Dr. Leonard Primiano has been researching, interviewing and documenting the Peace Mission Movement for over 20 years and has established a high level of trust and relationship with Mother Divine and the followers. Reflexive and dialogical ethnographic methods of research has helped in keeping Mother Divine and the community aware of Primiano's work and analysis, while engaging them in a dialogue about issues of interpretation when they arise. This method has allowed Primiano to sustain his position as informed and knowledgeable outsider with them. Mother Divine and the followers have historically been very reluctant to discuss their beliefs with the press and academics, because they have experienced a long history of distortions and rumors about their community. A communal, interracial and financially independent religious group that believes an illiterate African-American man is God is a story ripe for controversy. In addition, there are other barriers to telling the story of Father Divine. For example, while it is a part of the Peace Mission belief system not to recognize race or speak in racial terms, it would be difficult for a journalist or scholar not to speak of Father Divine as African American. Dr. Primiano has worked productively with Mother Divine and the followers to recognize the need for an outsider understanding of their beliefs and culture. They have also come to appreciate the historical importance of their own archive of media and the value such a resource would be for the study of twentieth-century American religious and racial history. In 2010, the Peace Mission will, in fact, complete their new Father Divine Library and Archive at the Woodmount estate. Dr. Primiano will be given first access to the materials that it will contain.

 

In 1996, Dr. Primiano asked his former student Will Luers to document on video the Fiftieth Wedding Anniversary of Father and Mother Divine. Luers taped numerous banquets, singing and dancing rituals and inter-views with Mother Divine and about twenty of the followers. Many of those interviewed have since died and there remain many more whose stories have not yet been recorded. These are inherently fascinating and uniquely American personal narratives. Women and men, rich and poor, black and white, from as far away as Australia and Switzerland, came to Harlem or Philadelphia in the thirties and forties. They dedicated their lives to an incarnation of God and to working for racial justice and world peace. Each living member embodies a dramatic story that reveals a hidden history of race and religion in America.

 

In the years since their initial video recording, Primiano and Luers tried to produce a linear documentary out of this material. It has proved difficult, not only because of its sensitive subject, but also because the story contained so much about the changes in twentieth-century America: poverty, segregation, war, Americanism, civil rights, right and left wing politics, gender, women's liberation and the alternative medicine movement. The Father Divine Project was born out of the need to present a multi-linear and multimodal experience; a network of micro-narratives that convey to the general public a deeper, more nuanced understanding of religion, race, belief, aesthetics, culture, and America. 

 

In 2001, influenced by Lev Manovich's writings on database narratives, Luers created a database documentary (a Wordpress video blog) that contained tagged and searchable verite-style video segments, along with some texts and images and recordings. The blog format fit perfectly the needs at that time for an open, networked and multimodal interpretive narrative. The current site continues to attract religious studies scholars, sociologists, students, former followers of Father Divine and their relatives. Some relatives of followers have offered access to their personal archives. Students have asked to use video segments in their presentations. Primiano has used the website in numerous talks and in the classroom, as have many faculty across the United States and Canada teaching courses in the history of North American religion and African American religion.