MOVE: RELIGION, SECULARISM, AND THE POLITICS OF CLASSIFICATION

Abstract

This dissertation is a study of how religion is manufactured, policed, imagined, and defended in the modern United States. It traces the history of one group, MOVE, from its inception in the late 1960s to the present in order to illustrate how the category of religion functions in the modern United States. The central premise of the book is that MOVE people believed MOVE was a religion. They believed, nearly from the very beginning of the group, that John Africa was a prophet who communicated on behalf of the divine, that his Teachings were inspired and had supernatural effects on the body, and that MOVE people had a role to play in a cosmic conflict between forces of good (The Law of Mama) and forces of evil (The System). Despite this, MOVE was rarely allowed to be a religion. That is, MOVE’s claim that they had a religion was, more often than not, dismissed. Historians of religion have, in recent years, begun turning their attention to the people with the power to define lived experience as either religious or secular. In MOVE’s case, the people who defined their experience as secular, and not religious, included police officers, judges, journalists, established religious leaders, and politicians. At various points throughout MOVE’s history, these social actors articulated a series of claims about what “true religion” was and why MOVE did not count. The disconnect between how MOVE people viewed themselves and how MOVE was understood by most outside the group points to the central concern of this dissertation.