Pentecostal Christianity began a century ago with a handful of evangelical Christians for whom simply being born again did not suffice.
It happened first in January 1901 at the Bible school of Charles Fox Parham in Topeka, Kan., and then, five years later, in the famous revival begun by the black evangelist William J. Seymour at the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles: A swelling band of religious seekers underwent an ecstatic experience of being filled with the Holy Ghost that led them to speak in tongues and testify to daily miracles of healing, both spiritual and physical.
Within four years, the handful had swollen to more than 50,000. A century later, surveys show that at least four million Americans (including Attorney General John Ashcroft) belong to classic Pentecostal denominations, which now worship in suburban megachurches as well as city storefronts. At least twice as many "charismatics" have adopted many Pentecostal beliefs while remaining in non-Pentecostal churches.
Bolstered by indigenous Christian movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Pentecostal and charismatic Christians now number hundreds of millions worldwide. That makes them probably the largest form of Christianity after Roman Catholicism and the fastest growing.
For a long time, efforts to understand this vigor were clouded by disdain. Pentecostals were pegged as Holy Rollers. Their services were viewed as bedlams of raw emotion, bodily contortions and gibberish. Their aggressive evangelizing was condemned as hucksterism.
Even serious, sympathetic studies reinforced the popular impression that Pentecostalism was the expression of poorly educated and socially marginal people, outcasts who grasped an exuberant faith as an escape from their miseries or found in it the meaning and discipline to make that escape effective.
Challenging this premise is one of the remarkable accomplishments of Grant Wacker, a historian of American religion at Duke University, in "Heaven Below" (Harvard University Press, $35), a study of the first generation of Pentecostals. His meticulous review of the data leads to a different, and in some sense surprising, conclusion: "Contrary to stereotype, the typical convert paralleled the demographic and biographical profile of the typical American."
A minority, indeed, came from the destitute and the alienated. But most early Pentecostals were upwardly mobile members of the stable working class and their leaders "the most upwardly mobile segment of the middling class."
What made them not quite "normal Americans," Professor Wacker said, was their "jut- jawed stress on personal autonomy." These were restless people, unusually mobile, ready to strike out for new parts and — evidently — for new beliefs.
"Heaven Below" is a historical ethnography, examining topics like authority, rhetoric, worship and prohibitions, and attitudes toward finances, education, women and race.
In a chapter on speaking in tongues, for example, Professor Wacker begins with the early Pentecostals' own descriptions of what came to define their movement, and then moves on to contemporary linguistic, physiological and cultural explanations. Along the way, the author recounts the poignant tales of early Pentecostal missionaries who embarked for Asia and Africa confidently expecting the gift of tongues to enable them to communicate with the native populations. (It didn't.)
Because the appeal of Pentecostalism has seemed to be an extreme version of evangelical Christianity's emphasis on immediate religious experience, it is fascinating to see how many joined the movement on the strength of its ideas. "They had come to believe, even unwillingly, that its theological claims were biblically irrefutable," Professor Wacker writes. "Repeatedly, we see men and women dragged in by their minds, as if against their wills."
The book's major thesis, however, is that Pentecostalism survived and flourished because the absolutism and certitude stemming from its quest for direct contact with the divine was always balanced by a "clear-eyed" common-sense recognition of practicalities like finances or dealings with the law.
Neither side of this balancing act gets the author's unqualified admiration. The movement's initial fervor had melted away divisions between black and white and male and female. But this worldly pragmatism almost immediately began adjusting to Jim Crow laws and assumptions about the dominant place of males.
"Heaven Below" is a work of careful research, but it is hard not to attribute the book's quality at least partly to the author's own relation to the tradition he is studying.
"I was reared in a Pentecostal home and attended a Pentecostal church once or twice a week until I left for college," Professor Wacker writes. "My father, grandfather, aunts, uncles and cousins in all directions were Pentecostal ministers or missionaries. Until adulthood, I simply assumed, as they did, that all mature Christians would speak in tongues and expect miracles of divine healing."
In time, Professor Wacker came to identify himself "simply as an evangelical Christian, and that is where my head, at least, remains."
"Yet in many ways my heart never left home," he continues. "Pentecostals continue to be my people. To be sure, I cringe when I watch Pentecostal flamethrowers on television. But I grow defensive when outsiders take swipes at them, not because they do not deserve it, but because most outsiders have not earned the right. More important, perhaps, my Pentecostal upbringing continues to influence my deepest assumptions about what is and is not possible in a world allegedly governed solely by natural processes."
Professor Wacker suspects that God skipped school on the day the Enlightenment was studied: "Clearly the Almighty did not get the word that He was not supposed to transform persons' lives in miraculous ways day after day."
Calling himself "a pilgrim with one leg still stuck in the tent," Professor Wacker hopes that being half-in and half-out has enabled him "to combine the cool eye of the critic with the warm heart of the believer."
Not a bad formula, one might argue, for writing religious history.