Daddy Grace: A Celebrity Preacher and His House of Prayer

Conclusion

Conclusion The leadership of Daddy Grace deserves more than the cursory scholarly dismissal it has received for so many decades. As a daring institutional leader and a savvy businessman, Grace was the inspiration and motivational figurehead for a church that affected the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans over several decades. The House of Prayer gave members a place to invest their creative energies, rewarding them with a community of believers and, often, a unique role within that community. Furthermore, Grace’s success would be almost unfathomable were it not for the fact that he achieved the conventional “American dream.” Despite being an immigrant from a tiny Afro-Lusophone country and not having an extensive formal education, Grace built a vast organization with less than a decade of effort. He began by connecting small groups of people in both northern and southern locales up and down the East Coast, and he made them feel they were part of a big, important religious community; they, in turn, believed in that vision and helped make it a reality. Using strategies including open letters to his congregations , church publications distributed nationally, regularly scheduled regional events, and an annual touring cycle, Daddy Grace united religious seekers and provided them with social and religious fulfillment. The degree to which he made something out of nothing means he must be counted among not only the significant creative religious strategists of his era, but also with other dramatically self-made men in the North American context, such as John Jacob Astor, Andrew Carnegie, or even the American-born Franklin W. Woolworth. Though his success was in a vastly different kind of endeavor than these entrepreneurs’, their paths were the same: all were born into families of modest means, each young man had a vision of a larger enterprise he wanted to create, and each persisted with his goals through every incremental step toward “success.” In fact, one can draw reasonable lines of comparison not only between Grace and other self-made immigrant men, but also between 185 Grace and numerous categories of success stories. The most obvious comparison is that which has been made for decades: grouping Daddy Grace with other religious leaders of urban African Americans during the same era, such as Elijah Muhammad and Ida Robinson. One might reasonably compare him to other immigrants who became social leaders or to Pentecostal ministers or to preachers whose appeal straddled the Mason-Dixon line or to any number of other possible groups. However , the most beneficial comparison grows out of those factors that are particularly unique to Grace: his uncanny conglomeration of religion, pageantry, money, fame, and scandal. If Grace were alive to embody these characteristics in the present day, surely he would be discussed in the popular tabloids as a celebrity. In many ways, Daddy Grace was a celebrity preacher: a religious leader who became famous as much for who he was, or was perceived to be, as for what he actually did. After Grace reached a certain level of fame, people would have been hard-pressed to explain whether they went to House of Prayer events because of the particular religious content offered in services or just because they had heard of the bishop. He regularly went on tour to keep his public happy, and in each town admirers flocked around him, longing to see and to touch and to be touched by Grace. Along with them came the curious, who wanted to see what the fuss was about. Like a modern celebrity, Grace traveled in style with an entourage, he dressed in what seemed like costumes, and he had keen sense about publicity and interacting with the media. Though he was merely continuing in the distinctly American Protestant tradition of celebrity ministry, he was among the first to create a path for nonwhite preachers, and his personal style of fame was in many ways ahead of its time. Grace’s counterparts in that tradition included men who came long before him, like George Whitefield, Charles Finney , and Dwight Moody; overlapping with him were Billy Sunday and, though less of a character, Billy Graham; and not long after him came men such as Oral Roberts and Pat Robertson. Today, African American celebrity preachers who stylistically echo Daddy Grace include men such as Reverend Ike, Creflo Dollar, and T. D. Jakes, as well as the occasional preacher who straddles religion and politics, such as Al Sharpton . But among Black men...