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Primitivism explains a lot of Pentecostal attitudes and behaviors, but it leaves several key questions unanswered, starting with the question of how a solely backward-looking movement could survive, let alone explode. Wacker finds those answers in another aspect of Pentecostal character: pragmatism. People who claimed to have no leaders flocked to hear big-name evangelists—and touted those names on promotional posters. Believers with no creeds attacked believers who held different ideas about the Trinity or the necessity of speaking in tongues. Zealots with their eyes fixed on heaven managed to turn more than a few bucks on earth, and avowed anti-intellectuals founded Bible colleges. Cool heads clearly helped to keep revival fires burning.

One area of the Pentecostal experience that has remained largely in the grip of the primitivist impulse is the notion of history. In the 1997 revision of his 1971 book on Pentecostalism, Vinson Synan took time in the preface to justify his addition of the word "tradition" to the title "despite the fact that most Pentecostals have disdained the word 'tradition' as belonging to the older and colder 'established' churches." "History" is not even a product category at Pentecostal Charisma House Books. Acknowledging their roots—which certainly extend through nineteenth-century holiness movements, back to early Methodists and John Wesley, further back to Pietists and Dissenters, and through many other stops on the way to the early church—is not something most Pentecostals have been eager to do. Their opinions on this book, if they publish any, should be interesting.

Quoting his colleague David Steinmetz, Wacker likes to say the historian's task is "to resurrect the dead and let them speak." Wacker accomplishes that goal in Heaven Below, for which both scholars and lay readers can be grateful. But Wacker goes beyond ventriloquism by reading between his subjects' lines to uncover traits the actors would not have recognized, and likely would have repudiated. The resulting sympathetic yet challenging account represents a crucial advance in Pentecostal scholarship.

Elesha Coffman is managing editor of Christian History magazine.

Copyright © 2001 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Christian History's issue 58 tells the story of Pentecostalism's beginnings and early years, and includes an article by Wacker on the reception pentecostalism received from evangelicals. The issue can be ordered here.

Peter Steinfels wrote about Wacker's book in The New York Times while Alan Wolfe reviewed it for The New Republic.

ChristianBook.com and Amazon.com offer the books mentioned in this essay, including:

Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture , by Grant Wacker; Harvard, 2001; $35

Religious Advocacy and American History, edited by Bruce Kuklick and D.G. Hart; Eerdmans, 1997

The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century, by Vinson Synan; Eerdmans, 1997 [1971]

Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism, by Robert Mapes Anderson; Oxford, 1979

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August (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45