I went on facts on JWs channel to discuss the overlap between SCJ and the JWs. This is the first episode and the second episode I’ll list out more of the overlap and similarities.

Each time a cult leader is arrested, the members of the cult would almost always view it as “persecution”, and more importantly, a way to verify that their leader is right or correct.

We can see this already happening in this subreddit with the current responses of the SCJ members, and of course to no surprise, this isn’t unique to just SCJ, but also to the other Korean cults listed below.

Olive Tree Sect

The Olive Tree movement, founded by Park Tae-son in 1956, grew with remarkable speed in the spiritually hungry years following the Korean War. Park presented himself as a figure of unique divine authority, linking himself to the two witnesses or olive trees of Revelation 11 and to the victorious "righteous man of the east" of Isaiah 41, and his followers came to claim that he would never die, or at least that the last day of the world would arrive within his lifetime. At its height the movement claimed as many as two million members in Korea, drawn largely out of Presbyterian congregations, and built self-sustaining "Christian towns" with their own factories, schools, and housing. For a time it genuinely rivaled the established Protestant churches in scale. But that growth ran alongside mounting accusations. In early 1958 Park was charged with a range of offenses, including causing injury and even death through anch'al, the vigorous laying-on of hands he practiced, and with defrauding his followers by promising to heal them in exchange for offerings. He was also accused of embezzling the enormous sums flowing into the movement, money that was not declared to the tax office, and later of organizing his followers to support pro-Rhee candidates in rigged elections. Blogger + 2

The arrests followed in sequence. Park was sentenced to two and a half years in prison in 1959, though he was released after only fifteen months, a leniency that scholars attribute to his political usefulness to President Syngman Rhee, whose party the Olive Tree had delivered votes to. Park sat in jail from December 1958 to March 1960, and then again from January 1961 to January 1962, this second time on charges connected to election fraud. The pattern was straightforward: as Rhee's power collapsed and his protection evaporated, the legal consequences that Park had previously escaped began to land. By any external reading, here was a religious leader repeatedly convicted of deceiving the very people who had given him their savings, their possessions, and in many cases their families. WRSPWikipedia

Yet inside the movement, the arrests did not read as exposure. They read as persecution, and persecution was treated as proof. The Olive Tree had built the logic of opposition into its identity from the beginning. When the Presbyterian Church expelled Park as a heretic in 1956, he answered that he was a truer Christian than the men who denounced him, and his followers kept calling him Elder Park. So when the state jailed him and the press branded him a fraud, members did not retreat; they mobilized. The most striking case came in December 1960, when roughly 2,000 Olive Tree followers stormed the offices of the Dong-a Ilbo newspaper, which had called Park a fraud, overwhelming around 400 police officers sent to protect the building. Far from chastening the leader, the hostility fed an escalation that scholars describe as deviance amplification. Rather than softening his message under media and legal pressure from 1958 to 1961, Park leaned into its most unconventional claims, eventually shifting from criticizing Presbyterians to attacking the Bible and Jesus directly, an arc that would culminate decades later in his claim to be God himself. The arrests, in other words, confirmed for the faithful that their group was the true place of truth precisely because the world had turned against it, the same self-sealing dynamic that would later define the movements that grew out of the Olive Tree's soil.

Unification Church

The Reverend Sun Myung Moon offers a close parallel from a generation later, and the same self-sealing logic is visible in how his followers absorbed his imprisonment. The legal facts were narrow. In October 1981 a federal grand jury indicted Moon on three counts of willfully filing false income tax returns for 1973 through 1975, plus a conspiracy count, and in 1982 he was convicted on all of them. The substance of the case was modest: prosecutors charged that he had failed to declare roughly $112,000 in interest earned in a Chase Manhattan account and the receipt of $50,000 in corporate stock, with the tax actually owed amounting to a small sum. He drew an 18-month sentence and a $15,000 fine, and ultimately served 13 months at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut, before release to a halfway house, surrendering to authorities there in July 1984. By any plain reading, a religious leader had been convicted of cheating on his taxes. Wikipedia + 2

Inside the Unification Church, that conviction did not register as exposure. It registered as persecution, and Moon's own response set the frame. After the charges were announced he publicly accused the federal government of fabricating a conspiracy to force him out of the country, casting it in explicitly racial and religious terms, saying he was being targeted because his skin was yellow and his religion was the Unification Church rather than Presbyterian. What made the framing unusually durable here, more so than in the Olive Tree case, was that it drew real outside support. Mainline bodies including the National Council of Churches, the American Baptist Churches, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference filed briefs on his behalf, and Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe argued the jury trial had doomed him to conviction based on religious prejudice. That external validation let the church present the verdict not as proof of wrongdoing but as confirmation that the powers of the world had aligned against God's chosen man, which is exactly the reading the persecution narrative requires. TodayincthistoryWikipedia

The parallel to Park Tae-son and the Olive Tree is structural, not incidental. In both cases a leader faced concrete, mundane accusations rooted in money: Park for defrauding followers and concealing offerings from the tax office, Moon for unreported interest income. In both cases the legal process produced a conviction and a prison term. And in both cases the membership metabolized the punishment as evidence rather than indictment, on the logic that the true people of God are precisely the ones the world attacks. The Olive Tree showed this in the raw, when followers stormed a newspaper that had called Park a fraud. The Unification Church showed a more sophisticated version, channeling the persecution claim through clergy alliances and constitutional argument. But the underlying move is identical: hardship suffered by the leader becomes proof that the group is the place of truth. One caution worth carrying into anything you publish is that with Moon the messianic claim long predated the imprisonment, so the honest parallel is that the prosecution fed an existing persecution narrative, not that jail produced a new claim. Keeping that distinction sharp is what keeps the comparison airtight against an apologist trying to break it.

Shincheonji

Now of course, this brings us to SCJ. As we can already see with the current members of SCJ, they are already making the connection of the current legal hardships of Lee Man-hee, and how Jesus was also persecuted during the first coming, and thus, SCJ must be the true church. 
Thanks to an insider, we can already see an internal training that was leaked about this very topic -

1. 세상 핍박받는 것은 철저히 하나님의 뜻대로 살기 때문
2. 범죄 혐의는 조작, 우리를 없애려고 정치적 프레임을 씌운 것
3. 새상 법, 언론은 불의하여 모두 신천지를 향한 음해
4. 영적 전쟁에 중립은 없으니 모두 총회장 편을 들고 싸워야
5. 뉴스와 세상 소문은 가짜니 절대 듣지도, 흔들리지도 말자
6. 총회장의 구속은 예수님이 받았던 십자가 고난과 완벽히 일치
7. 신천지 떠나거나 거부한 자들은 죄가 눈을 가려 진리를 못보는 것
8. 코로나때 방역을 방해한 적 없고 철저희 희생되고 핍박당했음

And thanks to the insider’s translation -

1. Being persecuted by the world is proof that we are living completely according to God’s will.
2. The criminal charges are fabricated, and political framing is being used to eliminate us.
3. The laws and media of the world are unjust and are all part of a smear campaign against Shincheonji.
4. There is no neutrality in this spiritual war, so everyone must stand with the chairman and fight.
5. The news and worldly rumors are fake, so never listen to them or be shaken by them.
6. The chairman’s imprisonment perfectly matches the suffering of the cross that Jesus endured.
7. Those who left or rejected Shincheonji are unable to see the truth because their sins have blinded them.
8. During COVID, we never obstructed quarantine measures and were instead thoroughly sacrificed and persecuted.

We can already see that this is being framed as persecution, and that it must mean that God is with Shincheonji.

Ironically, we can see that the Unification Church is also going through similar heat with their Holy Mother Hak Ja Han being arrested. Does this also mean that Jesus is working through the Unification Church as well? 

This URL is also apart of the pinned post of the doctrinal issues of SCJ.

SCJ Books - Google Drive

Here are the SCJ books for those who are interested.

About 3 months ago, I made a post talking about how SCJ has a different gospel, citing their own books as evidence, and I believe that it's an appropriate time to resurrect the post by repeating the contents.

Before we get to that, there are two verses that need to be reviewed.

2 Corinthians 11:4 -

>^(4) For if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the Spirit you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough.

We can already see in the Trinity discussion at how a current SCJ member is attempting to disprove the Deity of Christ and the Trinity, resulting in a different Jesus. You can read more of our back and forth here.

Despite Shincheonji using front groups like "Zion Christian Seminary", it's clear that they aren't Christian considering how we don't even have the same person of Jesus who we are following. This is what Paul warned about in 2 Corinthians.

Likewise, Shincheonji also has a different gospel of "prophecy and fulfillment".

The Christian definition of what the gospel is as follows -

1 Corinthians 15:3-5

>^(3) For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance^([)^(a)^(]): that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, ^(4) that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, ^(5) and that he appeared to Cephas,^([)^(b)^(]) and then to the Twelve.

The death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Without this, we are in vain.

Now, let's see what Shincheonji says about the new gospel -

The Creation of Heaven and Earth page 55 -

"Salvation comes from the promised pastor.... This pastor carries out the work appointed to Apostle John in Revelation. He witnesses the events of Revelation in physical reality and listens to an angel explain them to him. He is the male child who will rule all nations after fighting and overcoming the enemies prophesied in Revelation. He receives the scroll opened by Jesus and teaches it to [all] peoples. God, Jesus, and the spiritual kingdom descend on this pastor and work through him".

The Creation of Heaven and Earth page 56 -

"After Jesus ascended to heaven, God promised to send his next promised pastor and the spirit of truth".

The Creation of Heaven and Earth page 331-332 -

"Today, believers of the New Testament period eat the gospel of Jesus Christ as spiritual food. At the same time, however, they live their spiritual lives through another faith that is to be revealed... This revealed faith is Jesus’ new gospel.... Having the revealed faith is receiving and believing in [the testimony of the promised pastor]".

It's clear that Shincheonji is adding a new gospel, something that was warned about in 2 Corinthians 11:4.

Then, there's the most obvious contradiction - how Shincheonji breaks Jesus's promise in Matthew 16:18.

the sun, moon, and stars are God's chosen people, and when they darken and fall, it means that they are betraying. SCJ then makes the claim further that the Christian body becomes the home of demons, and are Babylon.

This contradicts what Jesus promised Peter in Matthew 16:18 -

>^(18) And I tell you that you are Peter,^([)^(a)^(]) and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades^([)^(b)^(]) will not overcome it.

The church in reference is "Spiritual Israel", and according to Shincheonji, this church is overcome by Hades (ie death and destruction).

This is a direct contradiction to what Jesus promised Peter and the disciples.

To read more direct quotes and references -

https://www.reddit.com/r/Shincheonji/comments/1rhbr34/shincheonji_is_a_biblical_cult_and_presents_a_new/