There have been many fraudulent people who portray themselves as the messengers of God or the reincarnation of Jesus, but Jung Myung-seok, a.k.a. Jeong Myeong-seok, takes the cake because of his unabashed manner of dealing with things. Jeong Myeong-seok and the members of his cult tried their best to stop the Netflix documentary “In the Name of God: A Holy Betrayal” from releasing, but the OTT giant won the case and showed the entire world the real face of the leader of the JMS (Jesus Morning Star). This lecherous man is neither ashamed of what he has done nor is he empathetic towards the plight of the women whose lives he has ruined. Those women are still haunted by what happened to them, but our self-proclaimed Messiah feels that he is just spreading God’s word. So, let’s see how Jeong Myeong-seok rose to fame and what events led to his downfall.
How Did Jung Myung Seok Gain Popularity?
Jung Myung Seok was a self-proclaimed messiah who, among many other outlandish things, could predict the future and had a cure for life threatening diseases that even science didn’t have a clue about. It was said that Jung Myung had read the Bible 2,000 times and saw it as a book of metaphors, for which he had his own unique interpretation. There are many reasons why such fraudulent people gain so many followers, and people start worshiping them, even though, to a rational mind, the malicious intent is clearly visible.
For Jung Myung, what helped was his scientific approach to dealing with things. He was the only pastor during the 1980s who was, firstly, not very conservative in his approach and, secondly, had a rational interpretation of things that the youth understood and could relate to. It was part of his game plan to target the youth of the country, and that is why he had a lot of followers from top-rated universities in South Korea. He captured the essence of the Bible and explained the metaphors in a manner that made sense to the masses. But apart from his scientific approach, he still needed a miracle to prove to the people that he was above the rest. People generally get brainwashed or start having blind faith in a person when they see that they are capable of doing something unimaginable. Myung Seok used to predict who would be the next president of the country during every election. After he had just opened the first JMS church in Shinchon, his prediction about the presidential election came true, and the masses were surprised at how he could do that.
After that, there were people apparently suffering from terminal illnesses like cancer, and the doctors had given up on them when Myung Seok told them that they would live. It didn’t take long, and the news spread through word of mouth like wildfire. How he was able to predict the future is still a mystery, but it did become a turning point in his life as people started to trust him and see him as an incarnation of Jesus. People are vulnerable and he knew how to take advantage of it. He knew that people needed someone to depend on, somebody who could tell them that it was not their fault, and he used it as a leverage to brainwash them and literally make them his slaves. He told them how important it was to earn their livelihood and work for the cause of the church, but behind all those big words and hollow promises, he was actually making them work for his own selfish interests. The followers used to toil hard and try to sell various merchandise to collect funds for the church so that it could keep working for the cause of humanity, but instead, all that money was being spent by Myung Seok to maintain his opulent lifestyle.
Myung Seok said that Jesus’ second coming would happen in the year 1945, and it was no coincidence that he was born in the same year. Myung Seok was quite different from the rest of the pastors in the country, mainly because he had a very unique perspective of looking at things. In addition to that he was fit, he was agile, he was promoting cultural and sporting activities, he had a scientific temper, and his ways and means were in stark contrast to those of his peers, i.e., very liberal, and that is why Jesus Morning Star religion, a.k.a. The Providence gained a lot of popularity in the 1980s.
How Was Jung Myung Seok Exposed? Where Is He Now?
The first cases of sexual misconduct against the messiah started surfacing in 1991. The Netflix documentary “In the Name of God: A Holy Betrayal” made us privy and provided a platform to a lot of women who came and gave their testimony and told the world what he had done with them. Jung Myung Seok was a sexual predator who knew very well what he was doing. He had garnered so much popularity that he had started feeling invincible, and he thought that he could get away with anything in life.
Now, there have been many so-called messiahs who have been delusional enough to think that whatever they are doing is right and that it would actually take them closer to their desired goal, but Myung Seok was a lecherous man who was fully aware of the fact that it was not right to use his position of power to coerce people and that it had nothing to do with God or the message that he wanted to spread. Like every other Godman, he abstained others from having sexual relations with people, but obviously, the rule didn’t apply to him as he considered himself to be “Pure Adam”. The Messiah liked tall girls, and he had told the people on the recruiting team to look out for girls who were 5 feet 6 inches and above.
Whenever a new girl came to him for those hideous one-on-one meetings, the other women who had been through the same ordeal, instead of supporting the new recruit, told them that they would get used to it after some time, because they felt coerced to do so. So basically, by making the women enablers, he was making them part of a vicious cycle where the people who were victims were now perpetrators themselves and helping him brainwash more girls and lay the trap for them. The women started speaking against him, and the legal authorities of the country realized that there was something suspicious happening. That is when the authorities got a lot of incriminating evidence that was enough to prove that the Messiah had some twisted inclinations and was, in fact, a criminal who needed to be behind bars at all costs. Even when the court sent him to prison for ten years on serious charges of sexual assault and rape, it didn’t dissuade him from doing what he did. When Myung Seok could no longer prey on girls in person, his people started sending him pictures of young girls in revealing clothes in prison. A proper photoshoot was organized for the girls, and it tells us how desperate Myung Seok was and to what lengths he was willing to go to fulfill his carnal desires.
As soon as he came out of prison in 2018, he sexually abused a girl named Maple for almost three years, and that act was enough to prove that firstly, he had no shame for what he had done, and secondly, he had no fear of the authorities. He was meeting Maple while he was in prison, and he had the audacity to tell her that the media and the women, who probably had some ulterior motives, were unnecessarily defaming him. Jeong is awaiting trial right now on serious charges of raping a foreign national and another woman in Guemsan County.
Jeong still maintains the fact that the media is just trying to tarnish his image, though we all know what the reality is. Jeong is responsible for ruining the lives of multiple girls who unfortunately came in contact with him. He was such a pervert that even when he was on the run, it didn’t stop him from preying upon girls constantly.
Though Jeong had stopped calling himself the Messiah in public, as he had realized the ramifications of doing so, he still does not agree with the fact that he has assaulted anybody and, in fact, portrays himself as the victim. The people of the Providence Christian Movement still maintain that the testimonies of the women were not credible and that their leader was only trying to teach people to live a life of faith.
