Body Salvation: New Thought, Father Divine, and the Feast of Material Pleasures

Abstract

New Thought undertones suffused theNew Day, a periodical published by Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement, during the 1930s. Bold-faced headlines such as “That Which You Vividly Visualize You Will Materialize” or “The Invisible Is the Reality of the Visible” were clear signposts of that highly influential yet utterly decentral-ized movement that swept across the United States beginning in the latter decades of the nineteenth Century Somewhat more surprising, however, would have been the mixing of these more conventional mind-cure sentiments with ones that highlighted the importance of material substance and the sacredness of human flesh: witness titles such as “Your Bodies Are the Temples of God” and “The Physical Bodies Are the Realizers.” Even more startling may have been titles like “The Material Food We Eat… Is the Actual Tangibilization of the Personification of God's Word, God's Love and God's Presence” and “God Is God in a Body Just Like a Doctor Is a Doctor in a Body—God Has a Body Just Like a Doctor Has.”