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'I Am Divine'
| Article
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19890 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1992 |
3,232 Words |
| Author
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Michael L. Mickler
Michael L. Mickler is assistant professor of church history at
the Unification Theological Seminary and is the author of The
Unification Church in America; A Bibliography and Research
Guide. |
GOD, HARLEM U.S.A
The Father Divine Story
Jill Watts
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992
239 pp., $30.00
Jill Watts' God, Harlem U.S.A is a serious effort to reexamine the life and career of Father Divine, one of the twentieth century's most colorful and controversial religious figures. Unfortunately, most previous accounts of his activities have been cynical and disparaging. It is typically remembered that he claimed to be God and founded an "aberrational cult" that grew to prominence in the ghettos of the northeastern United States during the 1930s. His appeal, it was said, rested mainly on free meals he provided to black parishioners, and rank emotionalism. Contemporary observers alleged that he had total control over followers, who broke family ties, practiced celibacy, and turned over their assets to his ministry.
At right angles to this view is a more a recent tendency to see Father Divine as a civil rights activist in the American social reform tradition. A victim of segregation and discrimination in the South, he is favorably recalled as a social critic committed to eradicating racism from American society and promoting equality. He is credited with having initiated antidiscrimination campaign and social-welfare programs in Harlem, activities that helped reintroduce social relief and political activism to the black church. This line of interpretation defines Father Divine as a civil rights leader whose campaigns were "precursors" to the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and '60s.
However, one interprets Father Divine, there is little question of his influence during the Depression. Although calculations of his followers of the time vary--from two million in 1936 biographical account to widely accepted figure of fifty thousand followers by Time in 1937, allow figure of a few thousand by critics, and a less modest estimate of twenty-two million by Father Divine himself--it is generally acknowledged that he fashioned the largest, most cohesive movement in the northern ghettos. Watts reports that "by early 1932, an average of twelve thousand worshippers attended his lectures" and sets the number of his followers and supporters at "between twenty and thirty thousand." One newspaper favorably compared the Peace Mission's 1932 Easter devotionals, which began with a parade of five thousand throughout he streets of Harlem, with the celebrations of Marcus Garvey's, the well-known West Indian black
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