Warren Jeffs: A lighter version of Mohammed

Mormonism as a whole is a slightly lighter version of Islam. Maybe their “prophets” will get into a duel someday.

A much better comparison could be made to the scoundrel “Father Divine.” His tale is long, but worthy of remembrance and archive as an “American original”.

WHO IS THIS KING OF GLORY?
by St. Clair McKelway and A. J. Liebling
(This is part of a long portrait of Father Divine which was
published in The New Yorker in June, 1936.)

Father Divine has said on more than one occasion that he is
God. On the walls of his various Heavens here and in other
cities hang banners which state that

FATHER DIVINE IS GOD ALMIGHTY

and on the buses which take his followers on joyous excursions
from the Harlem Heavens to the Heavens of Newark and Jersey
City is the invariable, red-lettered inscription:

FATHER DIVINE
(God)

The effect of this bold claim, on the press and government of
the city in which he makes his headquarters, has been
remarkable. The papers, on the whole, have appeared to regard
his works as miraculous. The city government has been
singularly deferential in its attitude toward him. The two
principal candidates for Mayor of New York called on him at
one of the nightly meetings in his Harlem Heaven in 1933. “I
came here tonight,” said Mr. LaGuardia, “to ask Father
Divine’s help and counsel. Whatever he wants, I’ll do it for
him.” Mr. O’Brien, appearing before the meeting a little
earlier, had said, “Peace! Come what may, adversity, joy, or
sorrow, you can meet it by reason of your leadership under
Father Divine. Peace!” It looks sometimes as if a good many
people besides Father Divine’s followers think maybe he is
God.
Father Divine would like everybody to believe that he was born
mature, and only a few years ago, in Providence, which is
neither in Rhode Island nor the sky, but right here (or over
there), like the pantheistic Deity or the Buddhists’ eternal
life. “Except a man be born again,” Jesus told Nicodemus, “he
cannot see the Kingdom of God.” Father Divine not only sees
the Kingdom of God every day, but leases it and lives in one
of the main apartments himself. Naturally, he says, he had to
be born again before that could be. He insists that he can’t
remember who he was or what he was like before that happened.
“Can you remember back to before you were born?” he has asked
skeptics who have questioned him on this point.
If you bear firmly in mind the fact that the Father is a
short, dignified colored man with a bald head, the true story
of his life is more impressive than his story of divine
rebirth. It is a story of arduous struggle, onward and
upward, from obscurity to national prominence, from rags to
riches. In a mere forty years, he rose from hedge-clipper and
grass-cutter to evangelist, from evangelist to The Messenger,
from The Messenger to Major J. Devine, from Major J. Devine to
the Rev. J. Divine, and from the Rev. J. Divine to Father
Divine (God).

He is around sixty now, and the earliest records of his life
are obscure. People who knew him when he was in his twenties
think he came from Georgia, or Florida, or Virginia. They are
not sure which. But in 1899, beyond all question, he was a
man named George Baker and was earning an honest living in
Baltimore, mostly by clipping hedges and mowing lawns. He had
a scythe and a pair of pruning shears, and he would canvass
the white residential districts in spring and summer, offering
his services for fifty cents a day. He was frugal, and when
winter came he had usually saved up enough money to loaf for a
while. If his store of coins began to get too low, he would
find odd jobs on the docks. He did not seem to be very
ambitious.
On Sundays he taught in the Sunday school of the Rev. Mr.
Henderson’s Baptist Church on Eden Street. He was a serious-
minded young fellow and worried a lot about God. He didn’t
feel, or claim to be, closer to God than any of the other
members of the Rev. Mr. Henderson’s colored congregation. He
just taught his Sunday-school class, read his Bible, and went
about his work during the week with his head full of large
words and sounding phrases. At Wednesday night prayer
meetings in the church he sometimes made little speeches, as
any member of the congregation had a right to do, and in these
he almost always would get tangled up with some tremendous
thought, such as “God is personified and materialized.” He
would grasp the thought firmly and wrestle with it. “God,” he
would say, “is not only personified and materialized. He is
repersonified and rematerialized. He rematerializes and He
rematerialates. He rematerialates and He is
rematerializatable. He repersonificates and He
repersonifitizes.” He would go on like that for a while,
sweating, his eyes bulging a little, and then he would stop
abruptly and resume his seat. People liked to hear him talk
even then. There would be cries of “Amen, brother!” and
“Brother, ain’t it so!” between his words and sometimes
between the syllables of his words. But he wasn’t the superb
orator then that he is now, and he never seemed to be quite
sure what it was he was driving at.

***

Twenty years later, George Baker, who by a process of multiple
birth had become The Messenger and then Major J. Devine, was
born a fourth time, and then a fifth time, almost as soon as
he established himself in Sayville, Long Island, in 1919. He
became Rev. J. Divine, dropping the military title and
adopting a vowel which gave the name a supernatural
significance. Then almost immediately afterward he became
Father Divine (God). He has been God ever since. A few weeks
ago his disciples in Harlem stretched a streamer of black-
and-gold silk across the throne of Heaven, the headquarters of
the cult, on West 115th Street, with the blaring legend:

FATHER DIVINE IS DEAN OF THE UNIVERSE

But that is rank hyperbole. The promotion to Dean of the
Universe is simply a gratuitous expression of the enthusiasm
of his followers and does not represent a formal rebirth.
Neither in the early years in Sayville nor in the later years
in Harlem has Father Divine ever hinted that he considers
himself to be anything more than God.
As God, after he had settled down in Sayville, he was modest
and almost entirely without affectation. His white neighbors
on Macon Street were never exactly friendly with him, but they
didn’t object to him particularly. It was not a pretentious
street. The houses, set back from the curbs in comfortable,
shady yards, were occupied mostly by people who worked in the
village the year round. The summer colony was on the other
side of the Merrick Road and the hotels and great estates were
still further away. To his neighbors, Father Divine was known
not as Major J. Devine, the name he had signed to the deed
when he bought his house, but as the Rev. J. Divine, and he
told them he was operating an employment agency. He seemed to
be an exceptionally clean, upright, and dignified colored man,
with soft doe eyes and gentle manners. The neighbors did not
know until some years later that he was supposed to be God.
They used to see him doing odd jobs around his yard in his
spare time, pruning the shrubbery, cutting the grass, and
tidying up the places where the former owner had allowed
rubbish to accumulate. He was alone all day except for a
cook. The twenty-odd men and women who lived with him were
workers. Some of them were in New York except on Sundays;
others left the house in the morning and returned in the
evening. They were decent, orderly colored folk, and bothered
nobody. They sang a good deal at night, especially on Sunday,
but the singing was soft and they never kept it up much later
than nine o’clock. Inside the house George Baker was called
Father Divine, and all his followers were sure that he was
God.
Once each week Father Divine walked to the office of the
Suffolk County News, down the block from the Oystermen’s Bank
& Trust Company, and placed a classified advertisement
offering reliable colored help for all work. Whenever a
householder answered the advertisement, Father Divine would
call in person, bearing a business card marked “Rev. J.
Divine.” He would remove his hat and, standing on the
doorstep, would say, “I can guarantee and reguarantee the
character and probity and uprighteousness of all my clients.”
People liked him, and within a year or so, working at a
leisurely pace, he got jobs in and near Sayville for all of
the early disciples. This relieved the communal purse of the
cost of commuting, which had been a considerable strain.
These early followers of Father Divine had never had much to
give him but their wages, and their wages were never high.
They were poor people who labored on the outer fringe of
domestic service. None of them was expert as cook or
laundress. They worked mostly for families of three or four
who could afford one servant and who paid not more than $10 or
$12 a week. But now Father Divine began to attract from the
kitchens and butlers’ pantries of the summer hotels and big
houses of Nassau and Suffolk Counties a new kind of disciple—
colored people of some means, who earned sometimes as much as
$100 a month, slept and ate in their employers’ houses, and
had bank accounts and insurance policies. To these people
Father Divine seemed to be God in an even more wonderful
degree than he had been to the early followers. As he became
acquainted with the better class of colored folk in Sayville
and neighboring towns, he began to invite them to Sunday
dinners at his house; he preached to them after dinner, and
never took up a collection. When the guests asked him
candidly how he managed to give them free dinners, he would
say cheerfully, “Father will provide,” and his disciples would
say, “It’s wonderful! Ain’t it wonderful? Sweet Father is God
Almighty!” He enjoyed no sudden popularity. He attracted
people to his house only by twos and threes. Some Sundays
there were no outside guests at all; on others there might be
three or four. For six or seven years Father Divine’s
progress was slow. It was not until the late nineteen-
twenties that things began to boom.

The experiences of a butler-and-cook couple named Thomas and
Verinda Brown, who worked for a substantial white family in
Forest Hills and earned a joint salary of $150 a month, plus
board and room, are typical of the experiences of scores of
disciples who joined the cult of Father Divine about this
time. Thomas and Verinda occupied prominent places in Father
Divine’s Heaven from 1930 until 1933. They were what Father
Divine calls Angels, a title conferred upon any person who
assigns all his property to Father Divine, hands over all the
money he earns, and takes a new name. Verinda was called
Rebecca-Grace, and throughout one Sunday dinner in 1931 sat at
the right hand of God. Thomas was called Onward Universe and
for a while was one of God’s favorite Angels. Now the two are
Thomas and Verinda again and are back in Forest Hills, working
for the same family they were with when they first met Father
Divine. They no longer believe that he is God.
Verinda is a very tall, very healthy-looking middle-aged
woman, the color of a fine mink coat. Her features are large
and frank—a great nose, an enormous jaw, a mouth that opens
and shuts decisively. Her natural expression is an expansive
grin. Thomas is shorter, darker, less vivacious, a sort of
understatement of Verinda. His eyes are drowsy and slow-
moving. He is deliberate, methodical, and thoughtful by
nature. Verinda comes from Barbados, Thomas from the Bahamas.
Both have been in this country thirty years or more and they
have been married ten. Both are excessively neat; Thomas is
even something of a dude, and at one time owned sixteen suits of
clothes, all of them in fair condition. Verinda is a fine
cook and a capable children’s nurse; as a butler and house
man, Thomas is efficient and has a soothing manner. They are
decent, honest people. They estimate that during the time
they were Angels in Sayville they gave Father Divine, freely
and of their own accord, something over $5,ooo, itemized as
follows:

Savings withdrawn from the Railroad
Cooperative Building & Loan Association. $700
Verinda’s salary of $75 a month from April,
1930, to October, 1933. $3,225
Gold coins $100
Seven Florida lots (estimated value) $350
Thomas’s salary, averaging $75 a month, for six
months in 1930 $450
Thomas’s earnings at odd jobs in Sayville during
eighteen months of 1931-32 $750
Fifteen suits of clothes relinquished by Thomas
(estimated value) $85

Total $5,660

The manner in which Verinda and Thomas became acquainted with
Father Divine seemed to them for a long time afterward to be
clearly miraculous. One day in the spring of 1929, after
Father Divine’s Sunday dinners had become quite an event for
the colored population in and near Sayville without attracting
attention in other quarters, a laundryman in Forest Hills made
a mistake and left some strange clean clothes at the home in
which Thomas and Verinda worked. Thomas knew that another
family down the street patronized the same laundry, so he took
the bundle to the servants’ entrance of that house and
introduced himself to the cook. He asked if by any chance the
laundry bundles for the two houses had been transposed, and
found that was just what had happened. The cook was a happy
colored woman who said her name was Priscilla Paul. “After
the Apostle,” she explained. Thomas himself was a constant
reader of the Bible and he and Priscilla exchanged, along with
the laundry bundles, a few Biblical texts. They parted
friends. “Peace! It’s wonderful!” Priscilla said as Thomas
started off, and Thomas still remembers how pleasant and
reassuring it sounded. (”It’s a catching phrase,” he says now,
in the depths of his agnosticism.)
That night Priscilla Paul came to see Verinda and Thomas in
their kitchen. “Peace!” she said as she entered. “It’s
wonderful!” She invited them to come to the evening meal at
her father’s house in Sayville the next Sunday. She explained
that she went to Sayville every Sunday herself and suggested
they go with her on the bus. They accepted, and on Sunday
were surprised but not displeased to find themselves at a sort
of religious meeting. The dinner was very good. The fact
that each plate, before it was passed to the eater, was
blessed by the man Priscilla and all the other diners called
“Father” rather appealed to Verinda and Thomas. Father Divine
said nothing memorable in his sermon after dinner. He did not
say he was God, or even intimate it, but his phrasemaking was
glorious, and Thomas especially liked the Biblical sound of
the things Father Divine said. Verinda thought Father Divine
had the loveliest, softest eyes she had ever seen.
Verinda and Thomas had Sundays off after midday dinner, and
they became regular visitors at Father Divine’s house. They
asked him if they shouldn’t pay for the meals they had every
Sunday—told him they’d be more than glad to, because they
enjoyed themselves so much. But he would always wave them
away with a cheerful smile and say, “Father will provide.” It
was wonderful. As they got to know the other disciples—a
preoccupied and prim old fellow named Gabriel; an elderly
woman named Susanna, who sang beautifully; and others named
Ruth Rachel, Hozanna Love, Faith Sweetness, Frank Incense,
Blessed Charity, and so on—they began to learn how much more
wonderful it was than they had dreamed. Not only did the
Father provide a dinner every week that must have cost $15 or
$20; he worked other miracles besides. The loaves-and-fishes
trick, to him, was just a routine. He was a healer, too.
Everybody there, it seemed, had been cured of some physical or
spiritual disorder. After dinner in the evenings, between
songs like:

Father Divine is the Perfect God
Perfect God,
Perfect God ...

and

I love to sing the praise of thee,
Sweet Father Divine.
I love to sing the praise of thee,
Be practical all the time,

testimonials would be given by the Angels. This phase of the
meeting was a sort of burnt-cork Buchmanism. Verinda and
Thomas were perfectly healthy physically, but both had stern
consciences and they managed to join in by telling about
things they had done wrong, and explaining that, since they
had come to know the Father, they didn’t do wrong any more.

In the Father’s sermons at this time there ran a refrain which
had to do with “conscious mentality.” He would say,
“Relaxation of the conscious mentality is the super-mental
relaxativeness of mankind.” The Angels, who sat nearest to him
at the big dinner table, had achieved this sublime state, it
seemed. They had relaxed their conscious mentalities until
they had been born again as Angels, they had got fine new
names, and they didn’t remember anything that had ever
happened to them in the past. Verinda and Thomas thought the
Angels, and everything about them, were enviable, and they
began to try to relax their conscious mentalities. The way to
do this, they were told, was to love the Father and think
about him all the time.
The employers of Verinda and Thomas were puzzled, and somewhat
unnerved, when, during this period, their splendid servants
seemed to be going to pieces. Upon being reprimanded for
breaking dishes or being slow with the cocktail things, Verinda
and Thomas would explain mournfully that they were trying to
relax their conscious mentalities. They seemed preoccupied,
sad, and solemn, and they probably would have lost their jobs
had they not been faithful servants for nine years past.
Besides the worry over their conscious mentalities, they had
anxieties which their employers did not understand. Thomas
and Verinda had grown to love Father Divine. He had been so
kind to them during those first months, and he had seemed to
know everything, to feel everything, to be so confident when
he said, over and over at the dinners, “Your Father is rich
in all your needs and all your wants shall be supplied.” Those
ecstatic shouts of “Yes, Father, you are so wonderful!” and
“Thank you, Father!” which came from the Angels were impressive
and contagious. There was something keenly satisfying and
delightful about the idea of putting one’s trust in somebody as
the Angels put their trust in Father Divine. Verinda and Thomas
had begun to think of him as God. And now, just when they were
loving him so, and were trying so hard to please him, he seemed
not to notice them at all. They found themselves seated further
and further away from him every Sunday. When he looked at them
at all, it was as if he despised them. He was always talking
these days about sacrifice and self-denial and consecration,
building the words up till they seemed four times as big as
they really were. “He who would enter into the Kingdom of God
must have nothing he can call his own,” he would say
sometimes, candidly. He preached against life insurance,
against all forms of insurance, and said that anybody who
stood to benefit by an insurance policy was a murderer or an
incendiarist at heart. “Look,” he would say, “at the Snyder-
Gray case. If Albert Snyder hadn’t been insured, he would
never have been killed. He was putting temptation in the way
of the iniquitous. Live right and keep my commandments and
you shall never die. It is so written. He who insures his
life or his property is a man of little faith.” He did not
tell his followers that he had insured his house against fire
with the Firemen’s Insurance Company, the Glens Falls
Insurance Company, and the National Liberty Insurance Company,
but he had.
When Verinda and Thomas heard the speech against insurance
they were delighted. It seemed to be addressed directly to
them. They had small insurance policies of the kind that may
be cashed in, and they applied for the money that Monday.
When they got the cash the next week, Verinda bought a trunk
for Thomas and Thomas bought a diamond ring for Verinda. Then
they made a special night trip to Sayville to tell the Father
about it, feeling sure that he would be pleased.
“Why didn’t you ask me what to do with the money?” he demanded
bluntly, and added in a more Godlike tone, “He that loveth
father or mother, son or daughter, husband or wife, more than
me is not worthy to enter the Kingdom of God.” They were
abashed. Verinda, quicker of tongue than Thomas, said she was
so sorry and asked the Father’s forgiveness. They had, she
said after a silence, a joint account in the Railroad
Cooperative Building & Loan Association that contained about
$700. They would do anything Father wished with that, she
said. Father Divine said, “Draw it out. Lay not up treasures
on earth where moth and thief and mouse break in and steal,
but lay it up in Heaven with your Father.”
This they did. Father Divine got the $700 that Friday. Then,
for a while, Thomas and Verinda dwelt in a state of beatitude.
They were told that they had achieved the rank of Angels and were
permitted to choose new names for themselves. Verinda chose
Rebecca Grace, after some advice from the other Angels.
Thomas had already thought up Onward Universe for himself, and
he adopted it forthwith. They remained Thomas and Verinda to
their employers, but they explained one day that their old
names were really just nicknames, that their real names now
were Rebecca Grace and Onward Universe. “But you just keep
calling us Thomas and Verinda,” Thomas said to his master.
“That will be perfectly all right.”
Thomas and Verinda were happy now. They were moved back
nearer the head of the table, and Father Divine beamed on them
with heart-warming affection. As a matter of course, without
being invited to do so by the Father, they began at once to
turn over their wages to him every week, as all the other
Angels did. Thomas took the deeds to his Florida lots out of
his trunk and signed them over to the Father. When Verinda’s
mistress, the following year, gave her a bonus Of $100 in
gold, Verinda turned that over to the Father. For one Sunday,
Verinda sat on the right hand of God, and Thomas, only a few
seats away, found himself talking intimately with God during
dinner. They never talked with the other Angels about the
money they were giving to Father Divine because part of the
gospel taught at Heaven was that true believers “relaxed all
recollection of material transactions.” This was a phrase
which, with prefixes and suffixes, Father Divine built into
something of impressive proportions.
Father Divine was a keen-eyed God. He noticed that Thomas had
on a different suit nearly every time he came to Heaven, and
one day he asked Thomas about that and learned that Thomas had
sixteen suits. “Bring me fifteen of those suits,” he told
Thomas. “Ask how the lilies of the field are clothed, and they
spin not.”
He was a jealous God, too. In Brooklyn he had always preached
the gospel of celibacy to the followers who lived in the flat
with him, and now, in Sayville, with about twenty Angels
living with him and forty living with their employers, he
preached the same gospel with even more determination. When
the conscious mentality is really relaxed, he argued, all love
except for the Father has to relax, too. Verinda and Thomas
were a devoted couple and they slept at night in a double bed.
They took the Father’s preaching literally and seriously, and
Thomas faced the same hardships as those third-century monks
who used to exercise themselves by inviting attractive women
to come to the monastery and tempt them. As Gibbon said of
the monks, outraged nature sometimes vindicated herself.
Whenever that happened, Verinda and Thomas would appear before
the Father ill at case and heavy of conscience, and he,
looking at them, would say, “I see you have sinned. You
cannot hide from God. I am everywhere. I see all. I know
all.” And they would moan and cry, “Oh, Father! Yes, Father!
Forgive us, Father! You are so wonderful, Father!”
A man of Thomas’s abilities was needed in Heaven, and six
months after Thomas became Onward Universe, he left his job
and his Verinda, and came to live in the house on Macon
Street. He was one of the principal Angels, and for a while
used to hold long Biblical discussions with the Father on
weekday evenings. He is handy with tools, and by day he
worked around Heaven, putting up partitions where the Father
wanted them, repairing the roof, and doing other useful
chores. Evidently it was worth the loss of Thomas’s salary to
Father Divine to have Thomas around. When there was nothing
for Thomas to do, he found odd jobs in the village and earned
a little cash from time to time, which he turned over to the
Father. Verinda kept her job in Forest Hills and came to
Heaven only on Sundays, as in the past. She used to meet
Thomas there, but never clandestinely, and when they spoke to
one another it was just to say, “Peace! It’s wonderful!” For a
long time it seemed to them that they were happier than they
had ever been before. Verinda remained a faithful follower of
Father Divine until the fall of 1933, By that time she had
become just one of sixty-odd Angels, she was beginning to have
her doubts about the divinity of the Father, and she was tired
of not having any spending money. Her employers in Forest
Hills, who were fond of her, advised her to quit going to
Father Divine’s meetings, and finally she took their advice.
Thomas stayed with Father Divine until last year, by which
time he had been demoted to furnace man in the Harlem Heaven.
Then one day he walked out, got his old job back, and his
Verinda, and never returned.

A good many other Angel couples became estranged in the same
way during the Sayville period. Some of them lived separately
in Heaven itself and some lived separately outside, and all of
them were lonely, their hearts were full of affection, and
they didn’t love anybody but God. He looked after everything.
As he had done in Brooklyn with his early disciples, he now
provided second-hand clothes for his Angels, skillfully
altered and made over by Angel seamstresses. The Angels had
no outside expenses to speak of. They had no doctors’ bills
to pay. Father Divine preached against doctors and dentists.
“Father is the Doctor” became the refrain of one of the
Heavenly songs. If a disciple was in the habit of going to a
clinic for treatment of some disease, even the most contagious
ones, Father Divine frowned upon him and told him not to be of
little faith. Death, he said, could not come to a true
believer. If it did come, it was a proof that the dead Angel
had not been a true believer. At least one Angel died at the
Sayville Heaven. This was a woman named Bowman. It was
recorded at the time that she was a pauper, with no relatives
to pay for her funeral, and she was buried in the town’s
potter’s field.
How much money Father Divine was taking in during the winter
Of 1929-30 is anybody’s guess. Figuring that sixty skilled
and unskilled disciples earned an average Of $15 a week apiece
(some of them in those boom years were making $40 and $50),
the total, aside from insurance policies and savings accounts
which he took over, would have been $900 a week.
The Sunday dinners had become large affairs by the spring of
1930. Word of the strange preacher who seemed to be God, who
gave free Sunday dinners, and who never took up a collection,
had got back to Harlem. People began to go out to Sayville
from Harlem to see for themselves and to eat the miraculous
dinners. But they, like the new disciples, were not riffraff.
The round-trip ticket from New York to Sayville cost $2.40
and it was cheaper for people who had to count the pennies to
eat at home. Only the well-to-do class of Negroes came to
Father Divine’s Sunday dinners. Some of them became Angels.
A few newspaper stories appeared, all of them marvelling at
the hospitality of Father Divine, and after the publicity
white people began to go to the Sunday dinners in Sayville.
There was a Mrs. Withers, of Long Island City, for instance,
who went through the customary initiation and eventually
became an Angel named Sister Everjoy. She had been a
Christian Scientist, had lost a child, and was vulnerable to
any kind of new faith that came along. There was J. Maynard
Matthews, an automobile dealer of Brookline, Massachusetts,
who had tried Divine Science, Unity, and a number of swamis
and yogis without having found what he wanted. He presented
Father Divine with a Cadillac, abandoned his business, and
became the Father’s secretary. His name is John Lamb and he
is one of the most important Angels in the movement. Other
white followers arrived from all over the country, not in
great numbers, but singly, one at a time—a widow from
Charlotte, North Carolina; a doctor from Chicago; a young
accountant from Kansas City. They were solitaries, marked by
that peculiar, agonized look which profound faith seems to
bring to people’s eyes, and they were all looking for some new
kind of life on earth.
By midsummer that year, the Sayville police on Sundays had to
put no-parking signs up and down the block in which Heaven
stood, to prevent hopeless traffic jams. Trucks and buses
were bringing scores of Negroes out from Harlem every week.
Father Divine’s neighbors rented parking space in their front
yards, thus combatting the nascent depression. Not more than
seventy-five persons could be seated in Father Divine’s
dining-room, and he served the Sunday dinners to hundreds, in
shifts, all day long and into the evening. A new technique of
serving these meals was introduced about this time. The
hungry visitors would sit down around the table and Father
Divine would bless, first of all, the coffee and tea, and
those drinks would be served. There would be an interval of
thirty minutes or so, during which everybody was urged to have
four or five cups apiece. Then, when the diners had reached a
bloated condition, great platters of spaghetti, potatoes, Lima
beans, and other starches would be blessed and served.
Another half-hour would go by before the impressive hams,
roasts, chickens, and turkeys would appear. Usually these
dishes, having been blessed and offered to everybody, would
leave the table almost intact, to be blessed and served again
at successive meals for the rest of the day, and to turn up
again on quiet week nights when the Angels sat down to dinner.
Father Divine himself found the Heavenly meals unsatisfactory.
He usea to call on Verinda a little before noon on Sundays in
her kitchen in Forest Hills and she would invite him to have a
bite to eat. “I can’t do that,” he would say, drawing himself
up to the table. “My Angels are waiting on me in Sayville, to
bless their food,” he would protest. Verinda would cook up
some scrambled eggs, pancakes, sausage, fried potatoes, and
coffee, and the Father would fall to, remarking that he might
have a snack, at that, to strengthen him on his drive back to
Sayville. “When I scrambled eggs for him,” Verinda says now,
“I always scrambled six.”
As Father Divine’s fame increased, so did the suspicions of
many people outside his cult. Letters were sent to him
containing cash, money orders, and checks, by investigators in
the pay of the Sayville police authorities, who thought he
might be open to prosecution on a federal charge of using the
mails to defraud. In every case the enclosure was returned
with a note that said, “Father will provide.” The Suffolk
County District Attorney planted two colored women from Harlem
in Father Divine’s Heaven in an effort to find out where his
money came from, but at the end of two weeks they told him
they hadn’t been able to find out anything. This procedure
was doomed from the start, for the reason that the two colored
women were Harlem followers of Father Divine and were well on
the way toward becoming Angels themselves. In the end, the
Suffolk County authorities ceased trying to work up a criminal
case against Father Divine. Nobody could with authority
challenge his claim that his money came to him out of the sky.
“Everything comes to him automatically because he’s God,”
the Angels used to say, and it seemed to be the only possible
explanation.
By fall of that year, there were so many Angels in Heaven that
Father Divine had to expand. Property in his block had
declined in value somewhat since the big meetings had begun,
and he bought the house next door, at No. 64 Macon Street. It
is a smaller house than the other one, and was used as a
dormitory for female Angels. This left room in Heaven for an
extra dining-room to accommodate the guests who came each
Sunday in increasing numbers. Father Divine had by this time
about a hundred and fifty Angels living with him. In the
summer of 1931, he leased a house across the street for white
Angels exclusively. About the same time he established what
he called an Extension Heaven in Harlem, a flat of five or six
rooms on Fifth Avenue at 128th Street. Some twenty Angels who
worked in New York lived in the Extension Heaven just as the
suburban Angels lived in the one at Sayville. The sexes were
segregated, and one of Father Divine’s principal Angels looked
after the marketing, directed the household work, and collected
the wages of all the Angels every payday.
By the fall of 1931, the police authorities in Sayville and
the Suffolk County District Attorney had decided that Father
Divine was a public nuisance, and he was arrested on that
charge on November 16th of that year. After a change of venue
had been obtained, he was brought to trial in Nassau County,
before justice Lewis J. Smith, who turned out to be the man
who contributed as much as anybody to the present greatness of
Father Divine. The justice, according to the opinion of the
higher court which subsequently overruled him, permitted
prejudice to enter into the trial and charged the jury in a
manner that virtually demanded a verdict of guilty. Father
Divine was convicted and Justice Smith fined him $500 and
sentenced him to one year in jail. Four days after justice
Smith pronounced this sentence, he died. He had been a robust
man and was only fifty-five years old. His physicians said his
death was caused by heart failure. It was obvious to all of
Father Divine’s followers, and to thousands of people, both
white and colored, all over the country who read about it in
the newspapers, that Father Divine had struck down the
Justice. The appeal was handled brilliantly by James C.
Thomas, a Negro attorney who is a former Assistant United
States District Attorney. He donated his services because he
believed the issue to be one of racial prejudice. When the
Appellate Division reversed the conviction in January, 1933,
it was accepted as further evidence of the divinity of Father
Divine. The Angels gave Mr. Thomas no credit at all for the
victory.
During the five weeks Father Divine had been held in jail
without bail, scores of new followers joined his cult. The
Heavens in Sayville, and the branch in Harlem, had been
efficiently maintained by a few trusted Angels, who came to
him often at the Nassau County Jail for instruction and
advice. He was ready now to expand still further, and he
selected Harlem as his new headquarters. Leaving a few
elderly Angels to look after his property in Sayville, he
moved to New York. By this time not fewer than three hundred
Angels were turning over to him everything they earned.

When Father Divine addresses his followers these days in
Heaven, a roomy, five-story structure at 20 West 115th Street,
his demeanor is marked by an alertness which suggests that he
is an extremely nervous man. One of his favorite routines is
that of leading a chant which starts like this:

One million blessings,
Blessings flowing free,
Blessings flowing free.
There are so many blessings,
Blessings flowing free for you.

Then it goes:

One billion blessings,
Blessin-s flowing free,
Blessings flowing free,
There are so many blessings,
Blessings flowing free for you,

and so on-trillion, quadrillion, quintillion, and on up to
what he calls septdecillion. He shouts the catch line of each
verse and then, as he hums the chorus and the followers sing,
his soft eyes begin to wander. They shift rapidly over the
audience, they glance for an instant at the entrance door, at
the exits, and once or twice during the singing of a verse he
turns half about and looks sharply behind him. He seems
agitated and apprehensive, and it is clear that there is more
on his mind than the task of conducting a religious meeting.
He has the detached, preoccupied manner of a bartender in the
early days of prohibition who, while mixing a highball, was
always wondering when the police would come in.

*****

EPILOGUE:

Although he promised that he would ascend to Heaven in an
airplane, he died of old age (either 88 or 4,000), in 1965,
leaving an estate of $10 million. As for judge Lewis J.
Smith, Father Divine told reporters, “I hated to do it!”
He also frequently seduced his secretaries and Angels with
such lines as, “Mary wasn’t a virgin” and “I am bringing
your desire to the surface so I can eliminate it.”
Truly a God to emulate.

Saying mohammed was worse than Jeffs does not give Jeffs a pass.

Jeffs is a sick, twisted, pervert child molestor. And so was Joseph Smith and every “prophet” at least through 1890.

Saying mohammed was worse than Jeffs does not give Jeffs a pass.

Jeffs is a sick, twisted, pervert child molestor.
///
absolutely. but why can people be arrested, in half the world, for speaking the truth about Muhammad?

we can call Jeffs a child molester. we reject his religion.
but we are forced to accept the “religion” of Islam.
who’s founder had sex with a 9 year old, and “thighed” her since he married her at age 6...

a religion that doesn’t respect our constitution, and in fact calls for it’s overthrown.

I'll bet Mittens isn't appreciating all this ‘Mormon’ publicity right at this time.
True, Mormons no longer practice pologamy but..
Just sayin’.

Glad to see Amber Pawlik writing again.
Be sure to catch her ‘Islam on Trial’ here:
http://www.amberpawlik.com/IslamonTrial.html

Sure he’s not as bad.

http://www.statesman.com/news/texas/jury-hears-tape-of-polygamist-discussing-sex-with-1686577.html

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2758133/posts?page=2

yep, she’s awesome. very analytical.
i wish her, and Wafa Sultan, Walid Shoebat, Robert Spencer,
Phyllis Chesler, Brigitte Gabriel, and most of all, Ali Sina,
were known even as well as the latest “American Idol”.

http://www.faithfreedom.org/the-challenge/the-challenge/
Dr Sina has actually debated many Muslim scholars, and is truly brilliant.

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I wish Pawlik would write an article about Obama being Muslim, using the evidence at hand.

Ali Sina is one of my favorites.
This article, ‘Understanding Obama, the Making of the Fuehrer’ is the best article I’ve ever read explaining him and his rabid followers:

http://www.faithfreedom.org/obama.html

(Long, but worth every bit of your time to read it)

.

It’s still a moral imperative, however. That’s why a Mormon widower remarries inside of 6 months.

That’s why a Mormon widower remarries inside of 6 months.

Yes. For even your "standard" (unfundamentalist) Mormons, they actually believe in ALL three tenses:
Past: 19th century into early 20th-century Mormon America.
Present: Colonized away from U.S. to a locale near the star Kolob, where "standard" Mormons believe polygamy continues due to their unique doctrine of "marriage is forever."
Future in a celestial world: Mormon policy is that if a widow or widower marries multiple spouses in their temple (of course, serially, not simultaneously) -- and death separates the initial spouse...the person becomes an eternal polygamist.
Future on Planet Earth: Lds "apostle" Bruce McConkie taught in his book Mormon Doctrine (p. 578) that the Mormon jesus would re-institute plural marriage when he returned.

It's pure Mormon PR spin for them to try to correct the supposed "myth" or "misunderstanding" that polygamy was only yesteryear.

Mormons have not...
...condemned McConkie & his doctrine;
...nor condemned past Lds polygamists;
...nor changed their position on "marriage is forever..."
...nor changed their policy that men and women can get married in the temple "for eternity" to multiple partners...(they only stipulate that it be done one at a time; the partner has to die, etc. before a plural marriage or another plural marriage can be entered into).

Right now in the Lds general hierarchy, there's a few such supposed "eternal polygamists" who have married more than one wife in the temple "for eternity."

I'm still waiting for some Mormon women to go public that they are married to multiple Mormon men in the temple for "eternity" -- and for them to talk about future sleeping arrangements in that celestial world!

It's because of the above that 'twas FREEPER P-Marlowe who once mentioned a "take-off" of Lds "prophet's" Lorenzo Snow's famous Mormon "couplet."

Snow once said: "As man now is, God once was
As God now is, man may become."

Ever since, Mormons have faithfully repeated that couplet. (Given that they don't actually have solid theological footing -- even in Mormon "scripture" -- that God was once a man & that we can become gods, too...of course, Mormons have had to rely upon sayings & couplets to try to fill the vacuum.)

P-Marlowe's take-off couplet -- which applies to your 'widower' comment:

"As fLDS now are, LDS once were.
As fLDS now are, LDS may become."

Of course, this reflects the Mormon theological tenses of polygamy mentioned above.

wow. thank you!
...i read almost every article at his old site, many years ago.
(including a bunch of essays by one particular woman,
i think she used “Aisha”. she was awesome too.)
i recall him talking about Nacissism and Obama, but i never saw that long article. you’re right, it’s worth reading even now.
(and if more people knew about that, and his Chicago “New Party”, etc., he would never have won in 2008.)

...as for Obama being a Muslim, he simply is, according to Islam. the “beautiful” prayer he recited flawlessly for that NY Times reporter in 2008, contains the shahada kalima.
the entire Muslim world knows he WAS a Muslim. and so, he’s either STILL a Muslim, practicing kitman, or, he is an apostate.
(and, there are many many things supporting the later. the gold ring being repaired, no birthday presents for his daughters, this not wanting military trials with the death penalty, and much more.
...the birthday presents being haram, i learned about back when i was secretly dating a Muslim girl. which was partly why i learned so much about Islam.)

anyway, i’m very glad to meet another admirer of Dr. Sina.
he’s done a lot of good, for a lot of people.
anyone that Imams hate that much, is my hero!
(like that Coptic Priest, who Al-Queda put $25 million on!)

Yeah. You’re exactly right.
Thanks for the reply.

Wasn’t that a great article? As timely today as it was in 2008.
I’ve never seen one where Obama and his rabid followers are better described.

A few exerpts for those who haven’t read it:

‘Obama evinces symptoms of pathological narcissism..’

‘When sane people fall for the lies of an insane man, they act insanely.’

“A cult of personality or personality cult arises when a country’s leader uses mass media to create a heroic public image through unquestioning flattery and praise. Cults of personality are often found in dictatorships but can be found in some democracies.’

‘When you fall for someone to the extent that Obama’s followers have fallen for him, you surrender your reason and individuality to him willingly. When millions of people surrender their hearts and their minds to one person the result can be catastrophic. This is what happened in Germany with Hitler, in China with Mao, in the Soviet Union with Stalin, in Cuba with Castro, in Iran with Khomeini..’
‘Narcissists need their narcissistic supply to fuel their narcissism. They get it through adulation from people around them. These people are often also needy people. They are known as co-dependants. The narcissist and his co-dependent therefore, form a sick symbiosis in which both benefit.’

‘One must never underestimate the manipulative genius of pathological narcissists. They project such an imposing personality that it overwhelms those around them. Charmed by the charisma of the narcissist, people become like clay in his hands. They cheerfully do his bidding and delight to be at his service. The narcissist shapes the world around himself and reduces others in his own inverted image. He creates a cult of personality. His admirers become his co-dependents.’

‘Narcissists are amoral. They consider themselves to be above the law. Once in power, they will try to strengthen their hold by surrounding themselves with equally amoral people.’

‘The narcissist’s anger and intolerance is projected on his servile followers who also become angry and intolerant of criticism of their leader. Remember the sick symbiosis between the narcissist and his codependents? The followers get their narcissistic supply by elevating the status of their leader. The greater he looks, the better they feel. They see their glory is his glory. Conversely, when the narcissist is criticized, his followers become offended. They take those criticisms personally and their instinct of self defense is triggered. They will become vigilantes and will silence their critics through intimidation, bullying, mocking, threats and violence (like calling those who disagree with Obama, racists).’

‘The truth is that while everyone carries a misconceived collective guilt towards the blacks for wrongs done centuries ago by a bygone people to a bygone people, the blacks carry a collective rancor, enmity or vendetta towards non-blacks and to this day want to “stand up” to the Whiteman. They seem to be stuck in 19th century.’

‘If Obama turns out to be the disaster I predict, he will cause widespread resentment among the whites. The blacks are unlikely to give up their support of their man. They are in a state of trance. They truly believe Obama is their messiah. He is the fruition of their long quest for black power.’

‘Could all this phenomenal support and unbounded adulation erupt into violence? All the abuses and killings in Nazi Germany were done by the Germans, ordinary people who loved Hitler and believed in the glorious tomorrow that he was promising them. Hitler was insane, but those who did his bidding were not. Despite being smart, they did not hesitate to fulfill their fuehrer’s wishes and commit the most heinous crimes. The same thing happened in Iran. Ordinary people, once under the spell of Khomeini, acted like beasts. This is what happens when sane people follow insane people.’

‘Could the same thing happen in America? Why not? Look how millions of people literally worship Obama. With some people I cannot even talk about Obama. They cannot tolerate any criticism of him. They get angry and, not only they want to end the conversation but threaten to end the friendship. I am familiar with this kind of religious devotion to a person. The reaction that I get from Obama worshippers is similar to that of Muslims when their prophet is criticized. They are even prone to insult you. See how they overlook Obama’s blatant lies and are willing to forgive his major sins such as racism. Note how the mainstream media bends the rules, twists the facts, exaggerates Obama’s little virtues, absolves his sins, and even lies to sell him to the public. Compare the royal treatment that the liberal press has given to Obama to how unfairly they treat Governor Palin; how they smear her character and belittle her experience and achievement.’

‘I predict that in less than four years, racial tensions in America will increase to levels never seen since the turbulent 1960s. Obama will set the clock back decades. Despite his campaign rhetoric he has been a racist all his life. He will interpret any dissent as a rejection of his racial identity. As resentment towards him increases, so will his paranoia. He will grow distrustful of the whites and will surround himself with the blacks and other yesmen with whom he identifies himself. America’s near future is bleak.’

http://www.faithfreedom.org/obama.html