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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.
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