In the early 1940s, Arthur Huff Fauset found so many black migrants disappointed in the established Baptist and Methodist churches of Philadelphia that his noteworthy Black Gods of the Metropolis offered a veritable catalogue of dissatisfaction with black religious institutions. The New Jersey native and son of a black Methodist clergyman interviewed scores of people like thirty-year-old H. C. who, “in the dumps” over his financial and health troubles, moved to a pentecostal church “to relieve his mind” when the Baptist church he attended failed to give the solace he craved.Footnote ³ In recent years, many scholars have argued that prior observers of the interwar period overstated the unresponsiveness of established black churches to the needs of new arrivals and consequently overemphasized the relative importance of “non-Christian and quasi-Christian” charismatically based “cults and sects” in black life.Footnote ⁴ Even so, the urban unease Fauset witnessed did in fact animate much of black religious life in northern cities and set the broader social context for the strikingly vibrant religious experimentation that emerged both inside and outside the confines of Christian identity in those crucial years between the world wars. In Fauset's Philadelphia, for example, three quarters of southern migrants who came to Philadelphia had been members of churches before their arrival but when asked in 1924 whether they had joined a new congregation, nearly 60 percent answered they had not.Footnote ⁵ Migrants apparently unsatisfied with the choices immediately available were more likely to attach themselves over the next two decades to new emerging religious communities as they sparked religious innovation that paralleled the broader cultural renaissance under way in black America. Responding to Judith Weisenfeld's challenge to consider the largely unexamined “connection between the urban ‘sects’ and ‘cults’ and [the broader] African American Protestant tradition,” this article looks beyond associational links between sectarian groups and mainstream churches to the emergence of a new and partially shared religious language that celebrated the personal and the concrete over the abstract and shaped the evolution of black religion as a modern culture in an increasingly industrial age.Footnote ⁶ As Victorian sensibilities favoring emotional comportment and bodily restraint faded in the opening decades of a new century, black urban dwellers participated in a larger cultural renaissance during the 1920s and '30s. Popular dances and music enabled bodily expression that absorbed and transmuted the rhythms of modern life into a human exuberance that demonstrated the possibilities of collective joy and performance while maintaining and even accentuating individuality.Footnote ⁷ The same modern rhythms that propelled bodies in clubs and dance halls also helped to define new religious forms in songs, sermons, and other forms of religious practice.

While noting the importance of pentecostals and other emerging faiths, Wallace Best has argued that established Baptist churches were generally the central institutional space where black religion emerged as a modern culture. Pilgrim Baptist, Chicago's second-largest Baptist congregation in the 1930s, was an early incubator of the “gospel blues” popular with black migrants and demonstrates how cultural innovation on the margins typically entered into the mainstream of black America. Pilgrim's pastor, Junius C. Austin, did not originally accommodate the presence of new arrivals; he instead initially resisted the more emotive worship styles that many favored. His deep pessimism about the effects of mass migration on those who had already settled in the North began when he led a Pittsburgh congregation from 1915 to the early 1920s. Since migration “work[ed] against” black people already in the North, Austin argued, “I am sparing no time trying to meet the issue.”Footnote ⁸ Upon Austin's arrival in Chicago he maintained, as his son reported, a restrained piety that was “soft and refined” and that worked to ignore the “shaking and wobbling” of hips and the “hollering out” that many of the new arrivals seemed to expect.Footnote ⁹

But Best suggests that Austin's own limited experience with pentecostal experience—“receiv[ing] the Holy Ghost” himself in the mid-1930s while in California—sparked a willingness to suddenly reverse himself and transgress the prior boundaries of propriety he himself had established. After his experience, Austin was suddenly willing to recruit Thomas Dorsey, a former accompanist to the profane rhythms of Gertrude “Ma” Rainey's blues group, for his music ministry in Pilgrim.Footnote ¹⁰ Dorsey—a son of a Baptist minister and commonly described as the “father” of gospel—was significantly responsible for developing religious music in the idiom of the blues as he helped launch the careers of notable pentecostal woman singers who became famous touring churches; some became prominent recording artists in the 1930s and '40s. Like the companies who targeted black consumers with thousands of records that captured blues, sermons, and gospel tunes on vinyl, Pilgrim became one arena among many where folk traditions—both profane and sacred—were shaped for much broader consumption. Pilgrim's (and others’) initial “resistance against the gospel sound,” Davarian Baldwin has suggested, actually “encouraged the creation of a commercial market for the music” more open to the charismatic authority of female performers like Sallie Martin, Arizona Danes, and Mahalia Jackson, as well as sanctified ministers far from the center of established Baptist and Methodist churches.Footnote ¹¹ Within the religious world it inhabited and shaped, Pilgrim was one place where voices from the margins mingled and connected with those in established institutions, sparking the creation of a modern black religious culture that was much more decentralized and less restrictive in character.

In the arena of religious music generally, black pentecostals were willing, in Zora Neale Hurston's words, to “seize … every opportunity to introduce a new rhythm” to such an extent that she defined the entire religious movement around their musical innovations. As she proclaimed during the course of her work for the Federal Writers' Project in Florida during the 1930s, “The whole movement of the Sanctified Church is a rebirth of song-making!” Their songs were so compelling, she observed, that “the larger and more fashionable congregations … [had] succumb[ed] to their charm,” no matter how their members and leadership might despise the “humble” origins of these “tune-makers,” who were in Hurston's view replacing the older spirituals of a previous generation with new ones.Footnote ¹² Working with those who found themselves—initially at least—at the margins of Christian society and institutions, Baptists at Pilgrim along with religious elites elsewhere made the bodily centered speech, song, and practice of pentecostals more respectable for larger mainstream audiences throughout the interwar period.

But even as Best traces one route—in the evolution of gospel music—through which pentecostals participated in the emergence of black religious modernity, pentecostals' descriptions of God and religious experience in fact demonstrate how these religious innovators were not just active participants in religious modernism but in fact on its leading edge. No other religious group would come to define black religiosity and piety in the modern period as pentecostals would. Their influence extended beyond cultural expression to more intellectual domains of how black people thought of themselves, their relations with the larger (white) society, and the divine. Beginning with its spread during the 1920s, '30s, and '40s during the first major wave of black migration, pentecostalism represented a bridge between developments from the religious margins to that of the established Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Anglican churches already in northern cities. Instead of debating whether to define pentecostalism's origins around its introduction of glossolalia to the broader Christian world, Jonathan Baer has focused instead on the “materiality” of a pentecostal rhetoric that “originated in the body as much as the spirit.”Footnote ¹³ Early Holiness leaders who paved the way for pentecostalism believed God could “use a man's body just as much as use a man's words,” and in a world where personal expression began to supersede institutional ties and collective ambitions, the materiality Baer discusses was best conveyed among religionists in the actual physical bodies healed by the fullness of divine presence. As prominent Holiness revivalist Maria Woodworth-Etter once preached, “Our bodies are God's Power House, they are the channels for the Holy Ghost to flow out of like rivers of living waters.”Footnote ¹⁴

And when nascent pentecostals—both black and white—came to the Azusa Street mission, seeking the baptism of the Holy Spirit to equip them with the gift of tongues for worldwide evangelization, the human body in all its materiality could only become more of a site in describing the divine than it had been before. William Durham, for example, an intellectual forebear for the Assemblies of God, a predominantly white pentecostal denomination, never forgot how completely ensnared his body was when he spoke in tongues for the first time at Azusa.Footnote ¹⁵ On the Tuesday just before March of 1906, Durham recalled, “It seemed to me that my body had suddenly become porous, and that a current of electricity was being turned on me from all sides.” And when he finally achieved what he was seeking several days later, Durham exclaimed,

Charles H. Mason, the founder of the largest black pentecostal fellowship in the United States, remembered his own baptism in the Spirit in similar terms in the same issue of the short-lived Azusa Street Mission newspaper The Apostolic Faith. “It was not my voice but the voice of my Beloved I heard in me,” Mason recalled. “The gestures of my hands and movements of my body were His.”Footnote ¹⁶

Anthea Butler rightly argues that glossolalia, along with the fervent prayer, fasting, sanctified daily living, and modest dress that necessarily preceded it, served to disconnect believers from outsiders who viewed them as too “unreal” for the world.Footnote ¹⁷ But what connected these early pentecostals with the wider (religious) world was their theological embrace of the physical world harbored within their rejection of what they deemed a decadent social world. Their embrace was conveyed precisely in how they spoke about the religious domain and the experiences they had within it. The city with its industry and exposure to market culture only deepened and extended the materiality Baer describes among black pentecostals migrating to urban areas encompassing much of black religious culture just beyond the traditional boundaries of Christianity.

Among the constellation of non-traditional religious groups with their origins in the interwar period, the sharply race-conscious Nation of Islam (NOI) and Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement, which was strongly committed to principles of non-racialism, appeared to have little in common with each other or with the increasingly visible pentecostals. But despite their readily apparent differences, they both conceived of the divine as an “anthropomorphic being … expressed in flesh and blood.”Footnote ¹⁸ But while Claude Clegg has argued that this similarity was “more superficial and coincidental than imitative,” their shared use of the physical body as the principal site for imagining the divine, in fact, suggests a different story. Like the narrator in Countee Cullen's 1929 poem “The Black Christ,” they rejected the ephemeral promises of a traditional Christian god who had failed black Americans after the Civil War. The Christian deity was “somewhere worlds away”—too distant to secure the physical well-being of black believers—and they needed a better god when assailants constantly sought to exploit and lynch them in Jim Crow America. As Cullen writes: “Better my God should be/This moving, breathing frame of me/Strong hands and feet, live heart and eyes.”Footnote ¹⁹

In yearning for a god people could touch, feel, and see, NOI and the Peace Mission echoed this conviction lodged within Cullen's poem. But instead of pondering whether to dispense with God altogether, NOI and Father Divine, as perhaps two of the most visible expressions of New Thought and Spiritualist ideas within black America, imagined the divine as within and of the material world instead of from without and beyond the world they could see and touch. And while black pentecostals did not embrace an anthropomorphic deity, their experience of a Holy Spirit who resided and dwelled within their deepest selves and infused their flesh was close enough to shock outsiders. Pentecostals entering northern urban areas found a cultural space that was already being remade through market forces and migration that knit together a new black community ripe for religious and cultural innovations of all kinds. In his study of black modernity's emergence in Chicago in the 1920s and '30s, Davarian Baldwin has described how the “mass consumer marketplace” helped forge a new “black public space” as “urban social realities collapsed” the “Victorian divisions” that had predominated in the decades after Reconstruction.Footnote ²⁰ In this environment, pentecostals and others helped shape the contours of a new religious culture less tied to the collective expectations of white and black elites.

I. “Without Shame or Fear”: The New (Religious) Rhetoric of the Body

The testimony of another Baptist turned pentecostal—a “middle aged” black woman Fauset calls Mrs. W—illuminates how pentecostals helped shape black religion as a modern culture from a restrictive climate where racial uplift, group identity, and broad conformity seemed more emphasized than individuality.Footnote ²¹ While materiality had marked pentecostal speech from its beginnings, black migrants during the urbanization of the interwar period adopted a language that conveyed a sense of individual style while maintaining its outwardly social character. Religion was performed, marketed, and enjoyed more easily without the constraints that group solidarity can impose; religious language of the body combined the visceral character so present in Durham's testimony with a willingness to stand out even under watchful, unsympathetic eyes. Mrs. W, like other migrants, was dissatisfied with established churches in Philadelphia. In the past, joining a sanctified church was a risk she could not take, but the city presented new problems and new opportunities for Philadelphia's newest arrivals. As Mrs. W explained to Fauset:

Mrs. W had “felt depressed” when she first came to the city. Gambling took place on a scale she had never seen before. A broad wave of men had even gathered to gamble “on her doorstep,” and she was powerless to stop it. No matter how restrained pentecostals might have been in dress or manner when in public, presumably the sanctified worship she had seen or heard about with bodies uncontrolled in their movements or vocalizations embarrassed her. Gospel music organizer and singer Willie Mae Ford Smith demonstrated the opprobrium pentecostals faced. Before her own “pentecostal” experience in the late 1930s while living in St. Louis, Smith, a native of the Mississippi Delta, confessed: “I [had] made fun of holiness people. I laughed at 'em and tried to do the holy dance.”Footnote ²³ Despite her earlier reticence, when Mrs. W saw herself in a dream on a mountaintop with the sun “look[ing] like it does in the country” with a divine command to warn “men and women to be holy,” she went to a pentecostal church to be baptized again—this time in “Jesus’ name”—to claim spiritual power that would address the powerlessness she felt. “When you get the power, the spirit of God gets all in your flesh,” she explained to Fauset. “It's very great. Just like an electric shock.”Footnote ²⁴ We will never know whether Mrs. W would preach as Smith ultimately did with the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, but now freed from the gaze of her small-town neighbors in Virginia, Mrs. W was willing to experience the power of the Spirit infusing her “flesh” like an electric current.Footnote ²⁵ While the anonymity of the city had certainly contributed to the flowering of old vices like gambling, it had also produced space for individuality and room for a personal religious experience that countered the pressures for group conformity which animated the fierce regulation of black women's demeanor and behavior in urban centers.Footnote ²⁶

Elizabeth Grosz has argued that the “city,” in fact, “divides cultural life into public and private domains.” These two domains were not as distinct for Mrs. W in Virginia. There it seemed she never left the purview of her immediate network of friends. But the city helped differentiate aspects of her life by “geographically dividing and defining the particular social positions and locations occupied by individuals and groups,” and it created more space for nonconformity.Footnote ²⁷ She found in these seemingly “public” spaces opportunities for bodily expression that she might have reserved for family and not friends. That small group of sanctified people she worshiped with became a familial surrogate where behavior considered shameless could be pursued for the power people felt they needed in an unfamiliar world. As Mrs. W confessed to Fauset, “I didn't want to go to my own Baptist church,” but when she walked into a sanctified congregation, she “felt the spirit” and found that she had come because she hoped for something new.Footnote ²⁸

Her story provides a context for understanding how the language of respectability, which had animated so much of black political and religious life at the end of the prior century, declined with mass migration and provided more opportunities for bodily expression within black religious culture not present before. The body had long been a central preoccupation, but in the modern climate it would only gain prominence in how believers would frame religious experience and imagine the sacred in more materially centered and personal terms. The evolution of black religious music in this period captures this broader shift in the culture. In highlighting the differences between black gospel music and the older Negro spirituals, Wallace Best in his work on black Chicago's religious culture during the migration period described this evolution: “Black gospel tended to infuse God into the present, into current situations,” Best has asserted. “Black gospel suggested a greater intimacy with God, a God close at hand. In contrast to Negro spirituals, the God of black gospel was present and highly anthropomorphized.”Footnote ²⁹

The Victorianism that was tied to the collective black aspirations for racial uplift which had wedded many black religionists to the public expectations that resided in American bourgeois culture had begun to give way to a keener desire for vibrant personal experiences rendered in the language of flesh and blood. And as intellectuals and ordinary people alike demonstrated an increased taste for bodily expression and sensation, they not only reshaped conceptions of what it meant to be respectable, but they also made way for the physical body to be a principal site in imagining the seen and unseen world. Mrs. W's path toward sanctification demonstrates how thoroughly the modern and urbanized world she inhabited with new fearlessness had shaped the very substance of how she conceived religious experience. The vision that had immediately prompted her to search for a religious alternative was of the rural countryside, but in offering her an opportunity to fill her newly sanctified body with the electricity and power that characterized the modern world, it equipped her to navigate that new world's dangers.

Langston Hughes had already in a famous 1926 manifesto announced the arrival of the shameless in black expressive culture with “the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith” years before Mrs. W had even left for Philadelphia. The logic of respectability and conformity that would so inhibit Mrs. W a decade or so later had an analogue in the artistic realm where, in Hughes's view, social conventions cramped space for black creativity and were in desperate need of revision. With contempt and disdain, Hughes implicitly rejected older mores that included the public language of respectability, at the very core of black collective advancement since the Civil War, in favor of the new. Instead, he wanted to forge common cause with a new generation of black artists who would celebrate virtues other than prudence and restraint. “We younger Negro artists who create now,” Hughes proclaimed, “intend to express ourselves without fear or shame.”Footnote ³⁰ In his study on migration novels in black literature, Lawrence Rodgers has observed: “The Great Migration designates much more than simply a geographic movement; it signals the need for a change of internal consciousness and an entirely new apprehension of external reality.”Footnote ³¹ For Hughes and others, mass migration had animated an internal dialogue among black people in the United States that spanned regions and local communities. Instead of tying their responses so closely to those imagined to be outside the community, African Americans began to believe that they could assert and express themselves without such strong references to the interests and views of whites. This process began long before the 1920s, as Steve Hahn has argued, in rural towns where black people interested in the emigration movement struggled “to create or reconstitute freed communities on a stable foundation—and at arm's length from whites.”Footnote ³² Urban life—in both the North and the South—simply amplified and accelerated this shift toward the intra-racial conversations that would help forge separatist sensibilities and institutions.

The cultural awakening that grew in the initial years of mass migration, Hughes argued, did not in fact begin with the literary pretensions of the well-known writers so often celebrated but instead resided in the boldness of blues singers' voices, in the brass of black jazz bands, and in the dark bodies propelled by rhythm in the city's nightclubs, musical revues, and dance halls. The twenties “were the years of Manhattan's black Renaissance” and began, as Hughes insisted in his memoir, “with Shuffle Along, Running Wild, and the Charleston.”Footnote ³³ The emancipation of black bodies in cultural space was the very essence of a broader move against the language of respectability and the true source of the ongoing cultural renaissance in the twenties. And though Hughes was deeply skeptical of religious institutions and their dogma throughout his career, he understood better than most how much certain strains of religious practice during the interwar period were like these other forms of cultural expression made new in the city. Hughes, in fact, seemed to revel equally in the sweaty bodies caught up in the “black bottom” at rent-parties and in religious dance at the storefront sanctified churches that dotted the urban landscape. In remembering one visit he would make to a Chicago sanctified church, Hughes confessed: “I was entranced by their stepped-up rhythms, tambourines, hand clapping, and uninhibited dynamics, rivaled only by Ma Rainey singing the blues at the old Monogram Theater.”Footnote ³⁴

In his 1934 short story, “The Blues I'm Playing,” the pianist Oceola who plays in both clubs and churches demonstrates Hughes's enthusiasm for parallel “uninhibited dynamics” in both sacred and profane spaces. For Oceola, like Hughes, the music she loved propelled bodies; it “demanded movement and expression, dancing and living to go with it.” Oceola knew that “a syncopated variation from the Sanctified Church” could cause old women to rise up and cry praise to God, and she admired how “rhythmical Negro spirituals … possessed the power to pull colored folks out of their seats in the amen corner and make them prance and shout in the aisles for Jesus.” Capturing the fun and playfulness of sanctified expression within the bounds of church worship, Oceola confessed that “she never liked those fashionable colored churches where shouting and movement were discouraged and looked down upon, and where New England hymns instead of spirituals were sung.” Oceola simply preferred the religion of “sanctified churches” where, unlike other more reserved churches, “religion was a joy.”Footnote ³⁵ The most devout pentecostals might withhold themselves from various worldly pursuits, but Hughes saw how bodily expression held a central place in the religious lives of migrants. Even though leaders within sanctified churches strongly policed their parishioners' sexual conduct and dress, revivals provided religious thrills that paralleled the allure of nightclubs and provided the context for the emergence of a new religious language that was more attuned to bodily expression. The mass consumption and marketing of race records—recordings of gospel music and mini-sermons targeted for the African American market—in the 1930s demonstrate how ubiquitous the thirst was for excitement in religious experience. And the preachers and singers who helped make these recordings, and the companies who distributed their records, satisfied the black public's need for shared excitement in their religious lives as they developed a language of religious experience that echoed how bodily sensation animated secular artists. The marketplace established, as Davarian Baldwin argues, the “commercial convergence of the sacred and secular” where “blues singers and singing evangelists added their soundtrack to the larger public sphere.”Footnote ³⁶

Birmingham's A. W. Nix understood this commercial audience and its desires more than most and demonstrates how the language of faith converged with that of the profane even as it aimed to delineate the saved from the damned in sharper relief. Nix's 1927 sermon Black Diamond Express to Hell was so popular that Vocalion Records eventually added five sequels. In it, Nix yelled out station stops for Drunkardsville, Liars Avenue, Gambler's Tower, and Stealin' Town like an engineer calling out destination points for a train barreling toward hell. But even as Nix condemned the profane pleasures of the city, he knew that his audience enjoyed pleasures associated with both dancing halls and church altars. After he barked out the station “Dancing Hall Depot!” in his first sermon, he admonished his largely unseen audience. “Some of you think you can sing in the choir on Sunday and Charleston on the ballroom floor on Monday,” Nix preached, “but you got to go to hell on the Black Diamond train!”Footnote ³⁷ He knew that the dancing halls and the churches shared much of the same clientele. And though Nix preached against those earthly pleasures he described as the main “headlight” on sinners' hell-bound train, those who marketed his sermons knew that his preaching thrilled sensation-seekers. An advertisement with an attached map charted the train's route to hell: “Here she comes! The ‘Black Diamond Express to Hell’ with Sin, the Engineer, holding the throttle wide open; Pleasure is the Headlight, and the Devil is the Conductor. You can feel the roaring of the Express and the moanin' of the Drunkards, Liars, Gamblers.”Footnote ³⁸

So while many black intellectuals and artists assumed that the city would be the death of folk religion, migrants found that the urban environment, abetted by a rising consumer culture, opened space for vibrant and expressive religious speech. But religious language anchored in the rhythms of bodily expression extended beyond the ephemeral community knitted together through records of sermons and music sold. In one widely publicized letter written late in the second decade of the century, a recently arrived migrant wrote to her sister of the widespread enthusiasm for religious revival she and others in the city shared. She wrote:

Although the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), the largest black pentecostal church had its origins in the Mississippi Delta, in short order it became a “primarily urban church.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Early in its history, in just over a decade, COGIC grew from having nine churches across the entire state of Illinois to twenty-four churches in Chicago alone.Footnote ⁴¹ And while Baptist churches held revivals occasionally, the nearly constant revivalist atmosphere in COGIC churches became a major selling point for recruiting new members. As Susie Blakeny of small-town Louisiana confessed, she joined a COGIC church in Chicago because it “had revivals all the time.”Footnote ⁴² At the same time, gospel music pioneers like Sallie Martin, Willie Mae Ford Smith, Rosetta Tharpe, Thomas Dorsey, and others created a mass audience of African Americans for gospel music that mimicked the emphasis on revivals found within COGIC as they toured the country and created community gospel choirs and conventions.Footnote ⁴³ Whereas some have traditionally characterized revivalist religion as escapist and insulated from the broader society, mass revivals in the form of tours, conventions, race records, and later radio are a form of religious play—faiths of bodily joy—that challenged and remade a culture obsessed with being publicly respectable to the larger (white) society.

But what Father Divine's singular presence and the rise of the Nation of Islam in the 1930s in fact demonstrate was that the shared fascination with the human body that animated religious expression during the interwar period set the context for the broad materiality in god-talk that extended far beyond established Christian traditions. Newly minted pentecostals like Mrs. W would recognize that Father Divine and his Peace Mission Movement were in fact kindred spirits—sharing members and often rotating leaders. When Georgia native Mary Rozier became “first angel” Faithful Mary, she complained that many within the Peace Mission persisted in addressing her with a title—“Mother”—most often applied within Sanctified and some Baptist congregations to senior women leaders.Footnote ⁴⁴ After migrating to Newark, Rozier, herself raised a Baptist, became a pentecostal. Alleging corruption, Rozier left the Peace Mission, but the New Thought traditions that shaped Father Divine continued to animate her thinking and frame her pentecostal heritage in similar terms. As Rozier writes, “By coming in contact with the Sanctified Church I found the light of truth and was healed. I finally arrived at the point where I unconsciously turned on the switch and a flood of this quickening, magnetic, electric current [that is, God] entered my being and I was a changed person.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Divine's followers, in fact, often practiced the glossolalia that usually distinguished pentecostals from the rest of Christendom, and Father Divine himself when still called George Baker attended the 1906 revival at Azusa Street—the place pentecostals would recognize as the birthplace of pentecostalism—where he reportedly spoke in tongues as well.Footnote ⁴⁶ But despite Mrs. W's involvement in a pentecostal group that denied orthodox Trinitarian doctrine and adopted a modalist view of God contrary to orthodoxy, Fauset's holiness informant could not countenance the Peace Mission's god-talk and its affirmation of Father Divine's divinity. Mrs. W, like other pentecostals, while willing to risk shame in adopting the religious practices and language associated with Pentecost, was not willing to embrace the body as firmly as Father Divine's followers would in their heretical and fleshly conceptions of God. As Mrs. W would report: “Father [Divine] would be all right, but it's all wrong making him out to be God.”Footnote ⁴⁷ While pentecostals were much more aware of God infusing and electrifying human flesh than scholars have generally acknowledged, what Father Divine and NOI represented with their anthropomorphic gods was a fuller embrace of materiality in their god-talk than even pentecostals could muster. At the same time, members within both groups rejected the abstract piety of the past and maintained the intimately personal character that so marked pentecostals and most modern rhetoric on religious experience during this period.

II. “Getting Your Head out of the Sky”: Material Gods for Material People

The October 1939 headline of The New York Times Magazine probably astonished its primarily white upper-class readers when it suggested that there was more to Harlem than their voyeuristic participation in the then-ebbing music and party scene. It also seemed to presume that, in the public mind at least, religion had no parallel with the everyday and was in fact highly distinct from the other diversions of urban life. Even so, in his neighborhood review “It's Not All Swing in Harlem,” Times reporter Ollie Stewart assured his readers that Harlem remained “on the ‘must’ list,” at least partly because of the Peace Mission's entertainment value. Father Divine always seemed to keep “this uptown sector in the news—with a message to the President, with another of his bounteous feasts [and] with a parade of peace.” For Stewart, Father Divine was “the most significant and dynamic personality Harlem has known in the past two decades.”Footnote ⁴⁸

His impact in the long run would not outlast Marcus Garvey, who had been deported just a decade earlier, but drawn to Harlem from suburban Long Island on the power of his celebrity, Father Divine managed to fill for a short time the cultural, economic, and social vacuum left in Garvey's wake.Footnote ⁴⁹ With the “collapse of the Pan-African dream,” one chronicler of black Harlem during the 1940s noted how the seemingly “ubiquitous Father Divine,” despite his fervent non-racialism, was seen as the “Black God” who “fell heir to the bulk of Marcus Garvey's thousands.” Divine's multiracial religious gatherings in Sayville had, in fact, generated controversy and agitated his white neighbors, who were nervous over his “loud” meetings and pushed to have him tried as a public nuisance and run out of town. When the supervising judge died an untimely death after Divine's conviction, the brouhaha that erupted over suggestions of Divine's supernatural involvement helped generate along with his personal magnetism a platform for his unusual teachings as he moved his headquarters to New York in the early 1930s. There he continued to offer his blend of teachings that combined aspects of black evangelicalism with ideas from the New Thought movement.Footnote ⁵⁰ But despite the controversial claims he made for his divinity, by 1933 Father Divine, lost in obscurity just a decade before, had become the focus of both major candidates for mayor, who were eager, in words of then-candidate Fiorello LaGuardia, “to ask Father Divine's help and counsel.”Footnote ⁵¹

But it was the Holy Communion banquets—those “bounteous feasts” where the Peace Mission fed large numbers of hungry outsiders seemingly without cost—that most distinguished Divine's ministry in the public mind. Begun in his early years as an itinerant minister in Georgia, they became opportunities to celebrate food as a concrete expression of the divine spirit in the material world and embrace the bodily pleasures found in food, song, and dance.Footnote ⁵² Earlier in the 1930s, writer Claude McKay was captivated with “the women [who loosely] fling themselves about, with a verve and freedom that would startle a cabaret.”Footnote ⁵³ Another early observer of a banquet in the 1940s described how testimonies and bouts of religious ecstasy combined with music that fostered the crowd's “enthusiastic manner” with a “skillful boogie-woogie type of piano” generated great excitement and a welcome diversion from the Depression and the coming war.Footnote ⁵⁴ Marie Griffith forcefully demonstrates the inadequacies of those scholarly perspectives that fixate on sex and seem to focus exclusively on the Peace Mission's celibacy requirements in suggesting that Father Divine's teachings denied in any absolute sense the reality of the body.Footnote ⁵⁵ The celebratory meal, the joyous music and the testimonies that surrounded it, and Divine's opening greeting counter this claim. Divine, when present, often inaugurated the festivities with a simple declaration that reveled in the physical sensations of eating. He proclaimed: “Peace everyone! Good Health, Good Will, and a Good Appetite.”Footnote ⁵⁶

So despite the broad prohibitions against sexual contact he maintained in his residences and properties, Father Divine celebrated the physical body's appetite for food and with it all the senses of the body. Divine's embodied god-talk represented not just the elevation of his own individual status before his followers but also an embrace of the material world that the body with its senses apprehended. In Fauset's account of Divine's stay in Philadelphia, the religious leader explained the significance of God's (that is, his) body:

To convey the divine presence necessary for human beings to navigate the world, Father Divine closed hundreds of his letters during the 1930s and '40s in the same fashion. “This [letter] leaves ME,” Father Divine would typically conclude, “eternally Well, Healthy, Joyful, Peaceful, Lively, Loving, Successful, Prosperous and Happy in Spirit, Body and Mind and in every organ, muscle, sinew, joint, limb, vein and bone and even in every atom, fibre and cell of MY Bodily Form.”Footnote ⁵⁸

This intense focus on Divine's body in all its fleshiness demonstrates how the Peace Mission embraced not just individual bodies but also the material structures and worlds they inhabited. The Peace Mission not only preserved healthy human bodies, it also preserved architectural structures that housed and served them. As Leonard Primiano has observed, the Peace Mission's emphasis on “purchasing, restoring, re-using, and preserving” buildings instead of starting totally from scratch reflected Divine's embrace of the material world.Footnote ⁵⁹ From early in his ministry in Baltimore, before he was known as Father Divine, the future leader of the Peace Mission would reject what he called “old death songs”—that is, spirituals that promoted the notion of an afterlife in a heaven that was not a part of this world.Footnote ⁶⁰ Instead of these songs, Divine's followers sang tunes like “There's No Heaven in the Sky” that spoke of heaven as a present reality rather than as a future otherworldly possibility.Footnote ⁶¹ Indeed, echoing developments in gospel music Best has described, the Peace Mission's various branches were called Heavens, presumably because they realized the divine possibilities in the real physical world.Footnote ⁶² As Divine admonished his followers just after midnight on a July evening of 1938, “Just think of living in the PRESENCE of GOD all the time; getting your mind out of the sky; out of that nowhere-and-nothing place!”Footnote ⁶³ In answer to the question “What is Father Divine's attitude toward Heaven,” a later pamphlet offered this answer, first recorded in August of 1938: “Heaven is not a place geographically; it is a state of consciousness. All men have the privilege to lift their minds from superstition; to raise their minds to the Christ Consciousness.” Referring to an observation of Jesus recorded in the New Testament, Father Divine encouraged his adherents “to bring to fruition the Kingdom of God within you; that will give you victory over sickness, disease, sorrow and misery.”Footnote ⁶⁴

The living presence of the divine as seen in the body of Father Divine became the terrain from which the Peace Mission both embraced the physical world and questioned the immateriality of the traditional Christian god. Many of Divine's followers harbored deep suspicions of what they saw as the ephemeral promises of traditional Baptist and Methodist preachers. One man disenchanted with “churches, chiefly Baptist,” where “there was too much money collection with nothing in return,” confessed to Fauset that preachers’ promises of heaven “didn't satisfy him.” Preachers, he complained, could “only offer one a better world in the future … [and] promise a reward in heaven.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Father Divine, in fact, shared these suspicions and urged his followers to embrace only those divine possibilities that were rooted in the material world. The divine and heaven were inextricably linked and framed by materiality. As the nineteenth-century philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach suggested, “Heaven is God materialised or reduced to the forms of the senses… . As man conceives his heaven, so he conceives his God.”Footnote ⁶⁶ In a 1943 response to Mrs. Terry, who wrote about an injury she had recently suffered, Father Divine advised simply: “Put your trust in God—not a God of the imaginery [sic] world, above the stars and planets, but of a real God Whose Ever Presence is seen and known by the breath you breathe and by countless other conditions of life's abundance.”Footnote ⁶⁷ As dancing, emancipated bodies signaled the rise of a cultural renaissance in Harlem and elsewhere, they sparked a rise in the religions of urban bodily joy and sustained reflection on what connection the body had to have for the deepest aspirations of religious life. For Father Divine, the realness of the divine was conveyed not only in many of the automatic and natural mechanisms of the body—for example, “the breath you breathe”—but also in the appreciation people had for the bounty in the everyday material world in the Heavens on earth. But while this god-talk would speak of the material world and embrace, in Divine's words, “life's abundance,” it could not grapple fully with the presence of evil that New Thought attributed to wayward thoughts. The Lost-Found Nation of Islam and other forms of proto-Islamic thought in black America would offer a bodily conception of the divine even more directly connected to the perceived failures of the immaterial Christian god than Father Divine did. Followers of Fard and Elijah Muhammad negotiated a world made modern not only by scientific advances but also by the inexplicable existence of human suffering on the part of the earth's disinherited and dispossessed.Footnote ⁶⁸

Like Father Divine and the Peace Mission Movement, adherents of the Nation of Islam questioned the immateriality of the traditional Christian god from their beginnings in the early 1930s. Some of the earliest versions of NOI's basic catechisms now available in FBI files describe the traditional Christian god as a mystery God that “does not exist.” When initiates were asked whether they should “wait for that mystery God” to bring basic provisions for daily living, new members of the NOI were expected to answer:

The divine disregard represented in continued black deprivation proved to young initiates that the Christian god was either too ephemeral or nonexistent before the harsh realities of black suffering. And over time both in its deification of its founder and prophet Fard Muhammad (also known as W. D. Fard or Wallace Fard) and in its conception of corporal divinity that appears to predate Fard Muhammad's mysterious disappearance from the community, the NOI developed the physical body into a conceptual space to imagine the deity as concrete, present, and real. Elijah Muhammad, in his magnum opus Message to the Blackman in America, written decades later, extended on these early teachings: “If your God were a mystery, you and I would be a mystery people … I teach not the coming of God but the presence of God, in person… . God is a man and we just cannot make Him other than man.”Footnote ⁷⁰

The Nation of Islam's material conception of God was very much like that of Father Divine's Peace Mission. Both groups conceived of the divine in bodily terms while they strongly emphasized the importance of the physical body and food's contribution to its health and longevity. Even though adherents of the NOI fasted with the same frequency that members of the Peace Mission feasted, they considered food to be just as crucially important in achieving divine perfection in the physical world. Elijah Muhammad, in fact, opened the second volume of his collection How to Eat to Live with an admonition that contained a hint of New Thought philosophy: “Eat to live to bring about a return to perfection and long life; like Noah and Methuselah.”Footnote ⁷¹ And in answering the question “Are we living in a material universe or a ‘spirit’ universe,” Elijah Muhammad demonstrated just how much the physical body animated the material language of his god-talk: “We are material beings and live in a material universe.” And like Divine, the afterlife in the Nation of Islam was not conceived of as otherworldly and disembodied but rather as infused with flesh and blood. In one article written in the 1950s, Elijah Muhammad, bemoaning how black people had been “deceived by the arch deceiver [that is, white people] … [to] think the Hereafter is a life of spirits (spooks) up somewhere in the sky,” explained that instead “life in the hereafter is only a continuation of the present life.” In the afterlife, Muhammad continued, “You will be flesh and blood. You won't see spooks coming up out of graves to meet God.”Footnote ⁷² From God's connection with (black) people to the nature of the afterlife, the physical body and its movements, just as they did in much of black poetry of the period, became vehicles to convey the ineffable.Footnote ⁷³ But for the Nation of Islam the lack of food and physical sustenance in the “wilderness” of North America along with these teachings on the afterlife became opportunities not only to embrace a more material conception of the divine but also a platform for challenging the failure of the traditional Christian god to address the basic needs of black people.

III. Conclusion: Heaven's Collapse and Black Religious Modernism

Stephen Kern ends his influential study on how technology since the end of the nineteenth century has shaped conceptions of time and space with the observation: “Modern technology … collapsed the vault of heaven. Never before the age of the wireless and airplane did the heavens seem to be so close or so accessible.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Like Father Divine, the new adherents to the Nation of Islam found that scientific imperatives fostered dissatisfaction with established religious perspectives and an openness for the new that included a shared embrace of material conceptions of religious language or spaces. One early convert to the Nation of Islam noted how Fard Muhammad rejected the imaginary heaven of scripture just as Father Divine had done and turned him away from the religion he knew with knowledge Galileo had offered centuries before:

For many of African descent, along with many of their American comrades who participated in the New Thought and other related religious movements, internal illumination would govern the apprehension of the divine in the wake of heaven's collapse. This would lead the way for a new emphasis on self-knowledge and a rejection of many forms of secular public piety that would place a premium on deportment and respectability. The Nation of Islam certainly embraced the maxim of “know thyself” as many other religious groups often did within the influential cultural heritage of New Thought, Theosophy, and Spiritualism.Footnote ⁷⁶ For them, emancipation of the psychological self from the shackles of self-hate had the same blend of transcendence and materiality as the Christians' belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Followers of Fard Muhammad, in fact, translated this Christian symbol with its curious blend of otherworldliness and fleshly realities within NOI's map of the world as the always available but ineffable possibility of psychological awakening from the most desperate circumstance of mental bondage. As Elijah Muhammad offered innumerable times in weekly creedal statements published on the back page of his newspaper Muhammad Speaks: “We believe in the resurrection of the dead—not in physical resurrection—but in mental resurrection.”Footnote ⁷⁷

A growing number of black religious migrants during the interwar period, in fact, pursued a direct and unvarnished experience of the divine as pentecostals did and imagined and described a god found principally within the material world infusing the very bodies of the faithful. These faithful, whether pentecostal or Muslim, were like modernists of all stripes and races who pursued, celebrated, and craved real experience and sought an authentic self in the age of machines and industry. As historian Jackson Lears described this period in his influential book No Place of Grace: “For the educated bourgeoisie, authentic experience of any sort seemed ever more elusive; life seemed increasingly confined to the airless parlor of material comfort and moral complacency. Many yearned to smash the glass and breathe freely—to experience ‘real life’ in all its intensity.” When this educated elite grappled with the unreality that framed modern life, many sought the “the simple life” or “pure experience”; others rejected “bourgeois respectability” in their embrace of the avant-garde.Footnote ⁷⁸ But what this period of black religious dissatisfaction demonstrates perhaps most of all is that the black and newly urban wanted to “breathe freely” as much as their white counterparts did. And with this desire they renegotiated what it meant to be religious in the new world they had freely (for the first time) chosen and now inhabited.