God, Harlem USA

God, Harlem USA: The Father Divine Story by Jill Watts, 178 pages

No doubt, many motorists were surprised by the news, proclaimed from the sides of buses travelling the highways of 1930s America, that "Father Divine is God!"  Those who knew that the Reverend Major Jealous Divine, born George Baker, was a diminutive son of former slaves living in Harlem were likely even more shocked.  Yet at the height of his ministry Father Divine headed a network of "International Peace Missions" spanning the country, was courted by politicians including New York mayor Fiorello Laguardia and the Communist Party USA, and was worshiped as God incarnate by tens of thousands of Americans, both black and white.  His story is a strange and little known part of American religious and cultural history.

While earlier studies of Father Divine's life and ministry concentrated on politics and sociology, Watts understands the primacy of the theological, although her own politics visibly shape her account - humorously, she is openly appreciative of Father Divine's declaration that, being God enfleshed, he was not an American, but critical of his (more consistent) statements that, for the same reason, he was not an African-American.  Not only does she correct widely accepted factual errors (Divine was born and raised in Maryland, not the Deep South), she places his teachings (including his claim to divinity) in the wider context of both early twentieth century African-American religious and social currents and the New Thought "positive thinking" movement.  Unfortunately, her descriptions and analysis seem too heavily dependent on her study of Father Divine's own publications, rarely (perhaps because of a lack of other sources) going beyond a superficial recounting of this version of events.  Even when she knows that these publications are untrustworthy (at one point she estimates that they claimed Divine commanded a following at least two orders of magnitude larger than even a generous estimate of his actual number of devotees), she continues to cite them with few caveats.  This, combined with the amorphous nature of Divine's theological and political beliefs, makes for frustrating reading.