From Exodus to Exile: Black Pentecostals, Migrating Pilgrims, and Imagined Internationalism

This article examines how black religious leaders – especially women Pentecostal preachers – in the decades before World War II sought a new basis for (religious) community beyond old "man-made" (and white-made) divisions of region, race and nations. They drew on black Holiness traditions, which began in the 1880s and 90s, and were remade in the context of the Pentecostal revivals at the beginning of the twentieth century as they attempted to embrace a broader world than the one they had inhabited before. At the same time, by forging an exilic rhetoric that extended beyond the Hebrew exodus narrative that had come to define black Protestantism since the Civil War, these religious leaders helped their followers remake their sense of collective identity as they migrated from the South and their religious institutions began to span regional divides. Years before the terms diaspora and transnationalism entered into the scholarly analyses of the possibilities for black global culture, Pentecostals understood that the communal fragmentation cities helped create also produced the possibilities for human connection beyond regional boundaries and fostered in the collective imagination an internationalism that extended beyond national boundaries.