Daddy Grace: A Celebrity Preacher and His House of Prayer

4 He Ousted God from Heaven

He Ousted God from Heaven In the late 1930s, a student of religion at Howard University began a chapter of his master’s thesis by writing, “Though not a deity on an equal level of popularity as Father Divine, some of the saints have crowned [Bishop Grace] with majesty and honor.”1 With this simple re- flection, James Daniel Tyms became the first in a long line of scholars who felt compelled to measure Daddy Grace against Father Divine, the leader of a religious group contemporary with the House of Prayer. But Tyms forged a path that few scholars after him bothered to follow. His thorough and engaging text, never published, correctly distinguished the work and theologies of Daddy Grace and Father Divine, and concluded that the only similarities in their organizations came as consequences of their newness. But Tyms’s conclusions did not define the field, and instead most subsequent work determined that Daddy Grace was but a shadow of the more influential Father Divine, called “God” by followers , and the House of Prayer was simply a less interesting version of Divine ’s group, the Peace Mission. Because Tyms’s work was unpublished, the public academic conversation about the relationship of Daddy Grace and Father Divine truly began in 1944 with Arthur Huff Fauset’s Black Gods of the Metropolis. Fauset’s anthropological project, which continues to be referenced today by a wide variety of scholars, was to understand some of the new forms of religion founded by Black leaders that were thriving in urban environments.2 Fauset provided individual profiles of five religious groups, compared the groups with each other, and measured them against mainstream Christianity.3 At the time that Fauset wrote, the preponderance of marginal, Christian-derived groups in African American communities was a phenomenon that researchers were just beginning to examine, therefore his study was pioneering in its scope and original in its attempts at explanation. However, his research demonstrated that these groups did not necessarily have theology in common, and though 4 107 in several cases they had organizational and developmental similarities, the religious impetus of each group was distinct. Significantly, Fauset suggested comparisons of Daddy Grace and Father Divine, and the primary similarity he articulated was that each man was worshipped as a God by his followers. Fauset described that in the House of Prayer, “the beliefs boil down to a worship of Daddy Grace. God appears to be all but forgotten.”4 In the Peace Mission, he likewise witnessed that, “Father Divine is God.”5 While Fauset noted the slight distinction between Grace as a divine messenger of God and Divine as God himself, their Christian context put both men on equal footing in having a divine status at all. Fauset also overstated the degree to which 108 | He Ousted God from Heaven Daddy Grace, July 1, 1952. Courtesy of Sargeant Memorial Room, Norfolk Public Library, Norfolk, Virginia. Divine’s religion corresponded with Holiness belief, thus causing an inaccurate picture of similarity between the two churches’ theologies. Important to note is that Fauset’s theme of the similar theologies emerges more strongly in his comparative section than it does in his individual chapters on the House of Prayer and the Peace Mission, therefore in many ways his comparison is uneven. Finally, one other major way that Fauset likened Grace and Divine was implied in the parameters of the study: both men were Black leaders of “urban cults.” Though this was simply a functional category for Fauset, his highly regarded work set a precedent and the idea of pairing the men remained present in subsequent literature. It is remarkable that most historians of American Religion who have written on Grace and Divine in the past half century have discussed the two men in the same breath, even as they have become somewhat more aware of the theological differences between them. Scholars place them side by side to discuss things such as urban African American religion or Black religion in the Depression era; yet older categories such as these have not offered fruitful insights for the study of African American religion in decades.6 Instead, the newer trend in histories has been to consider a group’s theological identity as equally important to its social or developmental history. As the academics have selected topics to include in their tomes on religious history, many have chosen not to write...