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The Father Divine Project

The Peace Mission's Media Archive

This page has paths:

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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"A Greater Picture of ME": The Peace Mission Archive
If you take cognizance of MY Message, a greater picture of ME can be reproduced in your likeness.
-Father Divine
Since the late 1930s, Father Divine and his followers oversaw the documentation of the Peace Mission's own history and public pronouncements in a weekly newspaper, with wire and tape recordings, film and photography. These texts, images and recordings were used to communicate the ideas of "God in a body" to followers in missions around the United States -- from Harlem to Los Angeles -- and around the world -- from Switzerland to Australia. The Peace Mission would later sacramentalize artifacts from this archive of media as "the word of God revealed," making use of Father Divine's printed words and recorded voice within their own religious rituals and practices to maintain contact with the deity and his standards when he was "physically absent."
Covering eighty years of the Movement -- from posed studio portraits of Father Divine and Penninah or Mother Divine in her first reincarnated body to Polaroids of Mother Divine in the second body with the immediate community of believers around her; from newspaper photographs originally published in the Movements newspaper, The New Day, to personal snapshots of followers in attendance at various Peace Mission Holy Communion Banquet services around the world, from Church residence to followers' businesses, this collection represents a remarkable disclosure of images by an American intentional community -- images which for the most part were taken by members by community themselves. These photographs formed a series of religious family albums of sorts -- exemplars of what some scholars have identified as "vernacular photography."
While Father Divine's Peace Mission was not the first American religion to actively engage such media as photography, sound and film (and now video) to promote its existence and purpose and celebrate and maintain its history, it did so with a passion that is related to dual causes. First, is the social energy in the Movement's early years for empowerment, justice, and intellectual stimulation felt by African Americans in Harlem during the era of "The New Negro" Movement in the period after the First World War. And second, the spiritual energy generated by a belief system that proposed that God had been incarnated on the earth as a black man; a figure whose appearance alone represented empowerment and equality. When his photographic image for Church members was circulated by the Movement in 1932 (having been photographed by now noted Washington, D.C. studio photographer, Addison Scurlock), it was soon venerated as a sacred icon of justice, freedom from oppression, and protection from ills. These images placed in every room of Church residences were the Peace Mission's answer to the omnipresent crucifix in Roman Catholic institutional and domestic spaces; they showed God in a "dark-complected" body and the very representation of that idea radiated its own positive power and spirit. Today, followers re-enact their collective past by watching together the old movies and listening to their God's recorded words.