The Incredible Messiah: The Deification of Father Divine
by
[Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown, $2.50] ANY man or any god who can inspire the adulation of two million people, who can support them or make them self-supporting, who can discipline them with kindness, and slake their human lusts, is one to command the audience of scholars. Father Divine is such a one, his followers claim; the rest of us must at least admit that he is a shrewd psychologist. Two biographies of the man-god of Harlem have appeared within the year, and in this, the second, Mr. Parker portrays him squarely.
It would have been easy to mock the little man, or to condemn him offhand as a racketeer, but the author has done neither. Tolerantly and intelligently he has sought to appraise his power and the subjection of his disciples, building a sturdy thesis on fact, the simple history, the good and foolish issues, and the precipitant drive of man to find a heaven on earth.
Since the days when he was merely George Baker in Georgia, the unschooled son of slaves. Father Divine has labored successfully to dope his fellows with the notion that he was God and they were already in Paradise with him. And ever since (according to his version) he was mystically ‘combusted,’ not born, on a Harlem street corner in 1900, he has striven for the abolition of creed and race distinction. Whites and Negroes share the same beds in his dormitories. The natives of Australia, the Indians of Alaska, and the white converts of Switzerland are all, in their far-flung Divine ‘Extensions,’ united by faith in him alone.
Mr. Parker seems as puzzled as the investigating police to account for the man’s power. It is not enough to call it the jet of a spiritual or sociological need, which other Messiahs have for centuries exploited. Father Divine, ostensibly, has wooed his followers with the most moral precepts, effectuating honesty, sobriety, and charity among them. But on the other hand he has torn their homes apart through his preachment that earthly love is vile; he has convinced them that curative measures not achieved by faith in him are false; worst of all, he has encouraged the dereliction of adult responsibility.
Partly, of course, his influence has been strengthened by his curious immunity from the law. So far he has paid no tax of any sort on income or his vast properties. Many of his enemies have died. Until the time of this writing it would have been safe to say that the incalculable dollars contributed, but never banked in his name, by his communally working disciples might protect him, but now this seems unlikely. The Philistines of the law are on the tail of the little mouse which brought forth such an unaccountable mountain.
Mr. Parker has covered his subject thoroughly and written a book of interest to the student of sociology and the lay reader alike. There are but two aspects of it which he has slighted. What of Mother Divine, herself accredited with miracles? And what if ‘God’ dies?
HASSOLDT DAVIS