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The Father Divine Project

The Marriage of Father and Mother Divine

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Contents of this path:
1. The Marriage of Father and Mother Divine
2. Sayville Sayville, Long Island (40 miles East of New York City) is where Father Divine’s ministry was transformed nearly overnight. In 1931, Father and Mother Divine (Peninniah) had purchased a house in the small white suburb of Sayville and there they held their Holy Communion banquet services where everyone was served “more than wine and a wafer.” In the middle of the depression, these multi-course feasts must have been miraculous. Visitors from all over, black and white, began arriving at 71 Macon Street, “the Home of the Soul,” to be fed and healed. The dancing and singing would often continue late into the evening. One night in 1932, there was a police raid on the house during a particulary spirited service. Father Divine and several followers were arrested. They were charged with disturbing the peace, but the case became about the white community’s fear of racial commingling. The events that followed turned Father Divine into a nationally known figure and brought tens of thousands to the belief that he was “God, condescended in a body.”
4. Sweet Angel In 1940, Edna Rose Ritchings left her home and family's flower shop business in Vancouver, Canada to join the Peace Mission Movement. She broke ties with her parents and traveled to Philadelphia to live communally and interracially. She became Father Divine's secretary and was given the name "Sweet Angel". One day in the office, Sweet Angel proposed to Father Divine by saying, "I want to marry you because I know you are God."
5. The Circle Mission Church
9. Mother Divine (part 2)
10. Miss Heddy's Conviction Each follower of the Peace Mission Movement has a story about his or her conviction that Father Divine is the living incarnation of God. Miss Heddy’s conviction occured before the Swiss alps in 1940. At the time, she didn’t speak English and had not visited the United States. She had met a small group of Peace Mission followers in Basil and heard all about Father Divine, but her logic told her that God could not possibly be walking around in Harlem, New York.
  
  In 1949, nine years after her conviction, she found her way to New York City to work with children. She met Father Divine and her faith was confirmed. She moved permanantly to the United States in 1956.
12. “Enacting the Bill”
22. Personal Absence / Personal Presence When Father Divine died at his Woodmont estate on September 10th 1965, Mother Divine became the spiritual leader of the movement. She took on the enormous responsibility of maintaining the properties and businesses that housed and employed thousands of followers. She also carried on the spiritual teachings both within the movement and in public.
  
  Mother Divine and the followers continue to recognize the “personal presence” of Father Divine everywhere and at all times. In conversation, he is refered to in the present tense. Everyday, a new suit and tie are layed out for him on his bed. At Banquet services, a place is kept for him at the head of the table. His plate is served from the many platters of food and a follower working in the kitchen will be “blessed” to eat this food after the service. There are photographs of Father Divine in all rooms and recordings of his sermons played at all meals.
  
  “The Shrine to Life” was built at the Woodmount estate in 1968 to house his body, a recognition of his absence. Considering that followers believe only in “heaven on earth,” Father Divine is both personally present and personally absent.
  
  These interviews were held in July, 1997.
23. Heaven on Earth

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The Father Divine Project
"...this Holy Marriage was for the purpose of uniting more effectively Heaven and Earth..."
-Father Divine (New Day, May 27, 1950, p. 37)

The above 1950 photograph of Father and Mother Divine expresses a unique religious belief system through the vernacular of American wedding photography. Within an iconography of conservative American values and the stylistic codes of wealth, independence and success, the photograph performs a radical act that would have been shocking to most of the public in the 1940s and the 1950s. Marriage between the races was socially taboo and in many states illegal. The photograph "visualizes" the social ideal of racial harmony through the celibate 1946 marriage between Father Divine, a 65 year-old African American man, and Mother Divine, a 21 year-old white Canadian woman.

The religious belief that this photograph depicts, however, is not the interracial union of two human beings, but the marriage of a single human being to her "God."

This is a work-in-progress. The Father Divine Project is the effort of Dr. Leonard Norman Primiano and Will Luers to make public, maintain, and interpret selections from the enormous archive of this still-active, but aging, American religion. The interpretative lenses focuses on the expressive culture of this distinctive religious community as evidenced in the archive's media artifacts. Ethnographic video documentation, as well as scholarly essays, provide both an artful and scholarly context for the movement. This digital archive presents the viewer, both lay and expert, with the opportunity to understand a complex story of race, religion and intentional communal living as experienced by the followers of one of the most unusual, and yet distinctively American, expressions of faith in United States religious history.
The Marriage of the Lamb and the Bride

In 1946, four years after Peninnha's death, Father Divine again legally wed.
Father Divine's marriage to a twenty-one-year-old white Canadian woman, Sweet Angel or the second Mother Divine, was a source of tremendous public criticism in the United States for a religious group which was already a source of national conversation and controversy.

As he had done many times in the past, Father Divine used the public commotion over his interracial, celibate marriage as a way to spread his messages. The marriage, he said, was the ultimate example of God's approval of racial integration, of international peace and the "life of Christ". Mother Divine was the embodiment of the conviction: "I know You Are God" and by marrying one of his followers, he married his whole Church.