were all brothers and
sisters and so we had to really take care of
each other. And so that kind of made it almost
easier to leave because I remember some of my friends
telling me like I have a secret boyfriend, or I,

(56:58):
you know, be gay or something, and I remember thinking
like it was drilled into me that this is my
brother or sister, like I'm that bond is gonna remain.
And even when I thought I was a true believer,
if people came and told me things like I made
out with a guy, I don't know what to do,

(57:18):
I would absolutely hold their secrets and like not tell anyone,
and so I feel like, you know, I'm not friends
with everyone from the church or you know, like I
feel like I have a lot of good feelings towards everyone,
Like I know what a terrible childhood we all had,
and I wish everyone the best even if I'm not
in contact with them, But I still I feel like

(57:42):
I still love everyone.

Speaker 2 (57:44):
Wow, it sounds somewhat unique in that you know so
much at the time, we hear about a culture within
occult of ratting on everyone, like it being required to.

Speaker 4 (57:54):
There was definitely like, yeah, there was definitely a lot
of trauma that we all had to do. I think
for me, even like if we were acting kind of
shitty to each other when we were teens, or you know,
like some like some girl like ratted me out for
like having not dress code at camp. It's still a

(58:14):
little bit annoyed with her, still a little resentment there.
But I'm like, we were all teens, Like what else
were we gonna do? Yeah, you know, like I feel
like I absolutely have forgiveness in my heart for any
other blessed child, and I'm sure I offended or hurt
other people, and I would definitely be happy to ask

(58:36):
for forgiveness. I feel like I have a harder time
for giving a lot of the first generation who raised us,
And I'm like, I know you were damaged and that's
why you joined, but honestly, like, what the.

Speaker 1 (58:48):
Hell, guys. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (58:52):
One of the other things that you said that really
interested me was how demonized therapy was. Oh yeah, and
how that's just a warning that you're probably in a
high control group.

Speaker 4 (59:02):
Can you say a little bit more about that. Yeah,
So it wasn't just therapy. It was like kind of
like all medical professionals were oh a little bit treated suspiciously,
especially therapists, because I think because they were so scared
of the church in turn. But I did go get

(59:25):
regular checkups when I was a kid. I think a
lot of that was also like I was going to
public school and I needed to get.

Speaker 1 (59:33):
Like batmanization, right right.

Speaker 4 (59:35):
I did have a health like health issues that like
kind of got ignored for a while. A lot of
people didn't even go to regular doctors. It was like,
don't don't even go if you have cancer. And there's
actually like it feels like a very huge crossover between
that and like the RFK. Yeah, because there's like people

(59:57):
being like you can pray your cancer away or just
this special tea or whatever.

Speaker 3 (01:00:02):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:00:03):
There's a lot of that too, So it wasn't necessarily
specifically don't talk about your emotions with a person because
it might expose us.

Speaker 1 (01:00:12):
It was more just like.

Speaker 4 (01:00:13):
The oh no, I think that was still oare It
was just everything.

Speaker 1 (01:00:16):
I have so many more questions about this.

Speaker 2 (01:00:18):
I think this would be a good time to break
and pick this back up in the next episode. She's
so cool, I know, I know. Also I wanted to
be a voice actor.

Speaker 3 (01:00:29):
I just want her to be my friend. Well that too,
I asked her when you went to the bathroom. She
seemed to hesitant, come out a little strong. Okay, Megan,
would you join the Unification Church? Okay, so if it's
the seventies, right, I think I might go on.

Speaker 1 (01:00:48):
I like flowers freedom, Okay.

Speaker 3 (01:00:51):
There was a lot of like we're not working for
the man, Like we're gonna live on a commune and
be in the sun and make our own garden.

Speaker 1 (01:01:01):
I'd like that, make our own garden. Yeah, I just
feel like there's a garden there.

Speaker 2 (01:01:06):
You just decided there was a garden involved somewhere.

Speaker 3 (01:01:11):
I just would like it. I just think I would
like it. I like it sounds like it started with
things that I would like. I wouldn't like him, probably
the reverend. Yeah, but I can just see myself being
swept away and maybe some of the excitement of selling
trinkets on the street and getting hitchhikes and free meals,
and I would join it.

Speaker 1 (01:01:32):
I just know I would. Yeah, I could see that
for you. Yeah, sure, I know.

Speaker 2 (01:01:35):
It's just it's so I'll never I'll never stop being
fascinated by this sort of like hippie Christian combination.

Speaker 3 (01:01:45):
Yes, endlessly fascinating hippy.

Speaker 2 (01:01:48):
Just like my idea of what it meant to be
a hippie growing up just seemed so like the antithesis
of being in like a strict Christian church.

Speaker 1 (01:01:57):
But like so much of that movement turned into these
like christ.

Speaker 3 (01:02:00):
Yeah, and that's why you see them having so many weird,
different kinds of rules, because they were like, well, then
we can do this, actually, and we can do those.

Speaker 2 (01:02:07):
Yeah, I like chicking and choosing first match. Yeah, it's
very interesting, she referenced in this interview, like creating a
buzzbeed quiz. I think it would be a fun BuzzFeed
quiz to pick which which belief systems you want to
pull from and like create your own quid.

Speaker 1 (01:02:22):
We actually have to do that.

Speaker 3 (01:02:24):
That's the speeds still exis Yeah, okay, shout out anyway,
Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Please
rate us five stars. If you don't have five stars,
don't rate us at all. Share it with your friends,
and as always, remember to follow your gut, watch out
for red flags, and never ever trust me.

Speaker 1 (01:02:43):
Bye. This has been an exactly right production hosted by
me Lo La.

Speaker 3 (01:02:48):
Blanc and me Megan Elizabeth. Our senior producer is Gee Holly.

Speaker 1 (01:02:53):
This episode was mixed by John Bradley.

Speaker 3 (01:02:55):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain, and our guest booker
is Patrick Kuttner.

Speaker 1 (01:03:00):
The theme song was composed by Holly Ambert Church.

Speaker 3 (01:03:02):
Trust Me as executive produced by Karen Kilgareth Georgia Hartstark
and Daniel Kramer.

Speaker 2 (01:03:07):
You can find us on Instagram at trust Me Podcast
or on TikTok at trust Me Cult Podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:03:12):
Got your own story about cults, extreme belief, our manipulation,
Shoot us an email at trustmepod at gmail dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:03:19):
Listen to trust Me on the iHeartRadio, app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.