An unlikely messiah to emerge from the youth movement of the mid-twentieth century was the Korean immigrant known as the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Not an obviously charismatic personality, he addressed his American followers in rambling two-hour sermons, filtered through an interpreter. Although shadowed by a history of matrimonial troubles and conflicts with the law on two continents, Moon preached family values and obedience to authority. His teachings attracted millions of youth (exact figures were never verified) in over 140 countries. He made the United States his base of operations in the 1970s, and collected followers largely from among the advantaged sons and daughters of mainline Christian and Jewish families. By the end of the twentieth century, the Unification Church, which Moon founded, controlled a fortune in U.S. property, and Moonies, as his followers were known, could still...