Rev. Sun Myung Moon, 92, Unification Church Founder, Dies United Press International The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, right, with his wife, Hak Ja Han, married 2,075 couples at Madison Square Garden in 1982. The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the Korean evangelist, businessman and self-proclaimed messiah who built a religious movement notable for its mass weddings, fresh-faced proselytizers and links to vast commercial interests, died on Monday in Gapyeong, South Korea. He was 92. His death was announced on his church's Web site, which said he had been battling complications from pneumonia, including kidney failure. Mr. Moon courted world leaders, financed newspapers and founded numerous innocuously named civic organizations. To his critics, he pursued those activities mainly to lend legitimacy to his movement, known as the Unification Church, although his methods were sometimes questionable. In 2004, for example, he had himself crowned "humanity's savior" in front of astonished members of Congress at a Capitol Hill luncheon. Mr. Moon was a leading figure in what Eileen V. Barker, a professor emeritus of sociology at the London School of Economics, called "the great wave of new religious movements and alternative religiosity in the 1960s and 1970s in the West," a time when the Hare Krishna and Transcendental Meditation movements were also gathering force. Mr. Moon, said Professor Barker, an expert on new religious movements, was "very important in those days - as far as the general culture was concerned - in the fear of cults and sects." Building a business empire in South Korea and Japan, Mr. Moon used his commercial interests to support nonprofit ventures, then kept control of them by placing key insiders within their hierarchies. He avidly backed right-wing causes, turning The Washington Times into a respected newspaper in conservative circles. An ardent anti-Communist who had been imprisoned by the Communist authorities in northern Korea in the 1940s, he saw the United States as the world's salvation. But in the late 1990s, after financial losses, defections and stagnant growth in the church's membership, he turned on America, branding it a repository of immorality - "Satan's harvest" - and repositioned his movement as a crusade for moral values. As Mr. Moon approached 90, not long after he survived a helicopter crash in 2008, three of his sons and a daughter began assuming more responsibility for running the church and his holdings. (According to reports at the time, Mr. Moon and 15 others, including family members, were injured when their helicopter crashed on a mountain near Seoul. There were no fatalities.) In its early years in the United States, the Unification Church was widely viewed as little more than a cult, one whose polite, well-scrubbed members, known derisively as Moonies, sold flowers and trinkets on street corners and married in mass weddings. In one of the last such events, in 2009, 10,000 couples exchanged or renewed vows before Mr. Moon at Sun Moon University near Seoul. A Focus on Marriage Such weddings were the activity most associated with Mr. Moon in the United States. They were in keeping with a central tenet of his theology, a mix of Eastern philosophy, biblical teachings and what he called God's revelations to him. In the church's view, Jesus had failed in his mission to purify mankind because he was crucified before being able to marry and have children. Mr. Moon saw himself as completing the unfulfilled task of Jesus: to restore humankind to a state of perfection by producing sinless children, and by blessing couples who would produce them. Marriage was a key part of achieving salvation, and for a couple the marriage was as much a commitment to the church as it was to each other. In a ceremony involving 2,075 couples at Madison Square Garden in 1982, for example, the men wore identical blue suits and the women lace and satin gowns. Mr. Moon was said to have made the matches, based on questionnaires, photographs and the recommendations of church officials. Often the couples had met only weeks earlier or could speak to each other only through an interpreter. Many had to remain separated for several years, doing church work, before they were allowed to consummate the unions. Mr. Moon struggled against bad publicity. He was sent to prison on tax evasion charges and accused of influence-buying and of maintaining ties to the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. He denied both allegations. In the late 1970s he was caught up in a Congressional investigation into attempts by South Korea to influence American policy. There were battles with local officials over zoning for church buildings and tax-exempt status. As his church grew more prominent in the 1970s and "80s, it became embroiled in lawsuits over soliciting funds, acquiring property and recruiting followers. Defectors wrote damaging books. From 1973 to 1986 at least 400 of the church's flock were abducted by their family members to undergo "deprogramming," according to an estimate by David G. Bromley, a professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and an expert on Mr. Moon. The church denied that it had brainwashed its followers, saying members joined and stayed of their own free will.