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Submission. This word is problematic. Beyond its reference to wives' relation to husbands, it aptly describes Pentecostals' habitual stance toward the divine. At its best, submission is what Pentecostal spirituality fundamentally represents: the bending of the individual's will to God's—a deep-seated awareness that humans do not create themselves and therefore owe their lives to another source. Pentecostals' insistence on teaching scientific creationism in the public schools is less a statement about science than a call to remember the contingency of all things God has created.

Theism. All Christians are theists but, for many believers, that is a mere principle rather than a daily reality. They are, as the saying goes, "atheists of the practical sort." Though such Christians live moral lives, hour by hour they salute no transcendent reference. In contrast, no one will ever say that Pentecostals are "atheists of the practical sort"—nor that they exhibit a moribund form of culture religion. Pentecostals' God may tumble into trivialization but rarely into dormancy.

Accountability. The second-generation Pentecostal theologian David DuPlessis earned recognition for emphasizing the phrase, "God has no grandchildren." For him, that phrase did not mean that tradition and the church remained irrelevant. It meant that God holds everyone directly responsible for their beliefs, attitudes, and actions. The idea that society causes individual shortcomings, widely spread in mainline Christianity, finds little resonance in Pentecostal culture. There are no ideologies of victimization, social or otherwise.

Assertiveness. Pentecostals take stands. The movement's corporate habit is to take a public position on issues of consequence. To be sure, a majority of white adherents come down on the "conservative" side of most public debates, especially moral issues like gay marriage and abortion. African American and Latino Pentecostals present a more complex picture, sometimes parallelling and sometimes differing from whites and from each other. On the whole, however, Pentecostals voice their views.

Pentecostals deserve better. No group can be equally concerned about all ills all the time.

Planting. Pentecostals evangelize. Indeed, there is a quip about it. When someone gets on a bus and says, "Is this seat saved—oh, by the way, are you?" you know that person is probably Pentecostal. For lots of reasons, some more commendable than others, most mainliners have come to doubt the warrant for overt evangelization of outsiders. In contrast, Pentecostals remain invincibly convinced that a buried truth, even a shielded truth, is not a truth worth holding at all. They rarely lack the courage to share the Good News.

Urgency. For Pentecostals, time counts. This is not to say that they always use their time more wisely than do other Christians. They don't. But it is to say that when they don't, they feel badly about it. And for good reason. Virtually all subscribe to some form of premillennialism. Like most secular ecologists and globalization theorists, Pentecostals strongly doubt that history can keep on going in the same old ways. Thus they emphasize stewardship, not only of money but also of the time God has given each of us to do God's work.

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March 2005, Vol. 49, No. 3