The People's Zion: Southern Africa, the United States, and a Transatlantic Faith-Healing Movement, by Joel Cabrita

Abstract

By the 1960s, 21 per cent of religiously active South Africans were Zionists, adherents of an influential but fragmented set of Africanist denominations. Joel Cabrita lucidly explains in this book the strange story of how this group of Christians came to be. The original Zion was not in southern Africa at all, but in the United States. Its founder was John Alexander Dowie, a Scot who emigrated as a boy with his family to South Australia in 1860. A Congregationalist by background, he was briefly a minister there before moving to Sydney, where his flamboyant attachment to the temperance cause created a stir. In 1882 he embraced distinctive teaching on divine healing, the availability of physical wellbeing as well as spiritual salvation through trust in the atonement, and in the following year branched out with his own Free Christian Church which soon issued a periodical, Leaves of Healing. In 1888...