Founded and led by Korean evangelist and businessman Sun Myung Moon, the Unification Church enjoyed a surge in popularity in the United States in the 1970s. Disciples of the controversial church, known as Moonies, believed Moon’s assertion that he was a messiah sent to continue Jesus’s work of brokering our connection to God, and was as such unquestionable. Moon presided over mass arranged weddings, called “blessings,” that would lead to children born without original sin. Drugs and sex outside of marriage were verboten, homosexuality was a sin, and various other rules were in place to ensure the “purity” of disciples. What seems to distinguish Moon’s religion from puritanical branches of Christianity is an insistence on internationality, which might have appealed to Americans disenfranchised in the wake of the Vietnam War. Cara Jones’s parents were such Americans.
Blessed Child is an insider’s look at the Unification Church, homing in on Jones’s own family. Farley Jones, her father, was an atheist who became a devout Moonie and rose within the ranks of the church, enjoying intimate counsel with Moon himself. In 1995, Cara was married to a young Korean man she’d just met along with thousands of other couples in a stadium in Seoul, after submitting her high school picture to the church for an arranged coupling. Footage of this wedding is included in Blessed Child, and it speaks to the chilling anonymity of cult life, as a ritual associated with great personal love is transformed into a mass recruiting rally. Blessed Child is, in fact, composed of quite a bit of Jones home-video footage, and the film doesn’t lack for wrenchingly casual details about how a family indoctrinates its young into a contrived belief system, making it all seem so natural and inevitable. Perhaps most unnervingly, we see a young Cara deep in the grips of prayer, performing in a daily ritual at the family’s home, her face curled in determination to please her father.
The documentary is structured as a kind of coming-of-age story. Cara went to Princeton University not long after her wedding and rebelled against her religion, feeling especially alienated by a husband she regarded more as a brother figure. Embracing drugs and sex, Cara eventually fell out with her parents, who insisted she leave Princeton, which she refused. Now in her 40s, Cara wants to be free of the church’s tentacles without losing her parents and brothers, one of whom, Bow, is gay and served as the film’s director of photography. Cara grapples with a hypocrisy that scans as a given to many atheists: that religions that speak of love often seem to pivot far more viscerally on inspiring shame (as well as on the donations that such shame can motivate). Bow, who occasionally appears on screen, is out but clearly damaged by the church, wishing to the camera that he wasn’t gay.
Farley is the film’s most haunting subject though, a patriarch and religious figure who rules the roost with a sense of erudition and overwhelming niceness. Cara, not without bitterness, says that Farley killed with kindness. Late in Blessed Child, Cara asks Farley how he can accommodate a religion that judges his own son. To his credit, Farley isn’t defensive, and to less of his credit, he hems and haws, more or less evading the ramifications of his daughter’s question. Judging by his face, Farley appears to be a man, eaten up with sadness, who absolutely needs this religion and self-definition regardless of certain consequences. Farley says that he saw Moon, who died in 2012, as a father figure, as his own father walked out on his family when he was 10, and he saw the Unification Church as a way to embrace and focus familial love. It’s here that another irony rises to the surface: Farley and his wife, Betsy, frequently left their children in the hands of nannies while on missionary expeditions, so if we’re to believe his motivations, he momentarily lost his family out of fear of losing them.
Jones captures moving moments throughout Blessed Child, such as when Farley and Betsy tearfully apologize for the pressure they put on her and the confusion and misery they wrought. But the film nonetheless feels under-developed, as Jones is vague about the intersections between her family, Moon, and the church at large. Tantalizing questions hang in the air. How did Farley rise so quickly in the church? How do the other brothers, briefly glimpsed over a lunch, feel about Cara’s emancipation? How did Farley rationalize Moon’s tax evasions, infidelities, and other controversies? Farley’s daddy issues also feel like an inadequate explanation for how an intellectual atheist might be seduced by what appears to the layman to be an obvious scam. Jones may be too close to Farley to get to the bottom of him, and as such she doesn’t quite render the rationalizations of the cult members, though she offers a poignant testament to the baggage and insecurities hounding her own life.
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