Does Kevin Smith have any resemblance to Alexander Bedward?

Following the recent demise of Pastor Kevin Smith, comparisons have been drawn between him and Alexander Bedward. But are such comparisons relevant or valid?

Some people argue that Smith should not be compared to Bedward, for the latter didn’t commit, or have committed on his behalf, those atrocities Smith is reported to have done – offering human beings as sacrifice in his Pathways International Kingdom Restoration Ministries church in Montego Bay, St James, on October 17.

For instance, it was reported in the media that “Reggae artiste Ras Ash 1st has taken umbrage with the tone of recent comments made by retired senior superintendent of police Reneto Adams, who compared Jamaican revivalist leader Alexander Bedward to the late cult leader Kevin Smith.”

Adams had said, among other things, that:

“People who are weak in their mentality are really looking for something, especially people who are dispossessed. When they need something and are made promises by people who are in high authority, like this man [Kevin Smith], who has a doctorate, people will join and do what they say.”

Because of the differing opinions concerning Smith and Bedward, I wanted to find out more about Bedward. I went to the monumental and authoritative book of Philip Sherlock and Hazel Bennett, called The Story of the Jamaican People, hoping to find information about Bedward; but amazingly, I found nothing there.

I remembered teaching my World Religions American students some years ago from New Religious Movements and under the title Rastafari, Bedward was mentioned.

That textbook said: “...Alexander Bedward of the Free Baptist Church in Jamaica prophesied a coming holocaust in which all the white people would be killed leaving the blacks, ‘the true people’, to celebrate the new world. He sat in his special robes as the predicated date came and went; eventually he was placed in a mental asylum for the insane.”

Still not satisfied with the results, I kept searching for more information about Bedward. This I found in a very long, but informative article which I’ll try to summarise by listing some of its major points.

ALEXANDER BEDWARD THE MYTH-MAKER

1. In Jamaica, on New Year’s Eve, 1920, it was estimated that thousands of people amassed in August Town, Jamaica, to watch Alexander Bedward fly to heaven.

2. Many in these densely packed crowds of people, some gathering on banks, with many wading in the shallow waters of the Hope River where for 30 years many who had followed Bedward had reported being healed, rejuvenated, and baptised in this very stretch of water; now these excited and expectant crowds gathered to watch their promised messiah beam up heaven.

3. Bedward, now in his 70s, sat in a wooden throne, dressed in pristine white robes, awaiting the prophetic fulfilment when he, like Elijah before him, would soar into the unknowable beyond.

4. On his arrival at the river, he took to his chariot – a chair balanced in a tree – and declared that the ascension would take place at 10 o’clock that morning. When 10 a.m. had come and gone, Bedward revised the schedule: three in the afternoon would see God’s will done. As the afternoon drifted by, Bedward stayed in his chair. When the hands of the clock swept past 10 that evening, Bedward clambered down from his chariot and went home.

5. Not a lot is known about Bedward as a man, but a few things seem certain: he had a rare charisma, an acute sense of theatre, a scorching sense of injustice, an unshakable faith, and in the righteousness of his words and deeds, the underpinnings of both his rise and his fall.

6. Bedward was born into an impoverished family of rural labourers in either 1848 or 1850. He spent part of his 20s working on the construction of the Panama Canal – an exhausting and traumatising experience. Along with hundreds of other labourers from the Caribbean, he worked long, arduous days in immensely hazardous conditions before being boarded up at night like cattle in shoddy, disease-ridden shacks.

7. Jamaica at the time was suffering an ‘epidemic of insanity among the black population’, which had first surfaced in the 1890s, ran a Gleaner newspaper report at the time.

8. It was further theorised that the principal reason for this trend of mass psychosis or madness was the Great Revival – a spirit of evangelical fervour that arrived in Jamaica in the 1860s, which permanently transformed its spiritual life. This movement had blown in on the Caribbean Sea earlier in the century from the United States and the British Isles.

9. This kind of mass religious enthusiasm was at first welcomed by the traditional Christian denominations, but only as long as the black men and women who crammed the churches communed with God in ways familiar to the ministers and missionaries from England and abroad.

10. However, when this kind of religious display became more like that which was associated with West African folk cultures, the sensibilities of ‘respectable’ Jamaicans were gravely offended.

11. As time elapsed, Bedward denounced the white establishment as “the Anti-Christ” sent to plague “the true people” and spoke of Jamaican society in terms of “a white wall” and “a black wall” – two solid, monolithic structures, immovable and irreducible.

12. This rhetoric terrified the minority white population, who fretted that a race war was imminent. From the perspective of many, Bedward was one of a clutch of unhinged black troublemakers who appeared simultaneously, all of them bent on perverting the natural state of white pre-eminence.

13. Because of his incendiary sermons, in 1917 the colonial establishment took him to the lunatic asylum, on the grounds that only a fevered mind could have uttered such madness; there the “white wall” hoped he would stay until such time as the madness brought on by his religious mania could be flushed out of him.

14. But within weeks Bedward was at liberty again, freed by an astute and a sympathetic white lawyer.

15. Over the next quarter-century, Bedward became an anti-establishment hero preaching a message of black power. The crowds at Hope River grew ever larger and more ecstatic; the numbers committed to Bedward’s austere regime of fasting and temperance swelled exponentially.

16. As people in search of cures, cleansing, or salvation waded into the water, others on the banks sang a song that has since become a Jamaican folk standard: “Dip dem, Bedward, dip dem/Dip dem in the healing stream/Dip dem deep, but not too deep/dip dem fi cure bad feeling.”

17. Bedward preached that in the dawning 20th century, God had bestowed “His special purpose” upon Jamaica and its black citizens, just as in biblical times when He had favoured the Jews of Jerusalem.

18. Bedwardism planted a seed from which a culture of racial consciousness grew, and found its most emphatic form in Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association.

19. However, by July 1921, Bedward was again returned to the asylum where he had been sent. Bedward spent the next nine years there, eventually dying in his cell from natural causes.

20. His followers were distraught and confused. As many as 6,000 of them, by one estimate, had given up their worldly possessions, certain that his prophecy would come true. Bedward himself claimed that he had never intended his talk of flying to heaven to be taken literally.

21. But, to this day, there are those who believe that Bedward’s reputation has been deliberately trashed by his detractors.

22. However, subsequent history has rehabilitated Bedward, for in August 2015, The Gleaner showed him as “a legendary folk hero”, one whose “black-empowerment, self-sufficiency, unifying and millennial messages” had been sullied by decades of establishment propaganda.

23. Finally, as Carolyn Cooper said in The Gleaner of 2015: “The Jamaican elite could not tolerate a powerful leader with the huge following that Bedward attracted. His religious movement could easily have been transformed into a political force. He had to be stopped. So he was declared a lunatic ... We must emancipate Bedward from the lie of lunacy.”

24. So in the final analysis, although Kevin Smith and Alexander Bedward appear to have espoused a similar idea – a messianic one – they are nonetheless very different from each other.

Smith was a self-promoter, a narcissist, and an apparent psychopath. While Bedward, although being classified as insane by his enemies, his message of salvation was in response to the severe injustices meted out to his people by the dehumanising and exploitative conditions instituted by the British colonial rulers.

Smith’s message was one of despair and death.

Bedward’s message was one of hope and life.

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