Brainwashing, Race, and the Unification Church: Orientalism and Yellow Peril Rhetoric from the Cold War to the Cult Wars

ABSTRACT: This article analyzes the development of the brainwashing concept in the 1950s and its weaponization against Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church during the 1970s–1980s through the lens of Orientalism, Yellow Peril fears, and anti-Asian racism. The brainwashing concept developed during the Korean War as the U.S. government and psychologists tried to explain why American prisoners of war supported Maoist propaganda. Twenty years later, media, parents, and anticult groups alleged that “cults” had “brainwashed” youths, with Asian new religions drawing the most ire. The primary target of the anticult movement was the Unification Church, founded in Korea. Psychologists and anticult activists used brainwashing theories to delegitimize new religions as coercive cults rather than freely chosen religions. In both eras, brainwashing rhetoric reflected anti-Asian prejudice, reproduced Yellow Peril imagery of Asiatic despotism infiltrating America, and echoed Orientalist binaries that framed Asians as irrational, submissive, and collectivist.