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Behind the News

The sordid 1980s scandals of Pentecostal ministers Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart will incline some to presume that Paul Crouch, president of Pentecostal-linked television network TBN, did engage in the alleged homosexual liaison.

But whether the allegations in this case are eventually substantiated or not, the question arises again: why does the Pentecostal ministry seem particularly susceptible to sexual scandal?

It may turn out, in fact, that statistically, Pentecostal ministers fall in this way no more often than do other ministers. I'm sure we make this connection at least partly because of the long cultural shadows of Bakker and Swaggart.

But I don't think the connection is accidental.

It all started in the time when Pentecostalism's parent, the holiness movement, was born: the 19th century, the Victorian period. In that warm-hearted, dewy-eyed era, both marriage and the Christian life promised to satisfy all emotional desires and meet all emotional needs.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries—the time of the First and Second Great Awakenings, both marriage and revivalistic conversion were communal events. They were fostered, supported, and celebrated by friends, family, and church members. Courting in the colonial era involved the couple's whole social network. It took place under the watchful eye of all who knew the young people involved. Communal customs and ceremonies marked every stage of the relationship, through the wedding and beyond into the couple's early married life.

Similarly, in the mid-18th-century Great Awakening or the early 19th-century Second Great Awakening, friends and loved ones brought you to the evangelistic meeting. They "prayed you through" to joyous conversion. They received you into the church family with open arms—announcing your rebirth all around town. And they pledged to help you, over the long years, become the best Christian you could be.

But then came the transatlantic 19th-century cultural movement called "romanticism." Romantic philosophers, writers, musicians, and artists—facing the rationalist Enlightenment destruction of the old traditional, communal values of Christendom—turned inward in their search for spiritual meaning. If you were of the leisured class, you found meaning by diving to the depths of your own heart with the help of art, music, and travel. What you hoped to find there was a personal connection to the Spirit of things—a Spirit many among the secular romantic elite preferred to call Nature rather than God.

Plain folks without the leisure or inclination to pursue rarified experiences through travel, symphony, the opera, and so forth turned to a more obvious source for meaning—and a more obvious (and, as it turned out, longer-lasting) translation of the term "romantic." They plumbed their hearts to "find themselves" in a spiritual connection not with some nebulous spirit of nature but with another person—specifically, a soul mate and life partner of the opposite sex.

Victorian courtship represented a tectonic shift from the old, communal modes of wooing. In the newly intense, individualistic post-Enlightenment environment, courting lovers separated themselves from family and friends. They sequestered themselves to write and read long, intense, soul-searching correspondence. They avowed total, exclusive love to each other. They no longer, as had been the custom, sought the blessing of their parents or consulted with friends. Since the prospective mate would be, as popular romantic philosophy had it, the source of all spiritual meaning and support—of all that was good and true and beautiful—courting lovers poured all their time and affection into each other, to the neglect of other relationships.

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September (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48