CultNEWS101 Articles 12/23/2025

[Patrick Ryan]

Unification Church, The Walk

Korean Herald: Rival parties clash as Unification Church scandal engulfs liberals

"South Korea’s rival parties are clashing head on over whether to launch a special counsel investigation into more bribery allegations involving the Unification Church, as the controversy expands to include senior government and ruling bloc figures.

The main opposition People Power Party on Sunday urged President Lee Jae Myung and the ruling Democratic Party of Korea to accept an opposition-recommended special prosecutor, arguing that the case has grown beyond isolated misconduct and now constitutes a full-fledged political scandal.

"Investigations that stop in the face of power and justice that operate selectively can no longer be countenanced," People Power Party Floor Leader Rep. Song Eon-seok said Sunday.

"(The party) officially proposes introducing a special counsel on the Unification Church in order to uphold judicial justice."

Referring to an assortment of allegations collectively as the "Unification Church-Democratic Party scandal," People Power Party spokesperson Rep. Choi Bo-yun joined the attack, saying that ruling bloc figures named in related allegations have close political ties to President Lee.

Ruling party and government figures named in connection to the allegations include former Oceans Minister Chun Jae-soo, Unification Minister Chung Dong-young, National Intelligence Service Director Lee Jong-seok and former Democratic Party lawmaker Lim Jong-seong.

The People Power Party has accused the special counsel team led by Min Joong-ki of conducting a selective investigation, claiming it failed for months to pursue testimony from a former senior Unification Church official regarding alleged payments to Democratic Party figures while using the same testimony as a key basis for investigating opposition lawmakers. Min headed the investigation into former first lady Kim Keon Hee, which led to suspicions that the church bribed figures on both sides of the aisle.

Little Village: A cult in Iowa helped hide Yoko Ono’s daughter from her for years: ‘We never talked about my mom and John’

"For a pair of prominent anti-war activists, John Lennon and Yoko Ono had many battles to fight in 1971. Upon their move to America, they faced the ire of bitter (and often racist and misogynistic) Beatles fans, investigations by the FBI, deportation attempts by the Nixon administration and pressure to either manifest or temper the revolution as bombing campaigns in and around Vietnam escalated. 

Perhaps the most personal and pivotal of them all, however, was a custody battle.

Ono gave birth to her first child and only daughter Kyoko Ono Cox in 1963. While Ono wasn’t married to Kyoko’s father for long — especially after meeting Lennon in ’66 — she and American filmmaker and artist Anthony Cox co-parented amicably while exploring their respective careers and relationships. At least, at the beginning.

In the new HBO doc One to One: John & Yoko, Ono admits to being an “offbeat mother,” bringing Kyoko onstage during performances as a baby and to Montreal for the “bed-in” for peace with Lennon when she was only 4. The unconventional family even gathered in Denmark for New Year’s Eve in 1969 — Ono and Lennon, Cox and his new wife Melinda Kendall, and little Kyoko.

The peace wouldn’t last. Ono and Lennon found it harder and harder to communicate with Cox, who grew paranoid that the celebrity couple was plotting to take Kyoko away from him for good. He missed a court-ordered appearance in 1971 and was jailed. Out on bail, he disappeared with the 8-year-old.

Cox and Kendall had been searching for a higher power, a sense of belonging — and validation for their rash decision to withhold Kyoko from her mother and stepfather. They found it in the Living Word Fellowship (LWF), also called the Church of the Living Word or simply “The Walk.”

 

As readers of Little Village may recognize, LWF is the cult that built the Shiloh township south of Kalona, not far from the birthplace of its founder and charismatic prophet John Robert Stevens. Before it was abandoned and leveled in a controlled burn in 2020, Shiloh hosted all-night death prayers, doomsday prepping, child labor, abusive summer camps, inadequate schools, a farm that produced and sold snake-oil health products, and an annual Fourth of July fireworks show attended by normal families across eastern Iowa.

While Shiloh served as the spiritual headquarters of the LWF, the cult formed in southern California among God-fearing hippies and wayward artists. 

“In our first meeting with John Robert Stevens, he solved all our problems,” Cox claimed.

“Father John” invited Cox in front of his L.A. congregation, prophesying the artist would raise his small family in Iowa. Cox obliged.

“The relationship was all right between us and Mr. Cox,” Lennon said in a 1972 interview on the The Dick Cavett Show. “But one day something happened, and we just didn’t see her, and Yoko hasn’t seen her child for two years. For two years, we’ve been chasing him all over the world.”

Kyoko was the main reason Ono and Lennon made their fateful move to the States. They spent a fortune on lawyers and investigators to try and find Cox, who they knew was somewhere in his home country. 

Meanwhile, Kyoko found herself in a quaint Iowa farmhouse doing chores: cleaning, husking dried beans and listening to tapes of John Robert Stevens’ sermons, over and over. Even mainstream Christian music was frowned upon, let alone Top 40 radio.

“There’s my mom and John doing all these things to appeal to me,” Kyoko told the Daily Mail in a rare interview earlier this year. 'But I was living on a farm in Iowa. We didn’t own a TV.'"

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