Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (review)

A historian of religion reared as a pentecostal, Wacker has written an important study of an early twentieth-century revival that spawned new denominations and transformed the religious landscape. In the 2000 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, he reports, the twenty largest pentecostal bodies claimed 11 million members. (Sampling data yield smaller but still impressive numbers.) Wacker traces pentecostalism from its origins in the nineteenth-century "holiness" movement to the year 1925. Key characteristics included a longing to rekindle the fervor of the apostolic age; a belief in Christ's imminent return; the certainty that Christians today, as at Pentecost, can experience the Holy Spirit's direct indwelling presence; and the conviction that this presence manifests itself in such gifts as divine healing and glossolalia (speaking in tongues). Gripped by revival fervor, early pentecostals led ecstatic, sometimes raucous "spirit-filled" revivals; founded periodicals and Bible schools; and flocked to foreign-mission fields.

Adopting an ethnographic approach, and drawing evidence from periodicals, diaries, and memoirs, Wacker treats the first-generation pentecostals as a cultural whole and the years from 1900 to 1925 "more or less as a single moment in time" (16), though with special attention to World War I, when piety and patriotism clashed. In fifteen chapters, he explores early pentecostals' temperament, worship, rhetoric, customs, leadership, eschatology, views of civil authority, and much else. Certain individuals, such as the evangelist Maria Woodworth-Etter, appear repeatedly, as their writings or careers illuminate different facets of pentecostalism. Wacker allows his subjects to speak for themselves, and they do so volubly. One fifteen-page chapter boasts 117 notes. It's hard to imagine a more comprehensive or sensitive evocation of early pentecostalism.

Wacker sees a basic tension between pentecostals' "primitivism"—their allegiance to the Holy Spirit and to primitive Christianity—and their pragmatic accommodation to contemporary realities. In tracing their view of women's roles, the relations between white and black pentecostals, and Christians' duty in wartime, he convincingly argues that prevailing social norms eventually overrode the initial impulse to ignore social hierarchies and conformist pressures in obedience to the Spirit. Unlike some earlier scholars (and jeering journalists) who portrayed pentecostals as the dregs of society, Wacker argues that they actually represented a cross-section of the U.S. population.

Like all good scholarship, Heaven Below raises further questions. How, for example, might a student of comparative religion position pentecostalism within a larger pattern of restorationist movements found in many religions? How does pentecostals' weepy quest for emotional intensity relate to more "secular" manifestations of the same impulse in an increasingly technocratic and bureaucratic age? To what extent was the movement a response to a society coming to terms with rapid urbanization, a vast tide of Catholic and Jewish immigrants, cultural modernism and skepticism, the growing authority of science, the expansion of higher education, and a Protestantism torn between the reformist social gospel and a fundamentalist backlash? How might pentecostalism's divisive effects on communities and families—anecdotally reported throughout the work—be examined more systematically? What methodologies or theoretical insights from other disciplines would shed light on these questions?

In this richly documented, refreshingly nonpedantic, and jargon-free evocation of the early pentecostal world, Wacker has built a solid empirical foundation that will be required reading for future scholars wishing to study this fascinating movement and its relation to the larger social, cultural, and intellectual trends of the day.