This page was created by Craig Dietrich. 

The Father Divine Project Main Menu "Inside the Kingdom": The Evolution of the Peace Mission "A Greater Picture of ME": The Peace Mission Archive 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. "I Know You Are God": A Database Documentary by Will Luers About The Father Divine Project

The Father Divine Project: The Expressive Culture of a Religious Movement

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Father and Mother Divine

In April, 1996, The Peace Mission Movement celebrated The 50th Anniversary of the marriage of Father and Mother Divine. Within a two week period, seven Holy Communion Banquet services were held at various Peace Mission properties in the Philadelphia area. Guests from the city's private and public sectors joined followers and co-workers in re-enacting the 1946 "Marriage of the Lamb and the Bride."  Mother Divine arrived at the banquet services by limousine wearing a gown and hat, in a style reminiscent of a luxurious wedding in the late 1940s.  She greeted the invited guests of Father Divine, and then took her place at the head of the long table next to the place set for  "personally absent," but still spiritually present husband. 

Since Father Divine "left his body" in 1965, at the age of 88,  Mother Divine has been the spiritual leader, the CEO and the public face of a religious movement that had its development in Harlem during the Depression.  Father Divine and Peninnha, the first Mother Divine, founded the Peace Mission in the 1920s as a response to the racism as well as spiritual and economic poverty that had followed African Americans, from the post Civil War South to the Harlem Renaissance. 

The declaration of Father Divine's deity in Sayville, Long Island and the spectacle of interracial gatherings around lavish multi-course banquets was an easy source of scandal for the international press. Such attention soon turned Father Divine and his movement into an international religious phenomenon, with tens of thousands claiming they were followers of "God the Father." The Peace Mission used the public media attention, especially the controversy over the 1946 interracial marriage, as the stage to perform and in-act their beliefs about racial integration, economic empowerment, and personal betterment through justice and chaste, communitarian living.