During 1906 and 1907, the headlines that lured American readers to pore over newspapers while sipping their morning coffee occasionally described startling local religious excitements. In April 1906 the Los Angeles Times alerted its readers to “howling, shrieking, and weird phenomena” at a downtown mission on Azusa Street. The Des Moines Capitol reported in July 1907 that a warrant had been issued for the arrest of the wife of the popular Republican Chief Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court. The charge? Disturbing the peace of a residential community. The socially prominent Emma Cromer Ladd was found presiding serenely over raucous religious services in which the devout lay strewn about the floor, apparently unconscious, or shouted in tongues while twitched by contortions. And the front page of a Salem, Oregon, paper followed the case of the frustrated wife of a colorful local preacher named M.L. Ryan. She sued for divorce with the wry observation that the gift of tongues did not mix with family life.
Reporters of such stories seldom masked their own skepticism. For the most part they described an unprepossessing constituency—humble folk in modest surroundings professing the firm belief that among and within them God was doing an extraordinary thing. These people audaciously claimed to be both signs and agents of the end-times. They adeptly reinterpreted secular rejection as divine approval. Bemoaning the “carnality” of congregations that objected to their enthusiasm, they created alternative religious affiliations. For some this meant taking a second or third step away from the forms of church life most Protestants experienced. Resisting “dead denominational churches,” they opted for the freer environments of storefronts, tents, and camp meetings. Taken together they constituted an emerging, loosely interrelated network that had at its core the unshakable conviction that the New Testament “apostolic faith”—with accompanying signs and wonders—was being restored in twentieth-century America, where it heralded the imminent end of time.
If the secular press was skeptical, the religious press—when it deigned to remark at all on this radical movement on the edge of respectability—proved equally hard to convince that anything worth serious notice was underway. To be sure, a handful of religious periodicals with modest national circulation (like The Way of Faith) advertised the new religious enthusiasm; others (like the Massachusetts-based Word and Work) embraced the purported “restoration of the apostolic faith.” But respected standard Protestant publications largely ignored this latest popular religious excitement. Sooner or later, such enthusiasms wore out or turned ridiculous, as the case of the self-proclaimed apostle of healing, John Alexander Dowie, had amply confirmed. Pressing concerns like the new theology, immigration, the Social Gospel, and a disastrous economic downturn appeared to offer Protestant pundits more compelling subject matter.
If the mainstream mass media provided little clarity about the apostolic faith movement, that movement’s participants compensated with a strong sense of identity and purpose. And they articulated this in an alternative mass media that, together with the rapidly expanding integrated national railroad system, contributed to their astonishing growth. A generation later, when the larger culture next bothered to notice, they had circled the globe and were busy carving out an enduring place on the religious map. In 1957, a cover story in Life magazine, citing the enormous growth of Pentecostalism in Latin America, posed the question, “Is there a third force in Christendom?” The secular and religious press took yet another look, and what they found gradually and profoundly changed the way scholars view modern Christianity.
To understand early Pentecostalism, one must engage this alternative mass media—no easy pros-pect. Early Pentecostals deemed getting out their message far more important than preserving copies of their products. After all, they expected an imminent end, not a legacy to future generations. Meager finances and radical faith meant they acted “as the Lord provided means.” In practice that often meant missed or combined issues of monthly publications. Publications came and went with bewildering rapidity. Most bore biblical titles, many of which manifested Pentecostals’ all-consuming sense of the times. At least five Apostolic Faith magazines served an overlapping readership. The Bridegroom’s Messenger, The Bridal Call, and The Midnight Cry reminded readers that the “marriage of the lamb” loomed on the immediate horizon. The Upper Room recalled the faithful to the hallowed Pentecost event that they professed to see repeated in their midst. The Whole Truth kept in mind the “full” gospel they believed was uniquely theirs.
In addition to monthlies, there were countless tracts. A staple of evangelical outreach, tracts became for Pentecostals inexpensive announcements of the availability of miracles, spiritual gifts, divine guidance, and prophecies, as well as venues for personal testimony. Whereas periodicals tended to be ventures undertaken by leaders—pastors, evangelists, congregations, and, later, denominations—tracts gave voice to thousands of anonymous or virtually unknown devotees.
The first Pentecostals also created and marketed their own music. Since they sang with enthusiasm if not always with musical training, their hymnody offers revealing commentary on the early movement’s texture. New songs seemed at first as likely to come by exercising the spiritual gifts of tongues and interpretation as by more traditional means, but within a few years, the movement boasted a cadre of musicians who gave expression to Pentecostalism’s particular emphases on the Holy Spirit and the end-times. Often produced on the cheapest stock available, early Pentecostal music remains an essential if fragile and neglected source. In the movement’s first heyday, few could have imagined just how profoundly Pentecostals would influence the musical tastes of vast numbers of Christians.
Inexpensive books of testimony and admonition offer yet another glimpse into the early Pentecostal ethos. They present filtered (and sometimes conflicting) memories, invaluable to the historian, but requiring careful use. The wide range, fragmentary nature, and uneven quality of the sources for the study of early Pentecostalism mean that thorough and comparative familiarity with the literature is essential to responsible study.
More than anyone else to date, Grant Wacker has accomplished this feat. His new book, Heaven Below, invites the reader into the world of early Pentecostalism. Wacker’s title was a common Pentecostal descriptor for the glory Pentecostals said they felt. It is found as well in the words of an old Pentecostal favorite: “‘Tis heaven below my Redeemer to know / For He is so precious to me.” The song came from the pen of Methodist Charles Gabriel, but Pentecostals resonated with its intimate description of the inner life. And, Wacker observes, the way they appropriated typified the tenacity and creativity that made them prosper against the odds. For the faithful, Pentecostal experience—a “know-so” salvation and spiritually empowering baptism with the Holy Spirit—brought heaven into their souls and transformed their humdrum lives from the inside out. It made divine power part of every day for those who believed the Holy Spirit literally indwelled, guided and empowered them in tangible ways.
But the word “below” was important, too. This “heaven” was not just a foretaste of eternity, an ecstasy of soul: it was also a relentless incentive and compelling mandate to transform the here-and-now into a place in which God’s work could proceed unimpeded. And so, despite the otherworldliness exuded by early Pentecostal publications, a close reading suggests that these were fiercely practical men and women, ready to seize on modern technology while cherishing an antimodern rhetoric. This tension, Wacker argues, defined first-generation Pentecostals. His book invites readers to eavesdrop at the kitchen tables of Pentecostalism’s earliest devotees, to listen at their prayers, and to discover what they thought they were about.
Both Wacker’s approach and his thesis break new ground. The approach values the ordinary as much as the privileged, and the thesis explains how people sustained by otherworldly immediacy succeeded so remarkably in the here-and-now.
First, the approach. The strength of Wacker’s book is its firm footing in the primary sources. Even a peripheral glance at the endnotes reveals the astonishing array of rare materials he consulted. Indeed, only the handful of scholars who have devoted themselves to the vast Pentecostal sources that are the stuff of such research can fully grasp the daunting task Wacker undertook or the magnitude of his accomplishment.
Wacker made a conscious choice not to write a narrative history. That has been done several times from different perspectives, establishing basic agreement on the personalities, places, and dates that must be part of a responsible retelling. Rather, he examines the essence of early Pentecostalism itself, that practical outworking of experience and conviction that gave the movement its genius. He consulted primary sources from smaller and from more regional Pentecostal groups as well as from the large African American constituencies and from better-known groups like the Assemblies of God. He read individual testimonies, prophecies, letters, diaries, tracts, poems, and songs, as well as sermons and official statements. What emerges is a composite picture of a movement that, despite its impressive diversity, can effectively be organized around certain themes.
Here Wacker ventures into fiercely contested terrain. Indeed, few religious historiographies are as politicized today as is the historiography of Pentecostalism. Vested interests, political choices, and power struggles fuel bitter debates about the movement’s early essence. Not surprisingly, matters of race, class, and gender are often at issue. Is Pentecostalism best understood as African American religion? Was it, as some insist, once a racially inclusive movement quickly subverted by privileged whites? Is it rooted in evangelicalism, or does it represent a new stream with “its own cisterns,” as some contemporary Pentecostal scholars insist? Did it, as some argue, radically affirm public roles for women? Is it best explained as a movement of the socially dispossessed?
Such questions are highly charged, and history can be mined to fuel contemporary Pentecostal politics. Until recently Pentecostal history attracted only a handful of scholars, and these (coming from various disciplines) have been deeply divided about the movement’s origins and character. They often address one another instead of the academy. In the past decade, new trends in scholarship as well as the proliferation of Pentecostal-like forms of Christianity have expanded curiosity. But careful assessment has not always followed superficial interest, and scholarship that is insufficiently grounded may perpetuate the myths rather than probe the realities.
This is why Wacker’s careful work in primary sources is both welcome and needed. His extensive documentation is not just the mark of a competent historian: it is also the power of his book. In the sources Wacker overhears many “yes. … buts,” and he keeps listening when other scholars have tended to stop. Sometimes he finds speakers manifesting endearing traits; sometimes he is repulsed. His sympathy—or at least his ability to empa-thize—is apparent, but so is his careful sensitivity to the nuancing that keeps sympathy from dulling critical scholarship. What emerges is a portrait of people who, in many ways, resembled their contemporaries of similar class and region. Heavenly longings kept “getting mixed up” in the messiness of day-to-day existence, Wacker reminds us. His portrait may be more tempered than some, but it is compelling precisely because his subjects remain at once heaven-directed and earthbound.
And that leads to the thesis. Wacker roots his work in his observation that Pentecostals were driven by both primitivism and pragmatism. That is, they yearned fervently to erase history—to “leap the intervening years” and reappropriate the fullest meaning of the Pentecost event recorded in Acts 2. At the same time, however, they saw no contradiction in doing what was necessary to accomplish their goals. They frankly employed modern means to reach premodern ends. The resulting tension fueled the growth and wealth of a movement that professed to want nothing but Jesus.
Of course, neither primitivism nor pragmatism—nor a mix of the two—was unique to Pentecostals. But Wacker’s reading of the sources suggests to him that their absolute conviction of an intimate “moment-by-moment” relationship with Christ through the Holy Spirit was unusually intense. Relying on spiritual gifts like wisdom, prophecy, words of knowledge, tongues and interpretation of tongues, impressions, “leadings,” and other forms of immediate divine guidance, early Pentecostals believed the Holy Spirit infused all of life in practical, tangible ways. Unsalaried preachers and evangelists prayed for all temporal needs; the sick shunned physicians and medicines and prayed for healing; the jobless prayed for work and expected to be led to the right place at the right time; housewives beseeched guidance in every conceivable small instance of life. The rhetoric of utter reliance on God reinforced participants’ heavenly citizenship and obscured the canny common sense that planted an enduring radical evangelical movement.
Some will notice that Wacker does not address the story of global Pentecostalism. He makes no claims about the applicability of his generalizations to Pentecostalism in other cultures. Still, a responsible account of the history of global Pentecostalism must be rooted in an accurate assessment of its emergence and development in particular places—and, one might argue, especially of its North Atlantic history. In this Wacker excels. He does what he sets out to do. For him Pentecostalism clearly belongs to the broadly evangelical part of American Protestantism. It is not its own thing. Wacker offers a close look at the bitter internecine struggles through which Pentecostals disentangled themselves from their evangelical cohorts. But by every conventional measure their spiritual quests began—and ended—in the broad arena of evangelicalism, and he assesses them in that context.
Those with vested interests in the rendering of the early Pentecostal story will give Wacker mixed reviews because his “yes. … but” approach yields an account that challenges cherished myths. With few exceptions American Pentecostal history has been written by people who are not historians of American religion. If Pentecostals telling their own story have tended to produce unashamedly providential narratives (especially in the early years of the movement), many outsiders have interpreted the story through highly politicized lenses of their own. If one combs the sources for specific evidence, one is likely to find it. One scholar celebrates Pentecostalism’s openness to women’s public voices, while another challenges its record on women in leadership. Both can cite supporting evidence; both are failing to do justice to the complex realities of history.
Unlike the hagiographers of Pentecostalism, Wacker refuses to avert his eyes from the all too human dimension of the movement. But neither will his account satisfy the reductionist ambitions of some of his fellow historians. He doesn’t explain away the fervent faith of his subjects as hypocrisy or self-delusion. Rather, he reveals the world of early Pentecostalism from within, in all its aspects, and allows readers to draw their own conclusions. One can’t ask anything more of a historian.
Indeed, if the future historiography of Pentecostalism looks promising—and it surely does—that is in no small part thanks to Grant Wacker and his talented students past and present in the history of American religion at Duke Divinity School. They are producing carefully nuanced accounts based firmly in a wide array of primary sources and sustained by larger historical questions. Interest groups will undoubtedly continue to find what they want to find when they look at the Pentecostal past. But allowing the primary sources to speak on their own terms requires the dogged persistence of scholars immersed in the idiom and practice of a particular time and people and at home in the larger historical context. May their tribe increase.
Edith Blumhofer is director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals and professor of history at Wheaton College. She is the author and editor of many books, including Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody’s Sister (Eerdmans), and she is currently at work on a biography of hymn writer Fanny Crosby.
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