CARP

CARP (원리연구회 / Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles): The Study of the Principle as Institutional Form in Unification Doctrine

CARP is the association founded in 1966 for the study of the Divine Principle, established on university campuses and known in Korean as 원리연구회, the Principle Research Association. Its English name, the Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles, adds the campus and preserves the two elements the Korean name gives: an object, the Principle, and a method, research.

The founding year is fixed by the corpus itself rather than asserted from outside it. Rev. Sun Myung Moon delivered an address on January 10, 2006, marking the fortieth anniversary of the association’s founding, and another on January 10, 2008, marking the forty-second (Moon 2006, vol. 514; Moon 2008a, vol. 585). Two independent anniversary addresses, two years apart, both point to 1966.

This entry argues that CARP is defined by its object and its method rather than by its constituency. The Korean name contains no word for student, campus, or youth; it names what is studied and how. The claim matters because it explains two features of the association’s history that a youth-wing reading struggles with: the corpus’s late addresses to CARP concern the manner of reading rather than the recruitment of readers, and in February 2005 Rev. Sun Myung Moon instructed that CARP be turned into hoon dok reading churches, a redeployment that makes sense only if the study rather than the students was the thing being redeployed.

— Sun Myung Moon (11/10/1969) Cheon Seong Gyeong

Three years after the founding, the sentence draws the boundary of the association's existence. The word "research" in the name is not academic mimicry, and the Principle is not offered as one more subject on a syllabus. It is a different kind of knowledge, and the same passage says what distinguishes it: knowing it and remaining an onlooker is not knowing it, since what is known must be put into practice. The Exposition of the Divine Principle supplies the ground, presenting itself as a statement of the way every person must walk rather than as a body of doctrine to be assented to.

This entry reads the official English Cheon Seong Gyeong compilation, the Exposition of the Divine Principle, and the title-level index of the Korean speech archive of Rev. Sun Myung Moon, covering 6,118 addresses from 1956 to 2010. The canonical texts are read as authoritative within the tradition, attending to their historical and rhetorical setting; the aim is doctrinal clarification, not external evaluation. The entry does not attempt an organisational history of CARP, an account of its national branches or campus activity, a treatment of Hoon Dok Hae or of the Exposition of the Divine Principle, which have their own entries, or any account of the movement’s relations with particular universities.

Naming conventions in this movement are doctrinal statements, and this one warrants attention because of what it leaves out.

원리연구회 has three elements. 원리 (原理) is the Principle. 연구 (硏究) is research or study in the sustained sense, the word a Korean university uses for a research institute. 회 (會) is association. Nothing in the compound designates who belongs. Compare the movement’s other bodies, which name their constituencies plainly: the Women’s Federation names women, the Youth Federation names youth, the Professors World Peace Academy names professors. This one names a text and an activity.

The English expansion adds the campus, and the addition is real rather than decorative, since the association was formed at universities and worked there. But the English also preserves the Korean structure, keeping research and principles at the center and placing the collegiate element as a qualifier.

What the naming implies is that membership is derivative. One is in CARP because one is engaged in this study; the study does not exist because the members needed something to do. This is not a small distinction in a movement that has founded many organizations, and the corpus’s treatment of the Principle supports it.

The choice of setting follows from the same logic rather than preceding it. A movement seeking young recruits could find them anywhere young people gather, and many movements do. What a movement seeking sustained study of a difficult text requires is a place where sustained study of difficult texts is already the accepted activity, where a room can be booked for it, and where arguing about first principles carries no social penalty. The university is that place.

On this reading, the campus was chosen because it is the natural habitat of the method, not because it is a reservoir of the constituency, and the English name records both facts in the order the Korean sets: research first, collegiate as the setting in which research happens.

There is a further implication that the movement’s own history bears out. If an association is constituted by an activity rather than by an age group, its members do not age out of it in the way a youth organization's members do. What ends is the season of life in which one sits in a university room; what does not end is the reading. The corpus never addresses the problem of what becomes of CARP members when they graduate, which is the first administrative problem any genuine youth wing must solve.

— Sun Myung Moon (08/09/1997) Cheon Seong Gyeong

Four words with a sharp edge. The address says that dogmas belonged to the era of the restoration of the archangelic realm and cannot establish families, and that what the Unification Church teaches is instead the principled path that anyone must walk, believer or not, a thousand years ago or ten thousand years hence. A body of teaching described that way invites investigation rather than subscription, and an association named for research is the natural institutional form for it.

The word "research" would mislead a reader who imported the academic sense whole, and the corpus is explicit about where the two part company.

The first difference is that the reading is meant to be exhaustive rather than selective.

— Sun Myung Moon (02/13/1978) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The standard set in the same passage is that one should be able to say on which page a given text is found. This is memorization of a kind the modern university does not ask for and has not asked for in a long time, and it belongs to an older idea of study in which a text is internalized rather than consulted.

The second difference is that the reading is tested by conduct rather than by examination.

— Sun Myung Moon (07/08/1973) Cheon Seong Gyeong

Moon applies the requirement to himself first in that address, saying that unless he had established the standard by practicing it, he could not teach the Principle at all. A discipline in which the teacher’s right to teach depends on his conduct is not a discipline in the academic sense, and the association formed around it inherits the same rules.

The third difference is affective, and it is the one most easily dismissed as rhetoric.

— Sun Myung Moon (01/01/1977) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The image in the surrounding passage is a bee that will not let go of the honey even if pulled at with tweezers. Taken with the other two requirements, it completes a description of study that is closer to what an older tradition would have called "lectio" than to coursework: total, formative, and pleasurable.

— Sun Myung Moon (05/19/1980) Cheon Seong Gyeong

This is the doctrinal reason the study is not preparatory. If the Word has creative power, then reading it is not gathering information ahead of action; the reading is already an action. An association whose whole purpose is that reading is therefore doing its work when it reads, which is a claim no student society makes about its meetings.

An entry that stopped here would have made its case too easily, because the corpus also puts CARP to work in ways that look like mobilization and nothing else.

— Sun Myung Moon (01/20/1990) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The same passage instructs that middle and high school students who become university students should win the younger generation over. Eighteen months earlier, Rev. Moon had asked how CARP was moving in the context of the same campaign, and treated the graduates who had stepped forward as a unit of activity requiring complete support.

— Sun Myung Moon (09/05/1988) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The archive corroborates the campus-strategic register at the title level and shows it running earlier than these addresses. A December 1976 address concerns organized activity in the university district (Moon 1976, vol. 90); an October 1987 address concerns building a university base for the unification of North and South (Moon 1987, vol. 169). This is the vocabulary of bases and organization, not of reading.

The entry does not treat this as an embarrassment, because on the reading proposed here it is precisely what one should expect. A body formed by sustained study of a text that claims to be the law of restoration will be the body a movement turns to when it needs people who understand what it is doing. The assignments follow from the formation. What would count against the reading is the reverse: a body assembled for campaigns and given study afterward to occupy it.

The corpus supplies a decisive test on precisely this point, and it comes late.

In February 2005, Rev. Sun Myung Moon gave CARP an instruction whose form matters more than its content: he told it to become hoon dok churches (Moon 2005b, vol. 488).

Hoon Dok Hae is the practice of reading the words of True Parents together, in a household or a gathering, as the ordinary form of religious life. To instruct an association to become Hoon Dok churches is to instruct it to become, formally, what it had been informally: a body constituted by a shared reading.

The instruction is intelligible on the reading argued here and awkward on the alternative.

If CARP were essentially the movement’s student wing, the natural late instruction would concern the students: their number, their campuses, their transition into adult membership. Instead, the instruction concerns the reading, and it converts the association into a form defined entirely by the reading.

The surrounding titles point the same way. In March 2004, Rev. Moon addressed the mission of CARP (Moon 2004a, vol. 441); in January 2005, what CARP should do, framed by the standing of the human being within creation (Moon 2005a, vol. 484); and in January 2008, the forty-second anniversary joined to a new age of hope (Moon 2008a, vol. 585). None of these is a recruitment address. The 1983 address, the only other title naming the association in its Korean form, concerns the mission of its leaders (Moon 1983, vol. 127).

One further detail deserves recording. The fortieth anniversary address of January 2006 is titled jointly with the founding declaration of the Universal Peace Federation (Moon 2006, vol. 514).

The association marks its anniversary at the same address as the launch of a peace institution rather than at a youth event, which places CARP among the movement’s providential bodies rather than among its ministries to a demographic.

The thesis was that CARP is defined by its object and method rather than by its constituency. Four lines of evidence converge. The Korean name gives a text and an activity and no membership term in a movement whose other bodies name their constituencies plainly.

The Principle is described in the corpus as a law of restoration distinguished from what universities teach and as something apart from a dogma, which calls for study rather than assent. The prescribed manner of study is total, practice-tested, and formative, not in the academic sense of research. And the association’s late instruction is to become Hoon Dok Hwe churches, a conversion into pure reading.

The strongest objection reads CARP as the movement’s campus and youth arm, with the research vocabulary supplying the form required to organize on universities. The objection has substantial support, and this entry has set it out at full strength: CARP was assigned a leading role in the Tong Ban breakthrough campaign in January 1990; its movements are reviewed as a unit of activity in September 1988; and the archive carries campus-strategic titles from December 1976 and October 1987 that speak of organization and bases.

The objection is serious, and it preserves something the reading here must not lose. The campus work was real, sustained across decades, and central to the movement’s growth in more than one country.

But two features of the evidence favor the object reading where the two diverge.

The first is the direction of the 2005 instruction. Movements that possess a youth wing do not, when the wing matures, instruct it to become a reading circle. They instruct it to recruit, to professionalize, or to graduate its members into the main body. The instruction to become a Hoon Dok church subtracts the campus and keeps the reading, which identifies which of the two the association was.

The second is the distribution of the title-level record. Six addresses name the association in 1983, 2004, twice in 2005, 2006, and 2008; not one of them concerns recruitment, numbers, or campuses. Twelve further titles concern universities, but they concern institutions the movement founded or the university as a field of work, not CARP.

The campaign material appears in the compiled addresses, inside passages about other subjects, while the addresses given to CARP by name are about mission, task, reading, and anniversary. What a movement puts in a title is what it takes the subject to be.

What the argument does not entail should be stated plainly. It does not entail that CARP was not a student organization, since it plainly was and the English name says so. It does not entail that the campus campaigns were peripheral, since the corpus assigns them and treats them as urgent.

Furthermore, it does not entail that study in this sense is private or quietist, since the same corpus makes witnessing the test of whether the Principle has been understood at all. And it does not entail any claim about CARP’s present activities or organization, which lie outside what the sources used here can establish.

What it does entail is a rule for reading the term. When the corpus addresses CARP, it is addressing a body assembled around a text, and the campaigns it is given are things such a body can be asked to do rather than the reason it exists.

• CARP is the association founded in 1966 for the study of the Divine Principle, known in Korean as 원리연구회, the Principle Research Association.
• The founding year is established from within the corpus by two anniversary addresses, the fortieth in January 2006 and the forty-second in January 2008.
• The Korean name gives an object and a method and contains no term for student, campus, or youth, unlike the movement’s other federations.
• Rev. Sun Myung Moon distinguished the Principle from what universities teach, calling it the law of restoration, and said elsewhere that it is not a dogma.
• The study prescribed is total, requiring memorization to the page, and is tested by conduct rather than by examination.
• Because the Word is held to have creative power, the reading is itself an action rather than preparation for one.
• The corpus also assigns CARP a leading role in the Tong Ban breakthrough campaign of 1990, which is the strongest evidence for reading it as a mobilization arm.
• In February 2005, Rev. Sun Myung Moon instructed that CARP become Hoon Dok churches, subtracting the campus and keeping the reading.
• Across the 6,118-sermon Korean archive, six titles name the association, and none of them concern recruitment, numbers, or campuses.

Cheon Seong Gyeong: Selections from the Speeches of Sun Myung Moon. 2003. 2nd ed. Seoul: Family Federation for World Peace and Unification.

Exposition of the Divine Principle. 1996. New York: Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1976. “조직적인 대학가 활동에 대하여.” Sermon, December 14, 1976. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 90, sermon 3.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1983. “원리연구회 지도자의 사명.” Sermon, May 7, 1983. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 127, sermon 5.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1987. “남북통일을 위한 대학기지 조성.” Sermon, October 29, 1987. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 169, sermon 5.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2004a. “카프(CARP)의 사명.” Sermon, March 4, 2004. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 441, sermon 3.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2005a. “만물의 영장과 카프(CARP)가 할 일.” Sermon, January 22, 2005. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 484, sermon 3.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2005b. “카프(CARP) 훈독교회를 만들어라.” Sermon, February 18, 2005. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 488, sermon 1.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2006. “원리연구회 창설 40주년과 천주평화연합 창설 선언문.” Sermon, January 10, 2006. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 514, sermon 10.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2008a. “카프(CARP) 창설 42주년과 희망적인 새로운 시대.” Sermon, January 10, 2008. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 585, sermon 3.