What happens when a leader of a faith does not actually believe in its founding precepts?  Presumably this kind of situation would be rare, but I recently finished reading a history of the Nation of Islam, and was struck by the parallels and sometimes contrasts between its recent history and that of the Community of Christ. In both cases you had a faith that was an eclectic variation on a mainstream tradition–for the Community of Christ Christianity, and for the Nation of Islam Islam. In both cases you have a top leader who more or less inherited his position through a father-to-son transmission, but who paradoxically didn’t really buy into the eclectic religious beliefs of the faith he inherited, so they moved to mainstream the faith, and in both cases splinter groups arose to contest the move to mainstream the faith. (Note: I readily admit to not being sure about Wallace B. Smith’s personal theology, but given his moves he made while the presiding authority of the Church I think I’m okay assuming they were more or less reflective of his own personal beliefs). 

More readers are probably familiar with the details of the CoC case: President Wallace B. Smith moved the RLDS Church into the mainstream Christian tradition in myriad different ways and disrupted the traditional patrilineal succession when he retired and named a non-Smith as a successor. 

Less familiar for us is the Nation of Islam case. Perhaps best known as the faith of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, the Nation of Islam was born in the turbulence of early-to-mid 20th century racial tensions. Eschewing traditional Black Christianity as the religion of the slavers, Black Islam, of which the NOI is a variant, appealed to low-income, inner-city African American community in the wake of The Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the industrializing North. 

I’ve said that I will never call another religion’s belief weird–glass houses and all that–but the Nation of Islam’s belief system is, shall we say, eclectic. In their religious cosmology the white race was an evil invention of a scientist from Mecca named Yakub who lived around 6,000 years ago. Additionally, their founding leaders enjoy a status that is prophet-like and semi-divine enough to make mainstream orthodox Muslims see them as heretics.  So they are as different from mainstream Islam as we are to mainstream Christianity. Nobody knows where the founder came from, and without warning he disappeared from history, leaving the faith to Elijah Mohammad, who was the leader during the Malcolm X/Mohammad Ali era.

After Elijah Mohammad’s death the leadership of the Nation passed to his son who, while providing some very initial accommodations to the “orthodox” Nation of Islam followers quickly began to overhaul the Nation, shedding its eclectic theology and aligning it formally with Sunni Islam. Eventually, he went so far as to shut it down altogether, simply telling his followers to participate in their local mosques. In both cases the moves to mainstream the faiths lead to splinter groups, but I imagine paradoxically splintering for the cause of orthodoxy when the duly ordained leader is not on your side is difficult. Still, the Nation of Islam splinter groups were more successful than the Restoration Branches, with time essentially replacing the original NOI. 

I wonder how the original NOI was essentially overtaken by its splinter groups, and I suspect much of it is because they literally closed up shop, so there was not even the barest bones of institutional legitimacy to fight over. The Community of Christ, on the other hand, has remained open and still identifies as the straight-line descendent from the RLDS organization founded by Joseph Smith III and Emma Smith, even if all the eclectic features that defined them for so long have been shrunk down to the smallest possible portion without dropping the altogether. 

Both cases also raise an interesting spectre, what would you do if you found yourself at the head of a faith whose beliefs you did not subscribe to? Do you just close up shop? Or, as religion is a meaning-giving source for many people, do you feel some obligation to make some concessions to the True Believers, with at least some plausible deniability that you’re not completely dumping the particulars of their faith that your are downplaying? 

An anti-white, Black Nationalist movement probably has less of an appeal in 2025 than it did in mid-20th century, segregated inner-city Detroit, so it is undergoing an identity crisis even now, and even the more purist “successor” to Elijah Mohammad, Louis Farrakhan has flirted with and zigzagged back and forth with mainstreaming the movement himself, but is hemmed in by the true believers. Conversely the CoC changed so abruptly that a lot of the true believers left like they did with the original Nation of Islam. 

Some of the NOI zigzagging has to do with their theology and teachings, which at times is baldly antisemitic and anti-white. Farrakhan doesn’t even bother to dog whistle. He’ll say something incredibly antisemitic, then do the rounds making it look like that’s not actually what he meant, then he’ll go off and say something blatantly antisemitic again. (During Obama’s early run, people tried to do the six-degrees-from-Hitler thing to connect Obama to Farrakhan, and Obama had to make a statement distancing himself from him). 

This kind of segues into the normative question of whether these organizations should have just closed up shop, or on the other hand whether the leader should have stepped down for a true believer. In Wallace Smith’s case, he probably could have found a Joseph Smith descendent who believed all the traditional things and handed it off to him. Doing this, I suspect, would have kept the RLDS Church more vibrant for the true believers, but I’m not going to take a position on whether that is what they should have done.   

On the NOI side of things, as I’ve spoken about earlier, I give a pretty wide berth to people when it comes to connecting the fundamentals of their religion to its negative aspects. I don’t pretend to be be intimately knowledgeable enough about the NOI to know whether a non-racist version would make coherent sense, or whether its race mythology is such an intertwined aspect of who they are that it might as well turn into a mainline Sunni movement with maybe an added Black emphasis along the lines of the Black Protestants.