Father Divine's Peace Mission

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The Peace Mission Movement was the religious and communal body that formed around Father Divine, an African American preacher of obscure origin — born, most likely, George Baker in the rural South around the 1870s — who came to public notice in the late 1920s. Its members regarded him not as a teacher about God but as God present among them, and ordered their lives around that conviction.

The movement took shape at Sayville, on Long Island, where Father Divine kept a house that fed and lodged a growing congregation, and it spread into Harlem and then across the country during the Great Depression. Its appeal in those years was concrete before it was doctrinal: communal residences, called “heavens,” that offered clean lodging and abundant low-cost meals when both were scarce, together with employment networks and businesses run by the faithful. Members took new names marking a break with the past, renounced tobacco, alcohol, and sexual relations, refused debt and tipping and government relief, and lived by a strict code of honesty and self-support. The movement was thoroughly integrated at a time when that was rare and dangerous, and it treated racial categories as something to be unmade rather than managed; its 1936 Righteous Government Platform called for the end of segregation and lynching in plain legislative language.

The teaching drew on the New Thought current then circulating in American religion — the idea that mind and right thinking shape material conditions — but bent it toward the person of Father Divine himself, whose word was held to heal, to provide, and to make the believer’s body deathless. In the movement’s teaching, sickness and death were failures of belief; longtime members were said not to die but to depart in disgrace. A 1932 court case in which a judge sentenced him and then died within days was received by followers as a demonstration of his power, and it widened his fame considerably.

How far the movement’s claims about Father Divine were his own teaching and how far they were the elaboration of devoted followers is not fully recoverable from the record, since he spoke in a deliberately elusive idiom and discouraged inquiry into his earlier life. After his second marriage, in 1946, to a young white Canadian follower who took the name Mother Divine, leadership passed in time to her. The movement contracted after his death in 1965 but did not dissolve; a remnant maintained its houses and its discipline for decades afterward, keeping a place set for him at the table.

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