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What was the catalyst?
For some years, into the '80s, I had been teaching a course in which I required students to visit a church, or temple, or synagogue and write a detailed ethnography of it. It was a great way of staying in touch with what was happening in Southern California. I kept coming across student papers talking about Calvary Chapel, the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, Hope Chapel, and other non-denominational groups. The students were fascinated with these churches—their music, the informal dress of the congregations, the buildings where they worshipped, and so forth. I decided at some point that I ought to go and visit some of these churches. When I did, I ended up writing a grant proposal to the Lilly Endowment saying that I would like to study the Vineyard, Calvary, and Hope. So, in the early 1990s, I launched the study that became Reinventing American Protestantism.
For the next three years, every Sunday, I was in one of these neo-Pentecostal churches. I found them incredibly interesting, at a purely personal level. Sometimes I found things going on in them that I'd absolutely no categories to interpret. I clearly remember the first time I went to a Vineyard healing conference and saw people manifesting the Spirit, lying on the floor, shaking. That same conference ended with some of the early manifestations of what became known as "holy laughter." One of those evenings, I was so disoriented by what I was experiencing that I went out into the car and turned on a rock- and-roll station, which I normally wouldn't listen to, just to ground myself back in the profane world. What amazed me about these churches was the warmth of the people, their honesty and transparency, and the fact that undeniably, they were encountering some reality beyond themselves, which they called the Holy Spirit.
What did you make of that?
At that point I realized that when I wrote The Case for Liberal Christianity, what was missing was the experiential dimension. I had been trying to solve the dilemma of how you could be a contemporary person and a Christian at a purely cognitive level, a rational level. It seemed to me that these neo-Pentecostals had circumvented that whole process and went right to the experiential level. I didn't really have a framework for understanding that, and frankly I had never thought much about the Holy Spirit. It had never been part of my theology, but I was intrigued with it. So, in Reinventing American Protestantism, I tried to acknowledge the role of the experiential and drew heavily upon William James as a framework for interpreting that.
When I finished that book, in some ways I knew that I was on to something. I felt that I was able to name the elements of these congregations that were allowing them to grow so rapidly and were attracting people who came from non-church backgrounds. These congregations didn't meet in religious-looking buildings. Their clergy didn't look "religious." They didn't have all the trappings of traditional religion. Another element, as I've already suggested, is that there was a transparency to the members of these churches, an honesty, a directness of communication. In some ways, they cut through the superficiality of late-20th-century America. Clearly that was very attractive to many people—attractive to me as well.
Then there were certain organizational factors. They were very non-hierarchical. They truly did believe in the priesthood of all believers. People were not only having their needs met, but they were finding an avenue for service. That created a lively sense of community—again, something that many people yearned for.
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