Religious Cult, Force for Civil Rights, or Both?

My second trip to heaven was more propitious than the first. I wasn’t alone this time, but accompanied by my friend Shannon, who works as a historic preservationist in Philadelphia. Shannon lent some professional credibility to our Sunday tour of Woodmont, also known as the Mount of the House of the Lord. Woodmont is an impeccably preserved 19th-century manor in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, situated within one of the wealthiest zip codes in the Northeast corridor.

At the time of our visit, Woodmont was the residence of Sweet Angel Mother Divine, the geriatric regent of a nationwide religious movement founded by her husband, Father Divine, more than three-quarters of a century prior. The preservation of historic buildings in and around Philadelphia, a city that has hemorrhaged wealth and population since the 1960s, was a cause near to Mother Divine’s heart. For decades she managed a vast network of Victorian-era mansions and hotels across the Northeast. Stewardship of these structures had made Mother Divine a celebrated proponent of historic preservation, and the recipient of awards from the Philadelphia City Council and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in recognition of her work.

Beginning in the second decade of the 20th century, Father Divine’s followers have lived in communes known alternately as “heavens” or “extensions” of the International Peace Mission Movement. Once scattered from coast to coast and housing tens of thousands of believers, Peace Mission extensions have slowly been emptied and sold ever since Father Divine “sacrificed” his earthly body in September 1965. Woodmont is one of the last and most majestic of the Movement’s once-legendary real-estate holdings, and it is still occupied by a coterie of (mostly) elderly followers. The denizens of Peace Mission heavens used to be known as “angels,” so called because of the sanctified lifestyle they adopted. Believers in Father Divine’s divinity do not usually describe themselves this way anymore, but they still follow the same severe moral code Father Divine enforced while he was alive. The code includes celibacy, a stricture that all but guarantees the eventual demise of the movement.

My first visit to a Peace Mission extension, a former hotel located on the corner of Broad and Catharine Streets in Center City Philadelphia, was thwarted by my own failure to abide by the International Peace Mission Modesty Code. I knew about the code, and was prepared not to swear, smoke, drink, tip, bribe, or engage in any “undue mixing of the sexes” during the Holy Communion banquet I wished to attend. I was only in town for a few days and put together the finest outfit I could assemble from my suitcase. I was turned away nonetheless, on account of my red shoes, and told to return when I was wearing my “Sunday best.” I packed accordingly for my next trip to Philly, and sent Shannon the Modesty Code before I picked her up. We turned up at Woodmont looking like frumpy substitute teachers.

Shannon and I weren’t the only visitors to the estate. A row of sedans had completely occupied the small parking lot at the end of the long lane that leads from the road to the mansion. I stopped short of the lot and pulled in behind a black SUV parked on the edge of the lane. A film crew was threading its way across a nearby garden.

There was no indication of where visitors should begin the tour, so Shannon and I made straight for the mansion’s porte cochere. Beneath it, the front door was thrown wide open. We showed ourselves in. Just as we crossed the threshold into a lavishly wood-paneled interior, the sound of voices, singing or chanting in unison, suddenly reverberated in the adjacent room. From where we stood in the mansion’s grand two-story foyer, Shannon and I could see through an archway into the dining room, where the Divinites appeared to be gathered around the table for worship over an elaborate meal: a tradition known in the Peace Mission as Holy Communion. Two silver-haired butlers in pale-blue tuxedo jackets and gloves wavered in the archway to the dining room but did not appear disposed to greet us. We ducked back out.

The film crew was eating lunch near one of the outbuildings when we approached. They were gathering footage for a documentary, and today, we learned, was a special day to do it: without realizing it, Shannon and I were visiting the annual feast held to mark Mother and Father Divine’s wedding anniversary. Mother Divine and the resident followers were hosting a full table, the crew explained; otherwise, we’d have been invited to sit down. After I mentioned that we’d called ahead to confirm our tour, members of the crew encouraged us to go back and request one from someone at the banquet.

We hovered in the mansion’s lobby while Father Divine’s voice crackled on recordings playing in the next room. Occasionally the sermon elicited a unified response from those assembled. None of the worshipers at the table who saw us enter made the slightest move to alert anyone else of our presence. Eventually, one of the guests emerged from the dining room to use the bathroom and sent for our tour guide.

Miss Sibyl Child entered the hall wearing a knee-length navy-blue skirt, a white blouse, and a red blazer with a white V for “victory” embroidered on the breast. I recognized her attire as the patriotic uniform of the Rosebuds, an elite corps of angels Father Divine had organized in the 1940s. Miss Sibyl was, to my eyes, a black woman in her golden years. But in the Peace Mission, which denies racial categories, she was merely considered dark-complected, whereas Shannon and I happened to be light-complected.

Our tour began in the foyer, under a nearly life-size portrait of Father and Mother Divine. I knew the spot from old photos I’d seen of one of the first wedding banquets. After we introduced ourselves as admirers of historic architecture, Shannon stepped forward with knowledgeable questions about Woodmont’s construction and maintenance as we proceeded through several rooms on the ground floor. One of these was Father Divine’s office, which is kept exactly as he left it in 1965. Miss Sibyl spoke to Father as though he were seated at his desk.

As we meandered, Miss Sibyl narrated the history of the Peace Mission, starting with Father Divine’s appearance in New York in the 1920s. Beginning in this manner, with the man fully formed, prompted Shannon to ask an obvious question: where was Father Divine originally from? Miss Sibyl said she didn’t know, nobody did. Her reply was crisp, delivered in the manner of someone who’s answered the question many times before.

As I’d feared, the dining room proved to be the most awkward segment of the tour. The followers and their guests were still eating when we entered. But after pointing out the room’s architectural features, Miss Sibyl insisted we take a turn about the room to inspect it more closely. An enormous table occupied almost the entire chamber. Thirty-odd diners of varied complexions filled all but one place at the table. Shannon and I squeezed behind the chairs of the faithful, moving along the edges of the room as silver clattered against china. Conversation was kept to a minimum while Father Divine’s voice continued over the loudspeaker. Mother Divine, in her nineties, was seated by herself at the end of the table. She was wearing a white wedding dress.

Miss Sibyl then guided us outdoors, around a small outbuilding called the Brothers’ Quarters, and across the mansion’s handsome grounds. We stopped for a while in a garden on the edge of the property, where the ridge dropped to the Schuylkill River valley below.

The tour inevitably led to a mausoleum on the edge of the estate, a structure known as the Shrine to Life. Here was where Father Divine’s earthly remains lay entombed. Miss Sibyl explained that although he had decided to abandon the body in which he’d conducted his marvelous career, Father Divine was by no means dead. This is because she, like the angels who came before her, believed Father Divine to be God.

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At the turn of the century, the various competing schools of mental healing and mind cure that derived from mesmerism, phrenomagnetism, and Christian Science came together under the auspices of a very loosely affiliated movement known as New Thought. Under this ambiguous and inaccurate banner, New Thought teachers and institutions, including the Church of Divine Science and the Institute of Religious Science, maintained that the effects of positive psychology were not limited to achieving freedom from disease and sin: these and other gurus taught that amending thoughts and perceptions could literally alter reality. As the names of its affiliate organizations suggest, New Thought was part of a broader modernist trend in American religious culture, one that sought to bridge the gap between science and religion through the study of metaphysics.

As mind-cure metaphysics secularized along with American society, its evangelists increasingly preferred a vocabulary of private, personalized bliss and individualized material abundance over a collective project of evolutionary and social transformation. Generally speaking, New Thought teaches that when an individual realizes that he is an emanation of the divine Unity and makes an effort to “tap into” this Power or Source (or whatever), he can begin to access untold prosperity and abundance. By marrying the Western esoteric tradition with latent cultural agnosticism at the core of American folk religion, New Thought became—and, indeed, remains—the unofficial national religion of the United States. Today’s New Thought prophets are self-help gurus like Tony Robbins, who urges readers to “awaken the giant within,” and Louise Hay, whose Hay House is a publishing juggernaut of New ought and New Age literature. Perhaps more than anyone else in recent decades, Oprah Winfrey is responsible for popularizing New Thought among several generations of Americans who admire her.

New Thought was the ideology favored by Cyrus Teed’s most notable successor in the American messianic tradition. But it was not the churn of exiles from Eddy’s Massachusetts Metaphysical College or the glut of graduates from Emma Curtis Hopkins’s Christian Science academies that produced the freshest New Thinker to emerge on the scene. He arose instead in Harlem during the Great Depression, where he became one of the most powerful and original religious leaders in United States history. Adored by tens of thousands and loathed by more than a few, he called himself Father Divine and was worshiped by his followers as God.

*

Father Divine burst onto the national scene in 1931, after being convicted of disturbing the peace in the otherwise placid seaside town of Sayville, Long Island. Reverend Major Jealous Divine, as he then styled himself, was already well known throughout black neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Harlem as the founder of a weekly feast that took place at his sprawling Cape Cod on Macon Street in Sayville, where he lived with twenty-odd devotees who simply called him “Father.” Residents in the group home referred to these meals as Holy Communion, and they enjoyed them every day. Observance of
the tradition was meant to evoke the primitive apostolic church, in which ritual communion was held daily. On Sundays, Divine and his housemates threw open their doors to welcome anyone in need of a hot meal. In 1931, this included quite a few hungry souls and resulted in heavy traffic through the neighborhood. The cars were bad enough, but for some Sayville residents, the passengers were far worse: a motley crowd, mostly dark in hue, carpooled and bussed into Sayville from the city’s poorest blocks, expecting a free meal and a few words of wisdom from the man who worked this weekly miracle of abundance.

Sayville’s forbearance eventually gave out, resulting in the black deity’s arraignment and eventual conviction. Three days after sentencing Father Divine to a year in prison for little more than leading late-night hymns, Judge Lewis J. Smith of Nassau County dropped stone dead. Reached for comment in his cell at Riverhead jail, Father Divine’s only comment was “I hated to do it.” Celebrity status in Harlem, which later became God’s principal residence, was guaranteed.

Father Divine went on to become a national sensation. During his lifetime, African Americans acknowledged Divine, often begrudgingly, as one of the most important civil rights leaders in America. In a 1949 article for Phylon, a journal for black affairs published by W.E.B. Du Bois, the prominent black sociologist Ira De Augustine Reid listed Father Divine’s kingdom among the nine most important movements affecting the lives and culture of black Americans during the first half of the 20th century. On this list, the Peace Mission appeared alongside Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Idea, Du Bois’s Niagara movement, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, and the transformative Great Migration to the industrial North.

One of the 20th century’s most lauded historians of American religion, William J. McLoughlin, characterized Divine as “one of the few black ministers [of his age] to preach something different from evangelical escapism.” Yet Divine’s rise to stunning wealth and fame—and his decades of work on behalf of racial equality and workers’ dignity—are not well recorded in the annals of the American civil rights movement. It would be fair to say that Father Divine’s Peace Mission has, for the most part, been deleted from the history of black struggle in America for its tacky theology, its unappealing blend of communistic lifestyle and respectability politics, its disavowal of racial identity, and most of all, its iconoclastic leader: a squat, bald, dark-skinned man whose followers called him God and their Redeemer.

Divine was scrupulously circumspect about his origins and did whatever he could to frustrate his interrogators’ attempts to determine his birthplace. He once claimed to have been “combusted” in New York, and sardonically informed one inquiring magistrate that he came from Providence. This joke led at least one credulous journalist to report his admission of birth in Rhode Island. Court documents from his tangles with the law on Long Island identified God as George Baker Jr., the son of freedman sharecroppers in Georgia. Some of Divine’s Depression-era biographers told of how he abandoned a wife and children in the South to venture north as an itinerant minister. These various George Bakers probably existed, but there is no evidence that any of them reinvented himself as a millionaire black messiah.

Following an exhaustive public-records research, Divine’s most recent biographer, the historian Jill Watts, concluded that the George Baker who became the Messiah was most likely born to a former slave and raised in Rockville, Maryland. The family was poor and lived in a crowded shack rented to them by Rockville’s only black landlord. They shared their dwelling with other poor families—a common practice in Rockville’s black ghetto, known to whites as “Monkey Run.” The early experience of semi-collective living had an important impact on George Jr.’s later career.

George’s 480-pound mother, Nancy, was too obese to seek employment out of the house, so her son was sent to work with his handyman father as soon as he was old enough to pitch in. This required the child to discontinue the rudimentary academic instruction that was available to black children in Rockville. However, hand-me-down Victorian textbooks cast off on black schools might have exercised early influence over the strict moral code Divine enforced in latter days: their emphasis on hard work and self-reliance would reappear in Father Divine’s disdain for welfare relief and labor unions. Nancy Baker’s obesity, which reached embarrassing celebrity dimensions when upon her death she was declared the largest woman in Montgomery County, likewise influenced Father Divine’s teachings on personal responsibility and respectability.

After his mother’s death, George Jr. took off for Baltimore, where he found work as a groundskeeper. Nancy had raised her children in the Methodist Church, but once George Jr. was out on his own, he began to prefer the city’s populist storefront churches. The religious enthusiasm of the self-ordained preachers who founded these churches was notoriously infectious. Baker soon fancied himself a minister. Before embarking on a preaching tour of the South in 1902, he honed his pedagogical skills by teaching Sunday school.

After returning to Baltimore having saved but a single soul, Baker sought new spiritual influences for his ministry. Like many other Americans in the first decade of the twentieth century, he discovered New Thought. Baker developed a particular affinity for the work of Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, two former students of Emma Curtis Hopkins who went on to found the Unity School of Christianity. From Unity School publications, Baker adopted several concepts that would later become articles of faith for followers of the Peace Mission. Fillmore taught that anyone—male or female, black or white—could enter into spiritual communication with the Divine Consciousness that others called God, and could attune his or her consciousness to its wisdom and thereby achieve a life of abundance. This was conventional New Thought fare.

But like Ann Lee and Cyrus Teed, Fillmore taught his disciples to abstain from sex. The rationale for celibacy was a familiar one: sexual expenditure was physically depleting, and complicated the work of spiritual purification. But whereas Lee and Teed connected the corrupting influence of sex to spiritual stagnation and eventual perdition, Fillmore’s spermatic economy held that sexual satisfaction competed with spiritual development in the marketplace of personal fulfillment.

By examining the postmarks and addresses of the New Thought publications circulating at the turn of the century, Baker learned that New Thought was strongest in the West. He eventually scraped together the cash for a pilgrimage to Los Angeles. By this point in the nation’s history, the City of Angels had become a locus of innovation in American religious culture. Baker was in town long enough to visit William Seymour’s Azusa Street Revival, where he not only witnessed others speaking in tongues, but experienced the phenomenon himself.

Back in Baltimore in 1906, Baker met an itinerant preacher called Samuel Morris, a tall and light-skinned black man from Allegheny, Pennsylvania. Morris had gone to Baltimore after discovering a Bible verse that changed his life. Located in 1 Corinthians, it read, “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God and the spirit of God dwelleth in you?” Morris believed the Good Book spoke directly to him, and set out for Baltimore to preach the good news: God had returned once more in a body. In Maryland he adopted the name Father Jehovia and quickly got used to being forcibly ejected from churches he visited. He had the obnoxious habit of rising in the middle of services to declare his divinity, or to express what many in the South considered an even more insane belief: Jehovia disavowed the existence of racial differences.

George Baker was in attendance for one of these performances. Whether out of pity or belief, he invited Jehovia back to the boardinghouse he shared with his landlady, Anna Snowden. Jehovia was a man of single purpose, and wasted no time converting the pair. A fourth adherent, John A. Hickerson, later joined them around 1908. Snowden’s house became a live-in church for disciples of God-in-the-body, and a template for Divine’s Sayville project.

Baker’s ardor for Jehovia’s teachings earned him the leader’s trust. Although adamant that he alone possessed the “Fathership” degree of God, Jehovia promoted Baker to the “Sonship” degree. These peculiar terms might have perplexed their associates in Baltimore, but they would not have confused a Koreshan. Cyrus Teed had used similar terminology in his attempt to convert his cousin Myron Baldwin, claiming that the “Sonship” degree of holiness was a concept derived from the original Greek text of Romans 8:23.

Like Teed, Jehovia associated the Sonship degree with the office of God’s Messenger. It was no coincidence that Jehovia adopted Teed’s obscure terminology: Morris resided in Allegheny City at a time when Teed enjoyed a small following there. Circulation of Koreshan publications in Pittsburgh had converted the Boomers, Ulysses Morrow, and numerous others; it is reasonable to suppose they also reached Samuel Morris. By the 1890s, Teed had also begun to preach in black churches.

After delivering a sermon in a black congregation in Florida in December 1893, Teed was surprised by how enthusiastic his audience became over Koreshan teachings of sexual and economic equality: “They urgently request my presence again,” he wrote to his sister, “The die is cast. The colored race is receptive to our doctrine, and understand it as no other people do except my own few. I am delighted at my reception by them!”

The next year, in a Christmas Day lecture to the Koreshan Unity given on Hickory Island in 1894, Teed explained that Swedenborg believed that the black race would be the first to receive the “new circumcision” of the millennial order, and become the first members of the new angelic race. Teed’s scientific bent and eugenic leanings carried him to different conclusions: he believed that in Florida, the Koreshan Unity would be able to gather an integrated following “for the purpose of directing the amalgamation of present races for the perfection of a new race who will be the future chosen people of the Most High.”

Teed considered himself the divinely appointed leader who might shepherd the “chosen portions of the race” to an island nation—probably Cuba—where they could begin the combination of the races. He rehearsed the same idea in The Great Red Dragon, where a new, amalgamated “red” race in the Caribbean leads humanity in the regenerative process.

Although the Unity never acquired many black followers, Teed’s experience witnessing racial struggle inspired him to theorize the ways in which racist exploitation might figure into the battle of Gog and Magog. He understood that the alleged “animal tendencies” of blacks were “greatly exaggerated” by their enslavers, who did not hesitate to quote the Bible to justify the abomination of chattel slavery—it was simply more evidence of the degeneracy of the Christian churches and their prostitution of the Word of God in the endless pursuit of lucre.

Teed came to understand that the “race question necessarily involves the labor problem,” and that the same industrialists who issued apologetics for slavery would foment racial animosity between blacks and whites to divide them and drive down wages.

Teed’s interpretations of Swedenborg and Greek scripture made such an idiosyncratic combination that the reappearance of his ideas and terminology in the sermons of an Allegheny lay minister suggest that Morris studied with the Koreshans, heard Cyrus Teed lecture, or read Koreshan publications. Jehovia additionally began to refer to his faithful disciple, George Baker, as “The Messenger” of his teachings. This, however, was where the appropriation stopped: the leap from racial amalgamation to the total disavowal of racial categories was one that Morris made on his own.

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From American Messiahs: False Prophets of a Damned Nation. Used with permission of Liveright. Copyright © 2019 by Adam Morris.