Gods of The Metropolis

Bishop Samuel “Sweet Daddy” Madison, leader of the United House of Prayer for All People on the Rock of the Apostolic Faith, kneels silently before the enormous mirror that dominates the altar of the golden-domed church, known as God’s White House, and prays. From high above, a severe portrait of the heavy-browed Bishop gazes out at the cavernous sanctuary.

A thousand or so congregants, dressed in their finest clothes, fill the pews and stand in the aisles of the double-decker church located in Shaw, the historic center of black D.C. Hundreds more wait outside, unable to get a seat. 

The Bishop, dressed in a snug, gray three-piece, stands and turns to face the assembled masses. He gestures toward the twenty-piece brass bands on either side of the church, and with a blast from the trumpets, trombones, and sousaphones that all but flutters the Bishop’s long white hair, the adoring and overstuffed house explodes. It’s a little after nine on a Friday night, and the festivities have officially begun.

The United House of Prayer is one patch in a varied undergrowth of independent churches that have sprouted in Shaw over the last century. As in other urban centers across the country, many of the independent churches in Shaw trace their origins, directly or indirectly, to the early 20th century, when migrants from the South fueled a remarkable proliferation of new black churches that broke from the mainline denominations and changed the face of American urban religion. Churches formed in storefronts, living rooms, and public parks as followers of spirited new doctrines seceded or were purged from moderate Baptist and Methodist congregations.

Famed for its nightlife, its business district, and Howard, its university, Shaw was the social, economic, and intellectual hub of black America during this period. In the years before the mid-1920s Harlem Renaissance, Shaw’s status made it the site of a particularly rich and influential religious explosion whose legacy is still apparent, not only in the neighborhood but in urban centers throughout the country. Even today, a tour of Shaw’s independent churches offers a glimpse of what urban religion in America looks like and a sense of the forces that shaped urban religion and that may contribute, ultimately, to its slow demise.

United House of Prayer is a big player on the independent church scene. Founded in 1919 by Charles “Sweet Daddy” Grace, who in doing so claimed to have “given God a vacation,” the church now claims perhaps 100,000 members at approximately 130 Houses of Prayer scattered in downtowns from coast to coast. With flowing hair, garish jewelry, and four-inch fingernails, Daddy Grace attracted adherents up and down the eastern seaboard with his flamboyant revivals before settling on Shaw, in the 1920s, as the site for his church’s headquarters.

Eighty-four years later on this Friday night, vendors work the congregation, selling Sweet Daddy trinkets, tambourines, mini-flugelhorns, and, mercifully, fans. On the altar the synchronized flappings of a team of attendants keep the bishop cool as he observes an honorific choral revue from his white satin throne. Hundreds of worshippers capture bootlegs on handheld tape recorders.

Afterwards, congregants file forward, money in hand, to place their “love offerings” to the Bishop in a large basket at the front of the altar.

“He’s the best. He’s the greatest,” declares a woman in her early twenties.

“I love him,” says her friend.

“He’s the sugar,” gushes one slight woman who looks to be in her eighties. Like the other people gathered tonight, these women believe the Bishop possesses divine power. Sweet Daddy Madison, like Sweet Daddy Grace before him, is the House of Prayer’s living deity.

Daddy Grace was part of perhaps the most remarkable force remaking the black church in the 1910s and ’20s: a small group of charismatic, putatively divine black leaders who, as the founders of new religious movements, came to be known as the “black gods of the metropolis”—a moniker taken from a book by black anthropologist Arthur Fauset. Others mentioned in the same breath include Father Divine of the Universal Peace Mission Movement in Harlem; Prophet Cherry of the black Judaism movement in Philadelphia; and Noble Drew Ali of the black Muslim Moorish Science Temple in Newark. These men led not only their movements but also, in a sense, a movement of thousands of men and a few women who broke from the period’s mainline doctrines to found independent churches.

Though most made incompatible claims to exclusive divinity, only one black god was Daddy Grace’s archrival: Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux, founder of the Gospel Spreading Church of God.

The novelist William Styron, in an essay titled “A Voice from the South,” remembers “two messianic figures” from his childhood in Newport News, Virginia. He describes the spectacle of their “competitive mass baptisms,” with “thousands of the faithful being immersed in the briny waters while shouting songs of salvation.” These figures were Elder Michaux and Daddy Grace. Given their evident success, it wasn’t long before they moved their churches to black America’s big time: Shaw.

Lacking briny waters there, both improvised. Michaux would fill Griffith Stadium, since razed and replaced by Howard University Hospital, with 15,000 people, baptizing hundreds in canvas tanks filled on at least one occasion with water imported from the River Jordan. Daddy Grace, eight blocks down, simply used a fire hose, initiating a House of Prayer tradition that lasted until the 1970s.

In the 1930s Michaux led a radio ministry on CBS that every Saturday broadcast his sermons and songs to 25 million people across the country. During the Depression the Washington Post called him “the best known colored man in the United States.” Despite Grace’s far inferior wattage, he and Michaux used to respond to each other’s broadcasts, sometimes rather rancorously, throughout the 1930s.

But Michaux differed in style from the other black gods. In manner and dress he was the opposite of flamboyant: buttoned-up, controlled. His religious movement, having shrunk since his death to a few churches in cities along the East Coast, still bears his imprint. On a Wednesday night at Gospel Spreading, old women wear dresses and modest hats or lace doilies atop impeccable hairdos. The men look for all they’re worth like the portrait of Elder Michaux that hangs to the left of the altar: parted hair, three-piece suit, wingtips, handkerchief, spectacles.

The church is similarly noble. Red fabrics adorn the walls and match the upholstery on the choir seats that sit upon the elevated stage. The church has theater seating instead of pews. The sanctuary has the feel of an auditorium at an old and exclusive private high school.

An elderly woman sings hymns and plays a Steinway. She is accompanied by a man playing trumpet with a mute.

You won’t find ecstatic abandon or speaking in tongues here. Elder Michaux’s wife, Mary, hated the ravings of the Pentecostalists, whom she sneeringly called “tongue people” and thought of as lower-class. She vowed never to allow them or their practices into her husband’s church.

The Gospel Spreading Church represents a divergent trend; most independent black churches, in Shaw and in America, trace their origins to one transformative moment: on the afternoon of January 1, 1901, Agnes Ozman, a white student at a Topeka, Kansas, bible school, caught the Holy Spirit in the college library and spoke in tongues. Pentecostalism, from Pentecost, the day when the same thing happened to Jesus’ Apostles, was born. A black student from an affiliated bible school, William Seymour, took Pentecostalism from the interior to Los Angeles, where he led the historic Azusa Street revivals from 1906 to 1909. From there, the new teaching radiated across America.

Congregants split from mainline denominations and formed new churches to follow the doctrine. Today, whether or not a church “has the Holy Spirit” divides urban religion into opposing camps: members of churches that don’t, including most mainline denominations, often look askance at the practices in churches that do. Members of churches that do, expressing the distinction, often refer to themselves simply and proudly as “believers.”

The Evangelistic Deliverance Christian Church, tucked between two Shaw row houses on New Jersey Avenue, looks abandoned. Garbage is piled out front, and someone smashed in the sign that would otherwise show the name of the church, the hours of worship, and the name of the pastor. Nevertheless, it has the Holy Spirit.

Inside, the church is skinny relative to its length, with a low, paneled ceiling. The effect is something like being in the cabin of a mid-size airplane. Ten rows of metal folding chairs have been set up for the congregation. Only a dozen seats have people in them on this evening, and all attendees but one are female. 

The daughter of Overseer Geneva Rious, the church’s pastor and widow of its founder, leads the service. Large and with a broad pockmarked face, she begins with an incantatory song, interspersed with prayers and testimonies.

Some of the women begin to jerk slightly. The testimonies start to overlap, the tics become more apparent, and soon everyone is in a trance and shouting at the walls. In the tight space the noise is powerful, absolutely a cacophony.

One of the congregants, a dark, ragged woman in full trance, spins slowly out of the row of seats and toward the back of the church. Two other women join hands and loosely enclose the woman in the trance. They let her wander slowly, like a Ouija planchette, and gently goad the Holy Spirit while keeping the woman away from the garbage can, radiator, and small table in the back corner. With an inarticulate yell, the woman falls. She thrashes and screams in an unrecognizable language at the back of the church. Afterwards, the women cover her with a red blanket and leave her motionless on the floor by the garbage can.

Like many churches where people speak in tongues, Evangelistic Deliverance simply grew out of another congregation when its founder “got the call” from God to start his own church. That, and the fact that the church is headed by a woman, hints at another major force in the independent church: the democratization of religious authority.

Originally, this push was closely identified with Pentecostal doctrine, which in most early variants taught that anyone touched by the spirit—not just clergy—can claim a direct personal relationship with God. Anyone with this relationship, whether humble servant or black god in the making, has the potential to start a church.

This thought, which came to influence the black church beyond Pentecostalism, led to something of a mini-Reformation in the early 20th century: no longer could pastors at mainline churches enjoy a monopoly on religious authority. Even today, newly forming churches of all stripes find justification in the belief that the people in the pews can have the same relationship with God as the person on the altar.

“I felt led by the Lord to start this church,” says Elder Alex Jones, explaining the origins of Two-or-More Church, a brick row house along Shaw’s rough eastern border converted from residential use and painted mustard yellow.

Elder Jones, whose wife, Johnny May, is another daughter of Overseer Rious, used to be a member of Evangelistic Deliverance until he got the call about five years ago. There was no schism to his split, which was more like ecclesiastical mitosis, and he keeps in close contact with his in-laws at his old church a few blocks away.

The name of the church refers to a saying of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew: “Whenever two or more of you are gathered in my name, I am there with them.” Stressing, as it does, that worship requires neither large groups of people nor accredited clergy, the name is doubly appropriate: Elder Jones learned his scripture at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary and presides on this Sunday over no more than six or seven souls, if you count small children. They sit in rows of metal folding chairs in front of a makeshift pulpit. A drum set collects dust in the corner.

The greater part of the service revolves around the day’s reading from the Gospel of Mark. Discussion lingers longest on Chapter 8, Verse 36: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

This makes sense: the relationship between worldly goods and salvation takes on special importance in poor neighborhoods. Here, the congregation decides that being poor, as regards the disposition of their souls, is a definite plus. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle,” reads another of this church’s favorite verses, “than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”

Churches in poor neighborhoods usually go one way or the other. At churches like Two-or-More, a focus on heavenly reward takes the sting out of worldly poverty. In other churches, like the United House of Prayer, the relationship is inverted: wealth is a sign of divine favor. Just as the people at Two-or-More look forward to paradise, people at these churches look forward to the day when God will make them rich. The distinction is deeper than money and has split the black church since the days of slave Christianity. The division concerns the open question of when God provides: is it in this world or the next?

The “Prayers” section of the bulletin at the Church of Love, one of the few independent churches in Shaw that looks like a church, suggests a list of what congregants here might pray for: “Jobs and Better Jobs, Raises and Bonuses, Benefits, Sales and Commissions, Houses and Automobiles, Scholarships and Fellowships, Settlements, Estates and Inheritances, Interest and Income, Rebates and Returns, Checks in the Mail, Gifts and Surprises, Find Money, Bills Paid Off, Bills Decreased and Blessings Increased!”

Usually “Prayers” sections list ailing or recently deceased members, but this is a young church with modern attentions. A full-on rock band plays on the deep, two-tiered stage at the front of the church, including two keyboardists, a horn line, an excellent drummer, and various earnest and open-faced singers. The band is tight and energetic, but there’s a problem: there are more people on stage than in the seats.

Among black independent churches, a nearly empty church is not an uncommon scene. According to the best numbers, compiled recently in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, participation in religious activities has fallen up to fifty percent since the 1950s. While big churches like the United House of Prayer, with hundreds of members and the money to be glorious, will outlive anyone in the pews or the pulpit, small churches have life cycles tied to one leader and just a few congregants. The decline in religious participation most acutely threatens these churches, which can hardly afford to lose any among their tiny congregations.

The explanation for most of the decline in church attendance is straightforward. Older generations, who faced fewer demands at work and grew up without TV, widespread car ownership, and drugs on every corner, go to church more than younger generations. Basically, people who attend church are dying and being replaced with people who don’t attend church.

On a Sunday morning at the center of Shaw, the All Souls House of Prayer is holding what will probably be one of the last services at the decades-old church, really just a corner row house with faux-stained-glass contact paper over the first-floor windows. A choir of two sings sleepily from the back of the altar, a drummer of no more than eight beats a simple boom-chick beat, an old woman plays an out-of-tune piano in the wrong key, and an even older woman rakes a washboard with a drumstick.

After one of the songs the washboard player stands. Dressed in a thick lacy white gown and matching hat, and with a face so wrinkled that her eyes appear to be shut, she thanks the Lord for a number of blessings: her health, her church, and her husband of 71 years. The woman, Mother Gibson, is 91 years old. Her husband, Elder Gibson, is the pastor of the church.

“He’s returning to childhood faster than I am,” she says, and indeed, her husband sits on the altar with a blank, wondering stare and the gently wobbling head of a baby. He has short wispy tufts of white hair and can no longer fill out the dark suit that he’s wearing. Similarly old people sit among the dozen or so congregants in the church’s six pews.

Elder Gibson gets up, slowly and improbably, to speak. Once at the altar he sermonizes in a mumble about keys and the locks on the doors of the church. It isn’t a parable. He seems to complain about the state of the neighborhood, but mostly he is difficult to understand. He sits back down.

After Elder Gibson’s done with it, maybe a would-be preacher will take over the corner row house and hang a new sign out front. More likely, the building will remain empty, another space for a secularism that has grown since the 1950s and ’60s as blacks gain access to American institutions beyond the churches. This is not to say religion is in near-term jeopardy, or that independent churches will ever cease to dot Shaw, just that religion is changing from a pervasive institution to one that fills a more bounded, more purely religious, role.

After the service Mother Gibson walks Elder Gibson from the House of Prayer to their house, two doors north. When it’s noted that their church’s name bears a resemblance to the name of a certain bigger, louder church in the neighborhood, Mother Gibson replies in a admonitory tone: “We don’t have nothin’ to do with that rich church down the street.”

She might be referring to God’s White House, or maybe to Shaw’s second United House of Prayer, D.C.’s sixth, recently opened just a few blocks away.