Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Buying the Right Dark side of Jerry Falwell: Being bought off! (1997)
On Jan. 28, 1995, a beaming
Rev. Jerry Falwell told his Old Time Gospel Hour congregation news that seemed heaven sent. The televangelist
hailed two Virginia businessmen as financial saviors of debt-ridden Liberty University, the fundamentalist Christian school that Falwell had made the crown jewel of his Religious Right empire.
"They had to borrow money, hock their houses, hock everything," enthused Falwell.
"Thank God for friends like Dan Reber and Jimmy Thomas." Falwell's congregation rose as one to applaud. The star of the moment was Daniel Reber, who was standing behind Falwell. Thomas was not present.
Reber and Thomas earned Falwell's public gratitude by excusing the Lynchburg, Va., school of about one-half of its $73 million debt. In the late 1980s, that flood of red ink had forced Falwell to abandon his Moral Majority political organization and nearly drowned Liberty University in bankruptcy.
Reber and Thomas came to Falwell's rescue in the nick of time.
Their non-profit Christian Heritage Foundation of Forest, Va., snapped up a big chunk of Liberty's debt for $2.5 million, a fraction of its face value. Thousands of small religious investors who had bought church construction bonds through a Texas company were the big losers. But Falwell shed no tears. He told local reporters that the moment was "the greatest single day of financial advantage" in the school's history.
Left unmentioned in the happy sermon was the identity of the bigger guardian angel who had been protecting Falwell's financial interests -- from a distance and without publicity.
That secret benefactor was the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the self-proclaimed South Korean messiah who is controversial with many fundamentalist Christians because of his bizarre Biblical interpretations and his brainwashing tactics that have torn thousands of young people from their families. Moon also has grown harshly anti-American in recent years.
Covertly, Moon helped bail out Liberty University through one of his front groups which funneled $3.5 million to the Reber-Thomas Christian Heritage Foundation, the non-profit that had purchased the school's debt.
I discovered this Moon-Falwell connection while looking for something else: how much Moon's Women's Federation for World Peace had paid former President George Bush for a series of speeches in Asia in 1995. I obtained the federation's Internal Revenue Service records but discovered that Bush's undisclosed speaking fee was buried in a line item of $13.6 million for conference expenses.
There was, however, a listing for a $3.5 million "educational" grant to the Christian Heritage Foundation. A call to the Virginia corporate records office confirmed that the foundation was the one run by Reber and Thomas.
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