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Heaven Below, which covers the first 25 years of the movement's growth, is a cultural history. Wacker divides the book into conceptual categories, analyzing, among other things, rhetoric, boundaries, authority, and cosmos. He serves them up in 15 lucid, meticulously researched chapters, all illustrated with lively anecdotes. He answers such questions as these: What did Pentecostals think and say about war and society, kin and foe? What were their customs? Their politics? What did they think of women in ministry? How did preachers preach, and leaders lead?

Tucked into this cultural history is social history. Who exactly were the early Pentecostals? Were they poor or rich, educated or illiterate? Where did they fit into early 20th-century society, and what did they think about that status? Here Wacker takes to task a common characterization of early Pentecostals, one perpetuated not only in popular myth but also by some scholars. Robert Mapes Anderson famously tagged Pentecostals America's "disinherited." The indictment could not have been more damning, but it was difficult to gainsay Anderson's assessment. No one had so thoroughly researched the available record—until now.

Rather than being dispossessed, Pentecostals were about as average as people come, which in this case is a compliment. For instance, though they may not have been the most educated, by all accounts they were as educated as the average citizen. Pentecostal churches were not, as is sometimes suggested, disproportionately populated by women and youth when compared to other evangelical churches. They worked as skilled and unskilled laborers, artisans, clerks, and, occasionally, professionals. As Americans go, they were "remarkably unremarkable."

With one foot still in the tent, Wacker chooses to accentuate the positive. He readily agrees that Pentecostals said and did some outlandish things. The list of activities and possessions forbidden or discouraged is remarkable: from bowling to crossword puzzles to Christmas trees. But rather than treating these as naïve byproducts of biblical literalism, Wacker invokes a kinder, gentler pragmatism. In the modern world, discipline requires prudence and efficiency, and at this Pentecostals were experts.

Glossolalia to the early Pentecostal was no mumbo-jumbo gibberish. It added to the faith a sense of authenticity; it was real and tangible, like the miraculous healings. Any account of Pentecostalism's genius that does not fully account for the implications of charismatic phenomena will fail. What is lacking in Wacker's beautifully constructed masterpiece is not only theology, but also much of the explicitly religious experiences and ideas animating Pentecostal "culture." Particularly in this case that omission makes this movement all the more enigmatic.

None of this should detract from the considerable feat Wacker has indeed accomplished. He has written the cultural history of a movement that shunned much of what was and is American culture. To their dying day they claimed heaven above, not America below, as their homeland. Heaven Below is a valiant—and successful—attempt to rescue early Pentecostalism from what E. P. Thompson called "the enormous condescension of posterity." No historian has done this more gracefully than Wacker, whose heart has "never left home."

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March 11 2002, Vol. 46, No. 3