MOVE: An American Religion

MOVE: An American Religion

What is a religion? That is the question that Richard Kent Evans attempts to answer in this book. He does so through the story of MOVE, a little-known group with a fascinating story. MOVE emerged in Philadelphia in the early 1970s. It was a small, mostly African American group devoted to the teachings of John Africa. In 1985, the Philadelphia Police Department -- working in concert with federal and state law enforcement -- attacked a home that "MOVE people" as they preferred to be known, shared in West Philadelphia. Hundreds of police officers and firefighters laid siege to the building using tear gas, ten thousand rounds of ammunition, and improvised explosives. Most infamously, a police officer riding in a helicopter dropped a bomb containing C-4 explosives, which he had acquired from the FBI, onto the roof of the MOVE house. The bomb started a fire, which officials allowed to spread in hopes of chasing the MOVE people out of the house. Police officers fired upon those who tried to escape the flames. Eleven MOVE people died in the attack, including John Africa. Five of those who died were children. In this book, Richard Kent Evans tells the story of MOVE -- a story that has been virtually lost outside of Philadelphia. What was MOVE? Many MOVE members thought of themselves as belonging to a religion, and they sought legal recognition. But to others, including other religious groups like the Quakers and, more importantly, the courts, MOVE was anything but a religion. Evans dives deep into how we decide what constitutes a genuine religious tradition, and the enormous consequences of that decision. "Evans has written a beautiful, blistering, and fine-grainedanalysis of MOVE and its particular and still pressing Americanlamentation. Evans dives deep into the theological imagination of JohnAfrica, the practices and pieties of MOVE people, and their struggleagainst what they imagined to be the false yet potent religion of theSystem. This is an essential work--not merely for understanding MOVE but also in revising standard narratives of American religious history andfor reconsidering the cosmic politics of racialization and civil rightsin the long 1970s." -- John Lardas Modern, Professor of Religious Studies, Franklin & Marshall College "In this richly research and compelling book Richard Kent Evans reminds us not only how important and complicated the organization MOVE was to the history of the city of Philadelphia during the tumultuous 1970s and into the 1980s, but also how we as scholars must broaden our understanding of what it means to have faith, and to be a religion, in this racially contested nation." -- Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy "The people of MOVE insisted that they had a religion. Nobody believed them. Their tragic story teaches us how religion is produced and policed under government surveillance--and why religion remains a category of privilege with life-or-death consequences in the United States." --Tisa Wenger, author of Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal Richard Kent Evan s received his PhD in North American Religions from Temple University in 2018. He is Research Associate in Quaker Studies at Haverford College and Adjunct Professor of History at The College of New Jersey.