This page was created by Craig Dietrich. The last update was by Will Luers.
Divine Style
The preservation and beautification of this property has had a notable influence on the expressive culture and general aesthetics of the Movement. The hallmarks of the "Divine style" under Father Divine were bounty, community, integration, and a nationalist spiritual ethos called "Americanism." Influenced by their Woodmont theology and under the leadership of Mother Divine, this aesthetic has been expanded to include safety, graciousness, orderliness, tradition, stasis, respectability, and propriety. A Victorian Quaker aesthetic may have inspired the creation of Woodmont, but the Peace Mission aesthetic has maintained it for fifty years. Woodmont stands as the embodiment of Father Divine's perfectionist utopian community, and with its workshops, garages, orchards and fields, it represents the synthesis of Divine's communal lifestyle. The property's pristine condition is the marriage of Father Divine's emphasis on the principle of perfection (The New Day 21 May 1942:50) to his understanding of an activist use of the material world to express that perfection. This union encapsulates Father Divine's theology of material culture where a sacramentalism of material usefulness is the primary objective of a world created by God and re-created, renewed, and restored by humans influenced by God.
In a celebratory meeting after midnight on 13 September 1953 in the auditorium of the Unity Mission Church on 41st Street in the city, he directly addressed to his followers the meaning of the dedication and consecration of Woodmont from a theological and racial perspective:
We know you all know a Standard of morality, of modesty, of Holiness, of Virtue and of Honesty, all of these attributes and qualities have been established and that is second to none! But as an abstract expression we are happy to say, the materialization of these things is taking place in our experience