10. The Moonies
You may not have heard of the Unification Church, but you have probably heard of a group during the free-wheeling 1960s and 1970s called the Moonies. The Moonies were followers of Sun Myung Moon, who claimed that Jesus had invited him to finish His mission on earth by arranging mass weddings among complete strangers to create “pure” families. In 1954, he formed the Unification Church in Seoul, South Korea. It was a blend of shamanism, Christianity, anti-communism, and Confucianism. The message of the church was to achieve world peace by creating pure families through marriages.
Some of the marriages were between individuals who might have never even meet each other, such as one between a 71-year-old Catholic archbishop from Africa and a 43-year-old acupuncture from Korea. The couples were forbidden to consummate their marriage for 40 days to prove that their marriage was about more than sex. In 1988, when Moon married 6,516 people in one mass ceremony, he entered the Guinness Book of World Records. When the movement spread to the United States, many parents became outraged that he brainwashed their children, many of whom were teenagers or in college, to sell all of their possessions to him and enter into a scandalous marriage with a stranger.