True Father Released, Welcomed at "God and Freedom" Banquet

True Father’s “Danbury Course” consisted of his indictment, trial, appeal and imprisonment on tax evasion charges. It was his sixth imprisonment and one of the most unjust. True Father was incarcerated at the Danbury Federal Correctional Institution in Connecticut from July 20, 1984, to July 4, 1985, and then from July 4, 1985, to August 20, 1985, at Phoenix House Foundation Inc., a halfway house in the New York City borough of Brooklyn.

On the evening of his release, 1,600 clergy and prominent laypersons gathered at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., to welcome True Father back at a “God and Freedom” Banquet. Earlier that day, twenty prominent clergy, including Rev. Jerry Falwell, head of the Moral Majority, and Rev. Joseph Lowery, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), usually at opposite ends of the religious- political spectrum, held a news conference at which they decried government encroachment upon religion and called upon President Ronald Reagan to pardon True Father.

In his speech at the God and Freedom Banquet True Father expressed his appreciation to those who had supported him through the court battles, amicus briefs and rallies, and expressed his determination “to relieve the great and long suffering of God.” He called upon all present to “transcend denominationalism” and “to consider seriously the mission of Christianity to lead a supra- denominational, cultural revolution on a worldwide scale.”