Pulpit and Politics: Clergy in American Politics at the Advent of the Millennium

14. Assemblies of God

The Assemblies of God is the largest Pentecostal denomination in the United States. It originated in the Pentecostal revivals of the early twentieth century, one of several religious movements that operated on the fringes of American Protestantism and the margins of mainstream society . This outsider status extended to politics, where Pentecostals were widely regarded as apolitical, a tendency that was especially pronounced in their religious institutions and among their clergy. As the century progressed, however, Pentecostals carved out a prominent niche in American religion and moved steadily into the social mainstream, buoyed by strong religious institutions and prodigious evangelism. This trend eventually produced a high level of political engagement. Some Pentecostals followed the path of working from within party politics, of which U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft is a good example. Others entered the political fray more as outsiders to party politics, such as Pat Robertson’s bid to capture the 1988 Republican presidential nomination and the activities of the Christian Coalition (Hertzke 1993; Guth et al. 1995). Assemblies of God clergy were central to this political transformation (Green 1996), and by the 2000 election these ministers had become a bulwark of the Right in American politics. This essay describes 179 Chapter 14 Assemblies of God John C. Green the distinctive characteristics of the Assemblies of God clergy and their political engagement at the beginning of the twenty-first century. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The Assemblies of God denomination was founded in 1914 at a meeting in Hot Springs, Arkansas, of three hundred clergy, evangelists, and lay persons from twenty states and several countries (Assemblies of God 2002a). The attendees were veterans of more than a decade of Pentecostal revivals, the first of which took place in 1901 at Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kansas. Perhaps the most famous of these revivals occurred at the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles, California, between 1903 and 1913. The distinguishing characteristics of these revivals included speaking in tongues (uttering unknown languages during prayer) and other gifts of the Spirit during spontaneous and ecstatic worship. The participants interpreted these phenomena as the baptism of the Holy Spirit mentioned in the New Testament book of the Acts of the Apostles, which occurred on Pentecost. Thus, these spirit-filled Christians were soon called “Pentecostals.” Although such revivals were distinctive, they were deeply influenced by other nineteenth-century religious movements among pietist Protestants, including the restorationist , holiness, premillennial, healing, and fundamentalist movements (Blumhofer 1993). Similar to these trends, Pentecostalism was a reaction to the inroads of modernist theology in the major Protestant denominations and shared an affirmation of orthodox Protestant doctrine, a commitment to evangelicalism, and the assumption that God was directly active in the lives of believers. The purpose of the initial meeting in 1914 was to develop a cooperative fellowship able to address some practical problems that emerged from the Pentecostal revivals. These issues included the need for doctrinal unity, gospel literature, accounting of funds, and the approval and training of clergy and missionaries. Having originated from many religious backgrounds and viewing themselves primarily as a spiritual movement , the Hot Springs participants had little interest in forming a centralized denomination. Accordingly, they adopted a loose organizational structure, the General Assembly of the Assemblies of God, which united local congregations for certain common purposes but left them autonomous in other regards. In 1916 the general council promulgated a “Statement of Fundamental Truth,” and within two years, the 180 Assemblies of God Assembly had articulated a distinct theological perspective and moved its headquarters to the present location in Springfield, Missouri in 1918 (Blumhofer 1993, 137). At its founding, the Assemblies of God encapsulated a tension between the spontaneity of religious movements and the order of denominational institutions (Poloma 1989). This tension helps define the relatively brief history of the Assemblies of God (Blumhofer 1985). From 1918 to 1940, the denomination developed basic religious institutions largely in isolation from other evangelical Protestants, including the fundamentalists, who rejected the gifts of the Spirit as false or even satanic. A period of contact with other evangelicals began in the 1940s, when the Assemblies of God accepted the invitation to join the newly founded National Association of Evangelicals and the National Association of Religious Broadcasters. A few years later, it joined the Pentecostal World Congress and the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America. At the same time, the denomination faced disputes with the “Latter Rain” movement, which put special stress...