This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
During the First World War, Mason publicly held that Christian nonresistance forbade military service, and he directed Church of God in Christ ministers and members to seek conscientious objector status under the 1917 Selective Service Act, a documented wartime stance distinct from the denominational split with Charles Price Jones and the 1907 Azusa Street trip that occupy his first article. That preaching, combined with the unfamiliar and racially mixed worship the young Pentecostal movement practiced, drew the attention of the wartime Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner of the FBI, which opened a file on him, a documented federal surveillance distinct from anything connected to his earlier ordination disputes with Jones.
In 1918 Mason was jailed at Lexington, Mississippi, on the accusation that his preaching against the war amounted to disloyalty, even though he had also sold war bonds to support the war effort, a documented and seemingly contradictory federal response distinct from the internal church politics his first article traces. He was released without conviction, and the episode did not end his ministry or his willingness to preach nonresistance again in later conflicts.
That the same bishop remembered for a decade-long partnership with Jones and a decisive 1907 trip to Los Angeles was also, within the same movement's first years, jailed by his own government for teaching that Christian nonresistance overrode a wartime draft, marks Mason's 1918 arrest as a documented case where a denomination's theological conviction collided directly with federal wartime authority rather than remaining a matter of internal church dispute.