About.

What this site is for

Principled Thinking is a sourced public record of the Unification Church: its doctrine, money, history, and what it has asked of the people inside it. The site is for current members, former members, and the people around them.

We built it out of love, and some despair, for the people we left behind. Many of us came out of this movement; some of us still have family inside it. This is our attempt to reach them, to help the people we love make sense of what we lived through and what we saw, and to give them room to question the systems they were raised in or gave their lives to.

We are not here to shame anyone for believing, or for staying. We are here so that what happened can be named plainly, so that people can deconstruct what was unhealthy, tend to their own spiritual wellbeing, and choose with clear eyes. Naming these patterns is also how the rest of us learn to recognize them. We would like to heal, as families and as a human family, and this is the part of that we know how to do.

Care this personal is exactly why we hold the work to a standard. How we source every claim, label opinion, and correct mistakes is set out in our Methodology.

Who writes this

Articles publish by default under a collective byline: the Principled Thinking Editors. Individual editors are anonymous unless they have personally chosen to be named on a specific article, which happens rarely and by their own decision. The site does not maintain a public team page or a directory of individuals.

Editorial communication runs through one address: [email protected].

If you're a researcher, journalist, ex-member, or scholar who wants to contribute (sources, corrections, a piece of the record), write to [email protected].

Funding

Principled Thinking is funded by its founders' time. No external funding has been accepted or solicited at this time. If that changes, the funding source will be itemized here, on this page, in plain language.

We don't run ads, accept sponsorships, or track readers.