c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ On Nov. 18, 1978, the catastrophe known simply as”Jonestown”occurred in a Guyana jungle.

On orders from the Rev. Jim Jones, 912 members of his Peoples Temple committed suicide or were murdered, along with California Congressman Leo Ryan, who was investigating the group. It was a slaughter of innocents that included 276 children under age 12. At the end, Jones killed himself.

At the time, Jonestown received extraordinary media coverage. But 19 years later, the massacre has faded from the world’s collective memory. And that’s a tragedy because cults continue to be physical and psychological threats to many individuals and families.

Cult apologists _ usually academics _ constantly tell us groups like the Peoples Temple are aberrations. And cults are referred to as”new religious movements.”But the truth is otherwise.

The United States is honeycombed with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of destructive cults like the Peoples Temple. And nearly every year a maniacal cult leader decides it’s time to kill the group’s members in order to find God, hitch a ride on a space ship, or prove the domination of the all-powerful cult ruler.

Even as the number of cults increases, each time a mass murder takes place, the public is always shocked and surprised;”unbelievable”is usually employed to describe cult murders.

But how many more deaths will it take to finally convince people the threat from cults is real? How many more deaths like those involving members of the Order of the Solar Temple, Hare Krishna, Rajneesh, Jonestown, Branch Davidians, Aum Shinrikyo, and Heaven’s Gate until we recognize the enormous dangers posed by destructive cults?

Although most cult deaths involve group members, in March 1995 Aum Shinrikyo followers released the deadly gas, Sarin, into the Tokyo subway system, killing 12 and injuring 5,000. In addition to Sarin, the Japanese cult’s arsenal includes VX, phosgene, and sodium cyanide. Aum Shinrikyo is also reported to be stockpiling biological weapons. Not exactly the stuff of a benign”new religious movement.”A more accurate description is”terrorist.” One of the richest and best organized cults, the Unification Church of the 77-year-old Sun Myung Moon, plans to stage a series of public events in Washington, D.C., Nov. 23-30 in an attempt to capture media attention.

During the eight-day,”World Culture and Sports Festival III,”the Rev. Moon plans to personally bless 30,000 married couples during a Nov. 29 event at RFK Stadium.

Unification Church officials also expect more than 3 million more couples in 160 nations will receive the blessing via satellite. The couples, who do not need to be church members to participate, are asked to pay a minimum of $70 each for the blessing. Not a bad fund-raising idea.

A mass blessings may seem bizarre to many, but issues of marriage and the family are central in the Unification Church’s theology, which labels Jesus a failure because he did not marry and establish his own family. And Unification Church members believe the human family can only be saved through the leadership of the world’s”True Parents”(Moon and his wife), who will show us the way to a”sinless”society.

In recent years, the Unification Church has attempted to present itself as a mainstream religion by, among other things, purchasing the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut and starting The Washington Times newspaper in the nation’s capital.

But Cynthia Lilley of New York has a far different view of Moon’s cult based on the bitter experience of her daughter, a former Unification Church member.”My daughter who was deceptively recruited into the Unification Church in 1993 was separated from her family and was taught that her family was satanic. … This is typical of the church. People who participate in the so-called `blessing’ only help legitimize Moon’s very dangerous cult. In addition, celebrities who lend their names to the church give it a legitimacy to continue breaking up families,”she said.

Unfortunately, some people still don’t recognize the dangers of destructive cults. Maybe the carnage of Jonestown and Cynthia Lilley’s disturbing warning will help them at last to”get it.”I hope so.

MJP END RUDIN