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Wacker is in a strong position to make this argument. He was raised as a Pentecostal and still calls Pentecostals "my people," though he now identifies himself "simply as an evangelical Christian." He's also a Stanford- and Harvard-educated scholar who teaches American religious history at Duke. His ear is trained for the concerns that both his subjects and his peers might raise.

For example, his chapter on worship begins with the acknowledgement that early Pentecostals would have had little to say on the topic, because "in their minds worship was something one did, not something one theorized about. After all, had not the Holy Spirit delivered them from all that Romish nonsense?" Anticipating the complaints of his colleagues, Wacker often introduces items of evidence with the phrase "chosen virtually at random" to blunt accusations of proof-texting—letting his conclusions rule the data, rather than the other way around.

Wacker should not be accused of slighting his data. He follows the scholarly convention of throwing heaps of evidence (and footnotes) at his topic, but rather than clogging up the book, this source material is its beating heart. Details introduce figures from Pentecostalism's early days (1900-1925) in all their colorful passion—evangelist Burt McCafferty, who cut through 14 inches of ice to baptize a convert; Canadian speaker B.L. Fitzpatrick, who got into a fistfight over a question regarding the nature of God; preacher Aimee Semple McPherson, who told Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover to "order your minions of Satan to leave my [radio] station alone."

Yet Wacker asserts that early Pentecostals occupied space within the fringes as well. In fact, in most respects the movement's makeup closely matched the demographic profile of the United States. Where earlier scholars (specifically Robert Mapes Anderson, author of the 1979 book Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism) found a sect composed overwhelmingly of the poor, illiterate victims of rapid modernization, Wacker finds laborers with average schooling and average upward mobility. Certainly early Pentecostals differed from the general public in a number of ways; they were less rigid about race and gender, less patriotic, and much more restrictive regarding social activities, for example. But they weren't the exotic species their critics lampooned.

Once Wacker had retrieved early Pentecostals' stories—largely through meticulous analysis of their many periodicals—he had to decide what to make of them, what interpretive framework to impose. In the essay mentioned above, Wacker likens such endeavors to the work of missionaries, "for [historians], like missionaries, remain convinced that their schemes are somehow more true, or more useful, or more likely to produce further insight, than the actors' own." The task was complicated in this study by the fact that the actors stridently denied having a scheme at all.

Because the Holy Ghost was really in charge, early Pentecostals professed to have no human leaders, no creeds, no business plans, no need for academic training, and no history except the book of Acts. Wacker identifies this aspect of Pentecostal identity as primitivism, "a downward or even backward quest for the infinitely pure and powerful fount of being itself."

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August (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45