Claim. God’s purpose in creating religions is not pluralistic spiritual diversity but to find one specific person — a true son who can share true love with God as His partner — and all religions ultimately converge on producing this single central figure, the messiah.
Elaboration. SMM reduces the providential purpose of religion to a strikingly minimal target: “God did not create religions to make a big global patchwork. The purpose is simple. Religion should find one person who can share true love with God” (1.3. History and the True Parents). The plurality of religions is instrumental — a search apparatus God runs in parallel to maximize the chance that somewhere, someone will emerge who can occupy the partner-in-love position.
The further claim is gendered: “It is interesting that there were no women among the founders of religions. Men founded all of them.” The providential staircase rises through “one, two, three, a hundred stages” of male founders, each carrying the baton further toward the figure who will take “the final baton and determine victory or defeat.” This is the Messiah — not as one religious founder among many, but as the convergence point of all religious founding.
The theological move is reductive in a way that will satisfy neither pluralists nor exclusivists. Against pluralism: religions are not parallel valid paths but stages in a single linear search. Against classical Christian exclusivism: Christianity does not stand alone — Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, and others were also genuine providential preparations, not demonic counterfeits. The Messiah inherits the entire religious patrimony of humanity, not just the Judeo-Christian stream.
This grounds UC’s distinctive ecumenical posture — interreligious dialogue is not pluralist relativism but the recognition that all religions were aimed at the same convergence point now actualized in true-parents. The argument also locates the purpose-of-creation (God’s joy through love-partnership with a beloved being) at the root of religious history itself. Critics from comparative religion typically engage on whether the convergence claim is empirically defensible or imposed retrospectively; feminist critics typically engage the gendered staircase. Worth a thread once a counter atomic on religious epistemics exists.