Once considered to be a marginal and faddish new religious movement, pentecostalism has become one of the fastest growing and most influential religious movements in America. Much of the work on pentecostalism, however, has focused on white leaders and denominations, ignoring the movement's racially diverse demographics, African American origins, and the appeal of pentecostalism in communities of color. Afro-Pentecostalism: Black Pentecostal Christianity in History and Culture forays into this conversation, exploring theological controversies and the historical circumstances that led to Azusa Street, gender, theological development and interpretation, missiology, and ethical reform.
Before exploring the contributions of this volume, attention must be drawn to a distracting shortcoming. As seen in so many works on African American religion, Afro-Pentecostalism is limited by its continued reliance on the category of “the black church” as a way to understand African American religious experiences. This conceptual framework is established in the editors' introductory essay as they articulate the primary significance of their project in relation to the “Black Church” (their capitalization), arguing that pentecostalism has profoundly shaped “the black church” in ways that have yet to be fully understood. In the past decade, the most prominent scholars of African American religions have decried the continued use of “the black church” as an analytic category. Not only is it the case that there is no single unifying religious orientation or tradition within African American history, but the use of the term “the black church” skews the diversity of African American religious experiences to a single, imaginary institution with prophetic progressive social and political activism.
Persistent reliance on the limiting descriptive term “the black church,” seen throughout most of this volume, misses much of the story. First, singular attention to African Americans in a movement that is multiracial and includes many people of color who are not African American (particularly Latinos) ignores the ways that pentecostalism reflects new trends in the ways that Americans, including people of color, think and talk about race. Many pentecostal churches, especially those associated with the pentecostal Prosperity Gospel, have prioritized racial integration and the integrated multiracial congregations that have resulted from their efforts represent a serious challenge to our historic understandings of race and religion. Cheryl Sanders's piece “Pentecostal Ethics and the Prosperity Gospel” precisely illustrates this point as she bemoans the destabilizing effect of the Faith movement on the social justice orientation of African Americans and the tradition of the black church. Though her aim is prescriptive and reform-minded, Sanders's concerns reflect the powerful shifts that are occurring in the ways that African Americans understand their religious identities.
Despite the methodological and intellectual problems associated with reliance on the black church as an analytic category, several essays in this collection make important contributions to the study of pentecostalism and race. In particular, Cecil M. Robeck, Jr.'s piece “The Azusa Street Mission and Historic Black Churches” places the Azusa Street revivals in tension with mainstream denominational black churches in Los Angeles. Focusing on the role of Latinos and whites in the revivals, Robeck shows that Azusa Street was uncharacteristically open to multiracial and multiethnic interests and, therefore, was not considered to be part of the local African American church community. Robeck's argument is interesting because it implicitly complicates and rejects the idea of a monolithic tradition of “the black church” and encourages a re-reading of pentecostal origins that extends beyond a black or white phenomenon.
Several theologians contribute to this volume: Leonard Lovett, William Turner, David Daniels, and Frederick Ware. Their work, along with chapters by Dale Irvin and Cheryl Sanders, constitutes a major subset of the volume centralizing primarily around approaches to the intersection of pneumatology, eschatology, liberation theology, and social justice. At the heart of their conversation is a persistent, underlying fear that the success of pentecostalism, and in particular prosperity gospel traditions, has resulted in the loss of a social-justice oriented, progressive African American religious identity. Indeed, the desire for a theology that supports social justice and liberation lies as the heart of many of the authors' continued emphasis on the black church as a normative archetype that must be uncovered or recovered in the Afro-pentecostal tradition.
Another body of work in this volume focuses on the historical development of pentecostalism within African American communities. Endeavoring to better understand the Azusa Street revivals, chapters by Robeck and Valerie C. Cooper emphasize the importance of understanding more fully the specific circumstances that led to the Azusa Street revivals, contributions that are essential for undermining and complicating the “myth of Azusa.” For her part, Cooper explores how women's roles in the evangelical and holiness movements created the theological atmosphere that would give birth to contemporary pentecostalism. Gender is a central lens for Clarence E. Hardy III's and Craig Scandrett-Leatherman's studies of church mothers and lynching. Both authors show how pentecostal beliefs and practices facilitated individual empowerment, resistance to oppression, and African American self-understanding in order to conclude that, in particular places and contexts, pentecostalism improved the lives of believers and functioned as a liberating religious tradition.
Though this volume focuses largely on American contexts, the posthumous publication of Ogbu Kalu's article on African American evangelization of Africans may well be the most significant and forward-looking contribution. From its earliest moments, pentecostalism sought to become a global religious tradition. Pentecostals missionaries traveled aggressively and were among the first Christians to exploit mass media technologies like radio, television, and the internet. As a result, American pentecostals have had a disproportionate influence on the development of global Christianity. Beginning in the early twentieth century, African American pentecostals traveled to Africa hoping to reconnect with their roots and rescue their racial kin from injustice and false religion. Operating from a complicated position of benevolence and paternalism, African American missionaries transplanted their American-born values—in particular individualism, materialism, and capitalism—to Africa. Though Kalu makes it clear that Africans exert agency in their reception of these traditions, he is equally clear that American and African American traditions, ideology, and popular culture have been enormously influential in the creation of African pentecostalisms. This approach to mission history, which must consider mass media technologies, remains one of the most important areas emerging in the study of pentecostalism as a force of globalization and bearer of the colonial legacy.
Owing largely to the prescriptive concerns of many of the volume's authors, Afro-Pentecostalism seems only to scratch the surface of a much larger and significant conversation about race in pentecostalism specifically and the study of religion generally. Serious application of critical race theories that examine the construction of whiteness, colorblindness, multiracial communities, and post-racial rhetoric are necessary for complicating scholarly conversations beyond a black/white paradigm to allow greater understanding of the impact of race and ethnic identity on religious experiences and expressions.
