In Holy Jumpers, William Kostlevy examines the Metropolitan Church Association (MCA), a radical holiness association rooted in Chicago that established communitarian centers in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and Bullard, Texas, in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on interviews, private correspondence, and periodicals, Kostlevy uses the MCA to introduce readers to the complexities of turn-of-the-twentieth-century radical holiness and in doing so complicates the idea that nineteenth-century groups loosely within the evangelical fold adhered to bourgeois norms of race, gender, and especially economics. Moreover, Kostlevy provides a case study of the emergence of the more radical premillennial and apolitical holiness movements that embraced healing, denominational separatism, ecstatic worship, and women in leadership from the early nineteenth-century postmillennial holiness movement connected to abolition and social reform.
The antebellum holiness movement stressed in one way or another the necessity of entire sanctification. Whether entire sanctification occurred in a single experience of consecration or gradually over time (Methodists and non-Methodists differed on the soteriological nuances), the holiness movement stressed that Christian belief should cause a genuine change of behavior expressed in family life and church life, and through social reform. By the 1890s, holiness teaching had become institutionalized in certain colleges, presses, periodicals, and associations that worked alongside existing denominations. Also by that time, “radical” holiness groups were adopting theological innovations such as divine healing, the expectation of supernatural manifestations of God, and, most important for Kostlevy, premillennial dispensationalism, which anticipated a sudden, supernatural, cataclysmic return of Jesus that would immediately establish the millennium. Kostlevy demonstrates that the adoption of premillennial dispensationalism by radical holiness groups, which replaced a postmillennialism stressing human agency in gradually bringing about the kingdom of God, was the most important theological shift that would mark the ethos of these radical holiness associations (for the MCA, he pinpoints this shift in 1896). Finally, by 1900 the MCA and other radical holiness groups embraced ecclesiastical separatism and forged churches, tabernacles, and associations distinct from Methodist and other denominations, anathematizing those denominations and anyone who did not “come out from among them.”
By the first decade of the twentieth century, the MCA was a fairly typical radical holiness group that had much in common with the Fire Baptized Holiness Church, various apostolic tabernacles, bands, and missions, and utopian centers at Shiloh, Maine, and Zion, Illinois. Rooted in Chicago, the MCA attracted mostly working-class folks along with northern European immigrants (especially Norwegians, Germans, and Swedes), eased the suffering of the poor and dispossessed (establishing a home for the elderly, an orphanage, settlement houses, and so forth), supported evangelists and tent revivals, and embraced ecstatic worship (especially the practice of “holy jumping”) along with the doctrine of divine healing. The MCA was deeply apolitical and practiced pacifism (at least until America entered World War I), encouraged women to preach and exercise leadership over men (as a manifestation of God's work at the cusp of the eschaton), and supported interracial worship. Kostlevy stresses, too, that in terms of ethos, the MCA and other radical holiness groups understood themselves as theological innovators rather than as reactionaries opposing theological liberalism or modernism. Like pentecostals, they saw technological advances as providential. The MCA was especially innovative and entrepreneurial in selling scripturally themed calendars and, most importantly, in adopting, under the auspices of “exposing sin,” the muckraking style of Ida Tarbell and others in its path-breaking periodical, The Burning Bush. Kostlevy points out that while the MCA especially antagonized moderate holiness folks (non-holiness Protestants and Roman Catholics were so far beyond salvation they were hardly worth the effort), it also criticized pentecostalism for its adoption of glossolalia, even though a number of other early pentecostals had been closely associated with the MCA and had adopted many of its theological innovations.
While pentecostals saw glossolalia as the evidence that one was wholly consecrated to God, the MCA insisted after 1904 that entire consecration was signified by selling all of one's possessions. For Kostlevy, this was the MCA's most interesting theological innovation: its rejection of private property and the subsequent establishment of communitarian compounds in Wisconsin and eventually Texas. Their rejection of private property is all the more interesting given that the two most important leaders of the MCA—E. L. Harvey and Duke Farson—were wealthy Chicago entrepreneurs (who, in fact, kept the MCA and especially its Wisconsin commune financially afloat). Kostlevy stresses the degree to which the MCA differed from radical Marxist groups like the Industrial Workers of the World (a group he considers a competitor with the MCA), Christian Socialists like George D. Herron, or holiness groups that supported the Socialist Party in Oklahoma and Texas (see Jim Bissett's Agrarian Socialism in America [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999]). For the MCA, rejecting private property (but not activities associated with a market economy such as the profit motive) was primarily an act of personal and communal consecration shaped by belief in an immediate eschaton (no reason to store up treasures on earth), by holiness anti-elitism and identification with the poor, by general ideas of stewardship (though this act of consecration was simultaneously a rejection of tithing), and by a restoration of the early church's “sharing all things in common” described in Acts 2:44–45. Eventually, though, these communitarian experiments could not sustain themselves financially, and with their demise the MCA modified its assault on private property. The MCA continued after the 1920s primarily as a missionary association, closing its last U.S. congregation in 2004.
Kostlevy focuses his analysis on the intellectual currents of the MCA and holiness folk more generally; the extent to which social, political, or economic factors might have shaped the MCA's communitarianism or its disengagement with political or social groups or causes remains largely unexamined. Nevertheless, in giving us this detailed description of the worldview and ethos of the MCA, Kostlevy adds an important volume to other recent works that continue to deepen our understanding of the holiness and early pentecostal movements that have shaped what is now a primary force in world Christianity (see, for example, Grant Wacker's Heaven Below [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001]; R. G. Robins's A. J. Tomlinson [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004]; Randall Stephens's The Fire Spreads [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008]; and Briane Turley's A Wheel Within a Wheel [Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1999]).
