A few weeks ago on a sunny Friday afternoon, my child’s preschool sent out an alert that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were nearby. I picked my child up early from school, passing a Home Depot that had apparently been raided a few hours earlier, sending day laborers and street vendors fleeing. The following day, ICE was seen in the city of Paramount where my friend lives, and I checked for alternate routes to her graduation party held that evening. On Sunday morning, as I was looking for shoes and packing snacks, I heard a rumor that ICE was on the same block as my child’s playdate. I searched for concrete details, scrolling through images of the previous day’s protests in Los Angeles only a few miles away — cops shooting rubber-coated steel bullets at protestors, tear gas wafting down the street like morning fog.
By the end of the weekend I was agitated and frayed, unable to focus. That’s when it struck me: I used to feel like this all the time, when I was growing up in the Unification Church, a doomsday cult known for arranged mass weddings of its members. Founded by the self-proclaimed messiah Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the Unification Church gained notoriety in the seventies when members known as “Moonies” became ubiquitous on city corners, selling trinkets and inviting passersby to a nearby center for a meal. Dinner would turn into a weekend at a rural property, and soon new members would vanish from their normal lives. Accusations of kidnapping were leveled on both sides, with distraught families claiming the Unification Church was keeping their children away from them, and the church alleging families had hired deprogrammers to kidnap them back. Families were torn apart, a situation that was repeated again when church offspring like myself wanted to leave.
While the reach of the Unification Church has diminished over the years, ICE is now on our street corners, arresting our neighbors and loved ones, disappearing them into a legally dubious network of prisons and holding facilities.
While the reach of the Unification Church has diminished over the years, ICE is now on our street corners, arresting our neighbors and loved ones, disappearing them into a legally dubious network of prisons and holding facilities. In observing these actions, I can’t help but notice the numerous parallels between the church and the current administration. Allegations of brainwashing, tax evasion and sexual abuse hounded Reverend Moon despite his growing wealth and political influence. Today the news is filled with stories about President Donald Trump, another alleged tax cheat and sex abuser, and his unprecedented monetization of the presidency for himself and his extended family through dubious cryptocurrency and international real estate deals, and tawdry commercialism that includes selling a $250 Victory 45-47 fragrance.
Most concerningly, both Trump and Moon have used scapegoats to distract their followers from their power grabs. Scapegoats are integral for a cult; they promote social cohesion, both by binding the in-group together over a common enemy, and by widening the gulf between members and outsiders. They cleave the world into a binary of us and them. Scapegoats are vilified as a tacit warning to cult members, an example of what could happen to them if they stray too far from the rest of the flock. The cohesion provided by the scapegoat places cult members in a position of further manipulation, when they don’t look past the easy answers and see their leaders taking advantage of them.
When I was a child, I remember Moon preaching about an apocalyptic battle taking place between God and Satan, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. I was taught to be suspicious of all outsiders, but there were a few enemies he particularly liked to single out: feminists, homosexuals and communists. They, Moon said, were stymying our efforts at world peace and were the reason why we were all struggling in poverty.
Today, Trump has used many of the same scapegoats as Moon, but his most popular target is the immigrant community. Trump is using immigrants as scapegoats to distract us from his unpopular policies like cuts to Medicare and tax breaks for the wealthy, and he is using ICE as the enforcement mechanism.
Both the Unification Church and MAGA are masters of the manipulation tactic psychologists refer to as DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender, in which perpetrators of abuse attempt to play the victim to avoid being held accountable. When Japan recently investigated the Unification Church for defrauding its members, leading to bankruptcies and suicides, the church decried the prosecution as an attack on religious freedom. Now, amid reports of attempted kidnappings of first-graders at schools, Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, complained to news outlets that agents have been harassed online, harming their well being.
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Cult leaders hope that by being loud enough, the rest of us will accept their version of events. Like Moon, Trump favors the rhetorical tactic known as the Gish gallop or shotgun argument, which presents as many arguments as possible without regard to their validity or relevancy. The point is not to win a debate by making a cogent case, but to overwhelm opponents and tire them out.
This can be seen most clearly in Trump’s anti-immigration arguments, such as when he says he’s for legal immigration, but then proceeds to cancel visas and arrest people who are here legally or are abiding by court orders. Trump claims to be guided by Christian values, when the Bible never wavers from the bedrock principle of being neighborly and welcoming to foreigners. He and his followers want us to get so overwhelmed that we will become paralyzed in a state of indecision and hypernormalization. If we are frozen by fear and confusion, Trump can force through his cruel policies with less resistance.
The shocking images of heavily armed ICE agents in my beloved city reminds me of photos of events at Sanctuary Church. Also known as Rod of Iron Ministries, Sanctuary Church is a splinter cult of the Unification Church that my parents belong to. Sanctuary Church members literally worship with their guns, at times donning crowns made from bullets and bringing their AR-15s to church.
For years, I tried to keep quiet about my past, in hopes that my parents and their ilk would leave me alone. Not anymore. As a child, more than once I had to walk by people protesting the Unification Church on the way to services. I stared with horror at signs portraying Moon with devil horns. I tried to push the images out of my mind, but they never fully left. They planted a small seed of doubt that maybe something we were doing wasn’t right. These encounters put a human face to the opposition, so as that doubt grew, I knew that I wasn’t alone. Those protests hurt the church in a way I didn’t understand as a child — they made it less popular to join, ultimately stunting its growth.
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Watching the current protests against ICE unfold, I feel extraordinarily privileged. I am a white, natural-born citizen. Being undocumented is a civil offense, not a criminal one, and I cannot abide a society that rips babies from their parents over a paperwork issue. The people ICE arrested are supposed to be a danger to me and my child. But ICE is the one bringing in military vehicles, guns, and other “less-lethal” — but still deadly — weapons to my neighborhood. It’s reminiscent of when the Unification Church promoted world peace while manufacturing weapons, or how the Sanctuary Church created the “Peace Police Peace Militia,” a group of armed cult members “practicing to be deadly because [they] love people.”
Engaging in these arguments at face value risks being drawn into their reality distortion field. Instead, the best response to these bad-faith tactics is to reject them through protest and direct action. Anti-ICE demonstrations are a public refusal of Trump’s attempts to fracture our communities. By binding ourselves with our neighbors, we are choosing each other over the avarice of Trump and his cronies.
I thought by leaving the Unification Church I would no longer be haunted by the specter of violence in my community, the horror of families being ripped apart, of leaders sowing division and chaos to distract from their greed and hate. But somehow, here I am again.
