Policing Religion

This chapter focuses on the role that policing plays in classifying groups, beliefs, and practices as either religious or secular. Almost from the very beginning of the group, MOVE was under surveillance from the city police’s extensive surveillance apparatus. By the early 1980s, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Pennsylvania State Police, and the Secret Service had all targeted MOVE for surveillance, infiltration, or prosecution. To be sure, MOVE brought much of this attention on themselves. But their claims to religious legitimacy were met, early on, with the presumption of criminality. One reason MOVE was not allowed to be a religion was because MOVE never existed apart from government policing and surveillance.

Pastoral Power

From 1977 to 1978, the Philadelphia Police Department established a blockade around the MOVE house. Eventually, this blockade became a starvation blockade, when the mayor, Frank Rizzo, determined that the best way to end the standoff was to starve MOVE people into surrendering. During this standoff, respected religious leaders representing various faith traditions negotiated between MOVE and the city. These religious leaders initially came to MOVE’s defense. Some of them believed that MOVE was a religion, and that the city’s actions threatened religious freedom in the city. As the negotiations wore on, however, MOVE lost their initial support. The religious leaders who previously defended MOVE decided that MOVE was not, in fact, a religion and sided with the city. In so doing, these religious leaders articulated a series of claims about the nature of “true religion” to explain why MOVE was not, in their view, a religion.

Progress

This chapter argues that MOVE’s public confrontations in the early 1970s should be understood within their religious worldview. John Africa taught MOVE people to confront progress, the idea that we can make the world a better place, that technology can relieve our suffering, that we control our own destinies. MOVE people used profane language, situationally inappropriate attire, and disrespectful behavior to draw attention to the sacredness with which American society imbued organized religion, political advancement, and formal education. They refused to genuflect before the power of the state to expose, they believed, the false trust Americans had placed in government. John Africa taught that by merely forcing Americans to confront the hypocrisy inherent in their false religion of progress, the System would crumble. But to do that, MOVE people had to profane what American society held sacred, and to venerate the sacredness of Life that American society had forgotten.

Conversions

This chapter introduces readers to the social world of MOVE. It features a biography of John Africa, also known as Vincent Leaphart. Leaphart was born in Philadelphia in 1936. He served a tour of duty during the Korean War. The chapter introduces readers to some of the early converts to MOVE, including Delbert Orr Africa, Louise James Africa, Donald Glassey, Gail Africa, Muriel Austin Africa, Janet Hollaway Africa, and others. By 1974, there were around two dozen MOVE people, most with the surname Africa. Many, though not all, were Black. Many were biological relatives. They spent their days working on the house, tending the animals, and cooking communal meals. What united these early MOVE people was a shared identity, a sense of family under the headship of John Africa, and a veneration of a sacred text.

Innocence

This chapter tells the story of the MOVE Bombing. In the thirty-three years since the MOVE Bombing, writers, artists, and filmmakers have struggled to make sense of what happened on May 13, 1985. Overall, they have failed to do so. This author does not expect to succeed. His main contribution to an understanding of the MOVE Bombing is this: it is not exceptional and it is not inexplicable. Such acts of state violence have happened many times before, and there is no reason to suspect that that they will not happen again. Rather than looking at the MOVE Bombing as an inexplicable event, one should look at it as a perfectly normal behavior of the secular state. The MOVE Bombing, the author argues, makes sense only when one sees it as a logical extension of secularism; as the secular state preempting “illegitimate” religious violence with “legitimate” state violence.

Belief and Practice

This chapter is a study of The Guidelines of John Africa, MOVE’s sacred text. John Africa dictated The Guidelines over a span of six years. Several different people helped him create the manuscript. The Guidelines of John Africa are an explanation for, and solution to, the problem of evil. John Africa called these forces of evil the “reformed world system,” or, more frequently, “the System.” John Africa’s worldview was dualistic; it understood the cosmos as a site of conflict that pitted forces of good against forces of evil. The force of good went by many names: the Law of Mama, the Law of Nature, God, Natural Law, and most frequently, Life. Natural processes, according to MOVE, are “coordinated” by this active force.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the main argument of the book: that MOVE people believed, from the very early days of the group, that their leader, John Africa, was a prophet, that his teachings, both written and embodied, had miraculous effects on the body, and that the shared beliefs and practices that constituted MOVE were religious in nature. To MOVE people, Vincent Leaphart was John Africa, a prophetic figure who was capable of performing miracles, healing the sick and injured, and communicating on behalf of the divine. John Africa inspired a remarkable level of devotion in his followers, who called themselves his “disciples.” To many people outside the group—including the police, the court system, MOVE’s neighbors, and other religious groups—MOVE was anything but a religion. At almost every turn, MOVE, a group that was desperate to be recognized as a religion, found themselves categorized as secular.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter discusses the funerals of John Africa and Frank Africa and updates the history of MOVE to the present. MOVE’s focus today is on freeing the remaining incarcerated MOVE people. MOVE maintains an international network of supporters—numbering, the author estimates, in the thousands. Many of these supporters advocate for the release of the MOVE 9 and of Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose writings on John Africa, MOVE, and his own experience as the world’s most famous death-row inmate have brought MOVE’s story to a wider audience. MOVE people maintain a headquarters near Clark Park in a pair of homes they bought using funds they won from their lawsuit against the city.

Religion on Trial

This chapter highlights the social actors who have perhaps the most outsized influence on religious classification in the modern United States: judges. In 1981, MOVE’s claims to religious legitimacy received their day in court. A MOVE person, Frank Africa, who was then incarcerated in a Pennsylvania state prison, requested from the prison a religious accommodation for his MOVE diet. The prison denied his request, and Frank appealed to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Before the court could decide on Frank’s request, the judges had to first determine whether or not MOVE was a religion.

Unthinkable

This chapter studies the conclusions reached by the Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission, more commonly known as the MOVE Commission, to trace the process by which the MOVE Bombing evolved from event to history to memory. As in the construction of any historical narrative, the asking of some questions precluded the asking of others. And those with the power to shape the process of historical construction ensured that some stories were highlighted and others suppressed. For many, the MOVE Bombing is unthinkable, and for this reason, many of the story’s details—and often the story itself—have been forgotten.