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A common topic of debate in my grad-school history classes was "who can tell whose stories?" (Postmodern historians eschew the term history, too loaded with leanings toward a metanarrative.) Can men tell women's stories? Euro Americans tell African Americans'? Latinos'? Asians'? Where does the authority reside? Strangely, though, one category was never debated: whether the nonreligious could tell the stories of the religious. It was presumed, if you were religious, you could not be trusted to tell your own story; only the nonreligious scholar could be trusted to handle such combustible material. (Somehow, when it came to religion, "objectivity" snuck in through the back door.)

It's not surprising, then, that in the recent flood of books on Pentecostalism from secular academic presses, there are relatively few by Pentecostal scholars. Where, I wondered some months ago, were Pentecostal scholars being published? Perhaps by evangelical presses, where secular suspicion of faith-based scholarship would not prevail. But when I examined catalogues from the academic divisions of the most prominent evangelical publishers--InterVarsity Press, Baker Book House, Zondervan, and so on--there was an obvious lack of Pentecostal scholarship. In order to understand this discrepancy, I decided to query my colleagues in the Society for Pentecostal Studies (SPS), speak to representatives of various evangelical presses, and place this evangelical/Pentecostal division in historical context.

For some, the idea of Pentecostal scholarship is an oxymoron. Pentecostals historically did not bother to develop an intellectual tradition. Most recently, Grant Wacker's exceptional work Heaven Below chronicles the anti-intellectual nature of early Pentecostalism.1 In addition to supporting the idea that Pentecostalism's eschatological and missionary zeal made intellectual endeavors a waste of precious time, Wacker noted that the leaderless nature of the early movement, which eschewed being called an organized denominational entity, encouraged Pentecostal anti-intellectualism and contributed to its persistence. Buffered by a faith that insists on being Spirit-led, this tradition dies hard. Pentecostal Bible institutes were not accredited till the 1960s, and the SPS was not in operation until 1970. One Pentecostal academic told me that he has been viewed as too intellectual for the Foursquare denomination--which, he was reminded, prefers "people with the Spirit over people with Ph.D.'s."

The SPS is one place where Pentecostals, charismatics, and other scholars can meet and share their research. The society publishes a scholarly journal, Pneuma, where much scholarship on Pentecostalism sees its first light. When I asked why I rarely encounter the people I meet at SPS and read in Pneuma in print anywhere else, I received many different answers, with a consensus forming around the conclusion that evangelical presses have a theological bias against Pentecostal scholarship.

Many scholars shared the view that the legacy of Pentecostal anti-intellectualism has limited the number of scholars who are trained to write for scholarly presses, and they made the point that charismatic scholarship is a relatively new field in comparison to other Christian intellectual traditions. If it is true that Pentecostals simply are not trained for academic discourse, what contributes to this inadequacy? Writing about and worshiping among charismatics for the better part of ten years, I have noticed this anti-intellectualism firsthand and concur with the perception that it is deeply ingrained in the culture.

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