Moonie

Scholarly studies

In 1984, Eileen Barker published The Making of a Moonie based on her seven-year study of HSA-UWC members in the United Kingdom and the United States. In 2006, Laurence Iannaccone of George Mason University, a specialist in the economics of religion, wrote that The Making of a Moonie was "one of the most comprehensive and influential studies" of the process of conversion to new religious movements. Australian psychologist Len Oakes and British psychiatry professor Anthony Storr, who have written rather critically about cults, gurus, new religious movements, and their leaders have praised The Making of a Moonie. It was given the Distinguished Book Award in 1985 by the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. In 1997 Barker reported that Unificationists had mostly undergone a transformation in their worldview from millennialism to utopianism. In 1998, Irving Louis Horowitz, a sociologist, questioned the relationship between the HSA-UWC and scholars whom it paid to conduct research on its behalf.