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After his careful examination of the origins of southern Pentecostalism, Stephens sketches the movement's later evolution. Once apolitical, egalitarian, and pacifist, white Pentecostals in particular "came in some respects to look more and more like their perennial enemies" and "identified with the same kind of social and political conservatism they had once shunned or even openly condemned." Having experienced a steady rise in wealth and social status, few Pentecostal preachers today would spend their time warning against Sunday newspapers, oyster suppers, and neckties.
Crisply written, analytically clear, and full of colorful personalities, The Fire Spreads is the most significant study of Pentecostal origins since Grant Wacker's Heaven Below, and Stephens' four chapters on holiness Christianity provide an unparalleled introduction to that movement's emergence and growth in the South. Good books leave their readers wanting more, and Stephens' survey of more recent developments left me hoping he will return to these years with the same chronological and regional nuance that undergirds the earlier portions of his narrative. While Stephens notes the role of the Keswick movement and Dwight Moody in promoting both holiness and premillennialism, he sometimes credits southern Pentecostalism for what are more accurately seen as broader trends within American evangelicalism. For example, Stephens suggests Pentecostalism's responsibility for the ascendancy of premillennialism within American theology and culture, citing the popularity of Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind series. But Lindsey (a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary) and Tim LaHaye (a Bob Jones University alumnus) hale from segments of the evangelical/fundamentalist landscape that vigorously opposed the Pentecostal and charismatic fire. Evangelicals—and later fundamentalists—across the United States steadily embraced premillennialism during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Likewise, Keswick-style holiness and consecration imbued mainstream evangelicalism with perfectionistic teachings by the mid-20th century. In the 1950s, Billy Graham and Bill Bright—among many others—encouraged their followers to become "filled with the Spirit" by completely surrendering themselves in faith to Jesus Christ. Stephens could more fully explore the cross-fertilization between evangelicalism and fundamentalism on the one hand and Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement on the other.
I also wanted more description of the fire itself. Most of The Fire Spreads is a history of the holiness movement, focusing on transregional networks, intra-denominational conflict, and doctrinal development. The narrative really crackles once it reaches the emergence of Pentecostalism, as the movement's ecstatic spirituality comes to the fore. "That same electrifying Spirit that overwhelmed Cornelius and the apostles in Acts," writes Stephens, "was again available to all." Members of the holiness denominations left in droves, convinced that their familiar churches "could not generate this kind of excitement."
"O for a heart to praise my God," wrote Charles Wesley, "a heart from sin set free." My own experience has more closely approximated that described by Wesley's Baptist hymn-writing contemporary, Robert Robinson: "Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the Lord I love." Few denominational hymnals include Robinson's fourth verse to "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing": "O that day when freed from sinning," he concludes, "I shall see Thy lovely face; Clothed then in blood washed linen, How I'll sing Thy sovereign grace." In this formulation, freedom from sin clearly comes only after entrance into eternal life. Of course, denominations find ways to make doctrinally specific hymns palatable for their own theologies. For instance, many Reformed Protestants substitute "promised rest" for "second rest" in Wesley's "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling." Such adaptations hint at doctrinal disagreements but also suggest their relative unimportance.
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