Cultic Studies Review, Vol. 2, No. 3, 2003, Page 26
If my ―mission‖ (that is, my assigned role in the church) had been anything other than the
Seminary, I would have been compelled by my church superiors to repress my feelings
again. However, because I was at the Seminary, where Unificationists were expected to
wrestle with intellectual questions, I was not compelled.
At first, I was so euphoric about the rediscovery of my own real feelings that I set out to
spread the word to the entire Seminary. So I wrote a heartfelt, poetic sermon titled
―Seeking the Oasis,‖ which I gave first to my Homiletics class, and then to the entire
Seminary. I still have a copy of this sermon, and I will quote from the last page because this
is probably the first piece of writing I produced since joining the Unification Church that
proceeded from my own authentic thoughts and feelings:
No one had ever penetrated to touch that depth of my heart before, and I
cried in gratitude to God that He had taken such special interest in me as to
even find a way to look after me I hadn‘t realized I needed. My tears were
like a small rivulet from the great, broad river flowing from the heart of God.
If we can open our hearts to it, then this river of love can wash over the roots
of our being, bringing forth even the Tree of Life from out of the desert sands.
All we need to do is to find the time and take the risk to bare our hearts to
our brothers and sisters. Our hearts may be as dry and thirsting as the most
barren ground without our even knowing it. Replenish them with the
nourishing water of your tears, and from the seed of your liberation will
sprout the sturdiest tree to give shade and comfort to all who come after you
there, with sunbaked, parching lips, seeking the oasis.
For the next six years, the more I tried to remain loyal to these ideas, the more I found
myself being pushed to the fringes of the church, and eventually out. Yet, throughout this
entire time, I continued to fear that I was straying from the straight and narrow, and I
struggled with the question of whether I should force my feelings back down again. (At one
point, I even considered voluntarily returning to the M.F.T.).
In the summer of 1980, I started a diary, which in my book I called the Boston Diary,
because I started it while I was in Boston as part of a contingent of seminarians in the new
three-year Divinity program who were expecting to return to their studies in the fall.
The Boston Diary demonstrates very clearly my divided state of mind, as I swung back and
forth between my authentic self and my cult self. This is how I describe the Boston Diary in
my new book:
I still have this diary, the only one of the many diaries I kept during my
Unification Church years that I did not later destroy in a fit of self-reforming
zeal. This one was special to me because the entries in it are so heart-
rending, so full of lacerating pain and desperate questioning, that I could not
bring myself to repudiate it. It is a small book with cream-colored pages,
covered with brown cloth, in which I wrote in ball point pen, my handwriting
sometimes scrawling and expansive, sometimes cramped and mechanical, as
I vacillated between the two sides of myself. (Neufeld, 111)
My inability during that summer in Boston to voluntarily repress my feelings made it almost
inevitable that, upon my return to the Seminary, I would be swiftly shown the door.
However, because of the high regard that Sun Myung Moon had for the Seminary during
that era, I received different treatment than I might have received if I had been an ordinary
member. The usual way to handle members who are having problems is to send them to a
Divine Principle workshop if that doesn‘t work, they may be placed in a demanding mission
such as the M.F.T. or, if all else fails, they are sent home to their parents. But instead of

Cultic Studies Review, Vol. 2, No. 3, 2003, Page 27
any of these courses of action, I was allowed to decide for myself what I would do next,
provided the choice included leaving the Seminary as soon as possible. Therefore, I chose to
move to Los Angeles in 1980, so I could undertake Arthur Janov‘s primal therapy, the same
therapy that had interested me in 1976.
I could never afford to complete this therapy. And although the combination was unusual, I
remained an active member of the Unification Church throughout the time of my primal
therapy treatments (this flies in the face of Janov‘s general view that religious beliefs are
artifacts of emotional repression that will fall away after treatment). In fact, I even
interrupted my primal therapy treatments so I could participate in the mass wedding that
Moon staged at Madison Square Garden in 1982. One might conclude from this situation
that primal therapy was ineffective in breaking through my cultic mindset, though this
ineffectiveness might simply be due to the fact that I couldn‘t finish the therapy.
It took, therefore, more than six years from the day Fran reawakened my real feelings until
I was finally ready to leave the Unification Church. Throughout that interval, I continued to
explore my feelings in many journals and diaries as well, during the final months of my
ten-year membership in the Unification Church, I began to write articles and humorous
stories that appeared in The Round Table and in Our Network, two grass-roots Unificationist
publications that sprang up and briefly flourished in the mid-1980s. These two informal
publications—what are sometimes called ―zines‖—were put out by disaffected members of
the Unification Church without the consent or approval of their church superiors. They were
mailed free of charge to anyone who requested them.
The Round Table was sent out monthly or bimonthly from the New York area. The Round
Table was a serious-minded publication that saw itself as trying to spark a reform
movement in the Unification Church. Its logo included a drawing of Martin Luther nailing the
95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg church.
The other newsletter, Our Network, was much more quirky and informal. True to
stereotype, this one came out of California. It included cartoons, poetry, and comedy lists
among its offerings. For Our Network, I wrote satirical pieces. In one of them, I imagined
myself going to ―Honest Dave‘s Used Theology Lot‖ to try to trade in Moon‘s Divine Principle
for an alternate belief system. In another, I pictured the world in 2084 after the Unification
Church had finally taken over, making joking parallels to George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-
Four.
My final article for The Round Table bore the title ―The Benefits of Repression.‖ I did not
intend this title ironically. I was genuinely trying to argue for the benefits of repressing
feelings yet, at the same time, I wanted to put forward the idea—which was considered
subversive in the Unification Church—that repressing feelings is not invariably beneficial
sometimes it is merely a habit, what I called ―institutionalized repression.‖ ―The Benefits of
Repression‖ appeared in The Round Table in November of 1986, the same month I became
an ex-member of the Unification Church. Writing that piece had been a last-ditch attempt to
try to see things the church‘s way, but now I was out.
To many people, the fact that I even wrote these pieces for The Round Table and Our
Network is proof that I could not possibly have been under the influence of mind control. I
believe, however, that although these writings were written in defiance of the Unification
Church hierarchy, I was still very much under the influence of mind control, and these
writings were merely the final stages of a prolonged, six-year inner struggle. Right up to the
final month of my cult involvement, the thought of actually leaving the church remained a
terrifying and unthinkable prospect.
Writing helped me throughout the six years from 1980 to 1986 while I sought
unsuccessfully to reconcile the church‘s insistence on emotional repression with my own