Shincheonji on the prowl

A notorious religious group from South Korea called Shincheonji (also known as Mount Zion) has apparently been actively recruiting in Auckland recently. Shincheonji has a long history in New Zealand, with underhanded recruiting techniques used to pull people into the cult group. Many years ago, the church in Wellington was using university students to lure people in. I also found a warning from a popular evangelical church here in Wellington from last year, letting people know that a group member had been attending church services and attempting to convince people to jump ship and join Shincheonji. Apparently this process can start as “an invite for coffee” followed by an invite to a Bible Study, from where attempts are made to convince the mark that Shincheonji is the one true religion.

Worryingly the group is often described as “apocalyptic”, with teachings that everyone who's not a member of the church will be destroyed at the upcoming time of eternal judgement. And, like many of these groups, their leader is “special”. Lee Man-hee's arrival was supposedly foretold by the bible. But the main thing they seem to be known for, globally, is the underhanded tactics they use to pull people in. I guess that true believers can excuse pretty much any kind of bad behaviour if the ends are seen to justify the means.

It seems unlikely that skeptics would end up falling prey to these kinds of predatory tactics, especially as skeptics are unlikely to be members of a church congregation in the first place. Personally, I've wanted to visit this secretive group for a while now, but haven't managed to find my way in yet. Maybe I'll have to start hanging around other churches a bit more and wait for an invite to go and get a cup of coffee.

These recent warnings reminded me of a story about another South Korean religious group from a few years ago, but this group is in the US. Since Reverend Moon's death, the Unification Church, better known as the Mooneys, has been split, with one half (called Sanctuary Church, or the Rod of Iron Ministries), being run by two of the Reverend's sons. This branch of the church has gone down an extreme path, even embracing firearms and integrating them into their church services.

I know that a large number of South Koreans are Christian, so I suspect that these two Korean Christian cults are not so much a product of Korea as they are a product of Christianity - and more broadly of religion in general.

Religions tend to be staffed by leaders who simply assert that they know the truth, rather than wanting to actually ascertain what's true and what isn't. At least within the more refined circles of Catholicism and Protestantism, for example, there seems to be some semblance of a shared acceptance of the limits of what people are allowed to claim - nobody in the Catholic church is going around telling everyone they're an apostle, for example. But in independent churches and breakaway factions, there's little to stop leaders from pushing the envelope and making more and more unproven claims.

After all, once people have been indoctrinated in a moderate church to trust authority rather than evidence, there's nothing stopping them replacing those moderate evidence-free ideas for more radical ones, except hopefully for their common sense. And often that common sense isn't enough to save someone from ending up in a dangerous cult - especially when entry into that cult is paved with love bombing and other kindnesses.