Cults: A Deity Derepersonifitized

When George Baker first got into the God game back in 1907, the pantheon was packed. What with such ranking deities as Father Obey, Elijah of the Fiery Chariot, St. John the Vine, and Joe World, among many others, the heavenly host could hardly muster enough worshipers to go around. So George, an itinerant lawn mower and hedge clipper from Georgia, settled for an apprentice apostleship — a “God in the Sonship Degree” — with Father Jehovia, a former Pittsburgh steelworker who had a cult in Baltimore.

But George was not cut out to be a second-class celestial. When he died last week in Philadelphia, at an undocumentable age close to 100, he had long since reached the terrestrial top of his profession and, in a skeptical age, out lived Olympus. As Father Divine, the pyknic, cherub-faced leader of countless thousands who believed that he was God Himself and Dean of the Universe had, in a sense, shuffled off the mortal coil some 50 years earlier.

Father Divine’s followers devoured his every word—and his pronouncements were seldom easy to digest. Many transmogrified their civil names into such heavenly appellations as Blessed Faithful, Sincere Determination, Philip Love Life and Perseverance Star. The rallying cry and everyday salutation for the faithful was “Peace, it’s wonderful!,” and even for the scores of thousands who took chastity vows and gave the Godhead all their filthy lucre, the Divine Kingdom seemed paradise enow.

High-Priced Heavens. Skeptics dismissed the little (5 ft. 2 in.) Father as a charlatan or a simple lunatic. Yet he was an upright man, both generous and just There was not a hint of racial militancy or Black Muslim arrogance in his organization; fully 25% of his worshipers were white.

His terrestrial kingdom consisted of hundreds of properties, or “heavens”—from hotels to beauty parlors to moving firms. Worth at least $10 million, they are scattered throughout the U.S. and in Austria, Australia, Sweden, West Germany, Switzerland and England. Father Divine’s own abode, Woodmont, was the gift of a wealthy white disciple called John De Voute: it consisted of a 32-room mansion set on a 73-acre estate along Philadelphia’s Main Line. He seldom rode in anything but a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, dressed in $500 silk suits and usually wore a fortune in gem-encrusted rings. Yet he insisted that he owned not a jot or a tittle of his empire. And legally, he was penniless when he died. Said his lawyer: “He had nothing; he never had to pay any income tax.”

High-Decibel Hymnfests. The only property that Father Divine ever held in his own name was an eight-room house in Sayville, Long Island, where he settled in 1919 to minister to his growing congregation. During one highdecibel hymnfest there in 1931, the cops moved in and arrested Father Divine and 80 worshipers, some of them white. God Himself pleaded guilty to a disorderly conduct charge stemming from the noisy singing, and Judge Lewis J. Smith sentenced him to jail. Four days later, when Judge Smith fell dead at 50 of a heart attack, Father Divine sighed, “I hated to do it.”

Word of that powerful happening mightily multiplied the fold. Moving to Harlem at the depth of the Depression, Father Divine used the alms of his flock to support countless missions that offered generous meals for 150 and immaculate rooms for $2 a week, organized a chain of employment agencies to provide jobs and Divine guidance for the needy. Said a white social worker in Harlem during those years: “Father Divine rendered an inestimable service, and he did it with genuine goodness.”

Smiting the Wicked. The flock had its tribulations. In 1941 an apostate sheep sued Father Divine to recover a $3,937 contribution, and a New York court found in her favor. In a moment of godly wrath, he threatened to “evaporate for 1,900 years” but instead moved to Philadelphia. He never forgave New York. Later, in the midst of a dry spell in 1950, he prophesied: “I will dry up your rivers and I will dry up your streams. This water shortage in New York City has been just a slight sketch and reflection of what I will do!” He lived to see his words come true with the drought of 1965.

Smiting the wicked became a habit. During World War II, he wrote a letter warning Japanese Emperor Hirohito: “Surrender or be totally annihilated and become extinct.” Three months later the atom bomb fell on Hiroshima. As Father Divine put it: “Things just don’t happen. Things happen just.”

The peak of ecstasy in the Kingdom of Peace came in 1949, when the evangelist made public his marriage to Edna Rose Ritchings, the comely 21-year-old daughter of a white Vancouver florist, his “Spotless Virgin Bride.” The original Mother Divine, a Negro, had died six years earlier; her spirit, Father Divine explained, had passed into Rose’s shapely form.

In recent years Father Divine had suffered from arteriosclerosis, and once-frequent pronouncements were seldom heard. But then, as one said: “Father has said everything there is to say about everything.” He had, indeed. He even defined the Divinity: “God ‘is repersonified and rematerialized. He rematerialates and he is rematerializatable. He repersonificates and he repersonifitizes.”

Few among his followers wept over Father Divine’s death last week. They knew well that he had only derepersonifitized, to rematerialate—who knows?—in 1,900 years.