Father Divine preached social justice through lavish meals decades before the Civil Rights era, but his story has largely been forgotten
. The key to his movement’s influence and longevity could be found in the bit that started it all — food.In The Beginning...uring the International Peace Mission’s heyday — beginning around 1932 and lasting for the better part of three decades — the group’s membership base is conservatively estimated to have numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Articles from the 1930s counted far-flung branches of Divine’s movement in Australia, Switzerland, and Panama.
The Peace Mission’s banquets served as a riff on the Eucharist and Christian communion, but the group also used food as a form of evangelism. For Divine and the Peace Mission — like many religious movements before them — the stomach was the route to salvation. Amid the Great Depression, World Wars I and II, Jim Crow segregation in the South, and de facto segregation in the North, Peace Mission members ate for free and in abundance at the banquets.
A large group sits around a dining table with Father Divine and his first wife, Peninnah, also known as Mother Divine, in undated photonewsreel showing busloads of Father Divine followers packing a Harlem-area"heaven" in 1936o one knows exactly when or where Father Divine was born, or even what his real name was; he presented himself as having simply manifested from heaven. When asked for his age, he’d say he didn’t know.
The Peace Mission presented itself as a form of evangelical Christianity. It practiced belief in the Christian Bible and its core teachings: that Jesus Christ died for all people and that everyone should live moral and righteous lives. Their beliefs differed from mainstream Christianity in the claims that Divine was God in the flesh, and that he had come to earth to make heaven accessible in the here and now.
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