Randall J. Stephens
ASSESSING THE ROOTS OF PENTECOSTALISM - A HISTORIOGRAPHIC ESSAY
Pentecostalism is arguably the most important mass religious movement of the
twentieth century. Today, this movement is the second largest sub-group of
global Christianity. It has over 30 million American adherents and a worldwide
following of 430 million.1 Pentecostalism's inauspicious beginnings at the turn
of the century make the movement's growth all the more surprising. This essay
will examine how historians have interpreted the origins of American
Pentecostalism and will suggest some areas for further study. Before discussing
the historiography, it will help to survey the movement's early history.
Pentecostalism grew out of the Holiness revival during the second half of the
nineteenth century. This revival was an expression of both social and
theological discontent among the nation's lower and middle-class groups.
Holiness advocates disapproved of the impiety in mainline denominations and were
alienated by the growing wealth and elaborateness of their churches. Not content
to remain in mainline churches, they formed new religious communities committed
to the theological doctrine of perfectionism.2 These former Methodists,
Presbyterians, and Baptists believed they were experiencing a renewed outpouring
of the Holy Spirit much like the early church experienced in the book of Acts.
The holiness revival spawned zeal for "Spirit Baptism" (a divine empowerment of
believers) and for other gifts of the New Testament church such as healing and
prophecy. Holiness leaders such as Charles Cullis, John Alexander Dowie, and
Albert B. Simpson established healing missions across the U.S. They, like other
holiness advocates, believed a new, miraculous era of the spirit was occurring
which would end in the second coming of Christ.
Pentecostalism took "Spirit Baptism" and the restoration of New Testament gifts
one step further. In January, 1901, holiness minister Charles Fox Parham asked
the students at his Topeka Bible school to study the scriptures and determine
what evidence might be given of Spirit baptism. Using the pentecost account in
Acts chapter two, they concluded that speaking in tongues was the confirmation
of Holy Spirit baptism. This first wave of Pentecostalism spread in the revival
that followed, but remained regional, moving into Kansas, Missouri, Texas, and
Arkansas.
The 1906 revival at Azusa street, Los Angeles marks the second phase of the
Pentecostals' origins. William Seymour, who studied under Parham in Houston,
Texas, carried the message of pentecost to Los Angeles where he began a revival
in one of the poorer sections of the city. The Azusa street revival gathered the
"ethnic minority groups of Los Angeles," who discovered a "sense of dignity and
community denied them in the larger urban culture."3
From Azusa street the revival spread throughout the U.S. Holiness leaders from
the Church of God in Christ (Memphis, Tenessee), the Church of God (Cleveland,
Tennessee), and the Pentecostal Holiness Church (Georgia and the Carolinas),
were present at Azusa, and carried its message back to their churches. Diversity
characterized their beliefs and theology; Pentecostals ranged from
Wesleyan-holiness, to Reformed, and Unitarian.4
The historiography of Pentecostalism is as multifaceted as the movement itself.
The initial historical works on Pentecostalism came from within the movement.
Pentecostal historians wrote within a "providential" framework and focused on
the role of God rather than human and natural causation. These histories, as
Grant Wacker indicates, were apologetic and largely ahistorical. They depicted
the Pentecostal revival as dropping from heaven like a sacred meteor. This
approach is evident in the titles of such early works as The Apostolic Faith
Restored (1916), and in such account as Suddenly From Heaven: A History of the
Assemblies of God (1961).5
Before 1970 few historians outside of Pentecostalism were interested in the
movement. Academics' unfamiliarity with the world of ecstatic religion might
have been one reason for this oversight. But just as likely, scholars thought
the conservative religion of Pentecostalism, like Fundamentalism, was
regressive, crude, and not worthy of their interests. In the late 1960s, the
historian William G. McLoughlin argued that Pentecostalism did not constitute a
dynamic new force in American Religion. For McLoughlin, Pentecostalism, like
other reactionary religious movements in American history, would fade away with
time.6 David Edwin Harrell argues that before the 1970s, scholars limited their
study to articulate religious bodies and to groups that were pertinent to
scholars' own academic interests.7
Since the 1970s, historians both outside of and within the movement have
critically engaged Pentecostalism. The rapid expansion of Pentecostalism in the
U. S. and abroad drew scholars' interest. At the same time scholarship on
Pentecostalism grew along with the increase in university and seminary-trained
Pentecostal historians. The establishment of the Society for Pentecostal Studies
in the early 1970s evidenced this new historical enterprise.8
As historians have analyzed Pentecostalism, they have developed several
explanations for its origins and growth. Some scholars focus on the
historical-theological roots of the movement and emphasize the primacy of
doctrine. They note the importance of Pentecostalism's historical and
theological predecessors and emphasize the religious appeal of the movement to
it adherents. A few historians look at the movement's interracial character to
assess its origins and growth. In its initial stages, Pentecostalism was
multi-ethnic and often challenged racial norms. Scholars looking at the
interracial aspect view the movement as a radical protest to segregation and as
a dynamic force of social change. With the ascendence of the new social history
in the early 1970s, scholars began to analyze the demographics of
Pentecostalism, assessing the movement's adherents according to social status
and class.
But before the rise of historical enquiries, sociological studies used class
analysis and theories of deprivation to understand the movement's appeal. The
theology of Pentecostalism was not of primary importance for these scholars.
They reflected Richard Niebuhr's class analysis of religion and posited that
theology mirrored cultural and political conditions.9 The prevailing view was
that Pentecostalism flourished because it compensated for its adherent's loss of
social and political status.10
"As Grant Wacker notes, Anderson's study is the most thorough monograph on
the origins of Pentecostalism."
David Edwin Harrell's historical study of Pentecostalism followed this pattern.
Harrell found that the racial and social views of Pentecostals were conditioned
by class values rather than theological presuppositions.11 Robert Mapes Anderson
also rooted the movement in its class status. In Vision of the Disinherited,
Anderson studied the social class origins of Pentecostalism and discovered that
extreme social strain among the nation's poor and dispossessed was the source of
Pentecostalism. Following Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson, Anderson located
social tension (such as class conflict and class stratification) in
industrialization. The shift from an agrarian to an industrial society fed
estrangement and those most at odds with this change suffered "status anxiety"
and turned to Pentecostalism.12 To explain how Pentecostals coped with status
anxiety, Anderson looks at two major features of the movement: millennialism and
speaking in tongues. Pentecostals' belief in the immanent, apocalyptic return of
Jesus, he contends, brought order to their chaotic lives and alleviated social
strain. Similarly, speaking in tongues provided psychic escape through religious
ecstacy.13
Anderson concludes that Pentecostalism represented a dysfunctional and
maladjusted reaction to social pressures. Because of the Pentecostals' negative
appraisal of society and their pessimistic outlook for the future, they were an
apolitical, "conservative bulwark of the status quo." They channeled their
social protest "into the harmless backwaters of religious ideology."14 For
Anderson, the radical social impulse inherent in the vision of the disinherited
was squandered away in escapism and conservative conformity.
As Grant Wacker notes, Anderson's study is the most thorough monograph on the
origins of Pentecostalism. The breadth of Anderson's book and the amount of data
he looked at makes it a monument in the field of Pentecostal history. At the
same time Wacker is critical of some of Anderson's basic arguments. Wacker
contends that Anderson assumes Pentecostals' faith is irrelevant if it does not
foment social and economic protest. Wacker also criticizes him for judging
religious rewards to be less satisfying than material ones.15 For Wacker, and a
number of other scholars, theology and doctrine, as much as social class,
explains the roots of the movement.
Wacker dwells on the positive functions of faith in the origins and spread of
Pentecostalism. He notes that the movement provided individuals with certitude
about the reality of the supernatural. Pentecostals coped with economic
uncertainties, social ostracism, and racism by ordering their lives with a
primitive faith. Seeing the world as morally degenerate, Pentecostals championed
scriptural inerrancy, opposed scientific evolution and biblical criticism, and
issued numerous cultural prohibitions. Pentecostalism, Wacker contends, was
appealing because its doctrines were situated in a traditional, mythic system
that protected believers from the encroachments of modernity.16
Scholars, including Grant Wacker, Edith Blumhofer, and D. William Faupel, have
looked at the restorationist and millennial roots of the movement. Wacker
describes the restorationist impulse as "a yearning to return to a time before
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