In 1907, Memphis police arrested Frank C. Ford, a twenty-two-year-old black man, for “funny talk.” His employer had alerted the station that a houseboy left Sunday night and when he returned Monday morning, he spoke in an unknown language, waiving his hands above his head. To the maid, Ford said, “O-pala, O-pala.” But to the police chief, he declared, “[d]ey ain't nothing wrong boss; I'se got ligon.” That religion, the subject of this book, was a strand of American Pentecostalism, carried from the Azusa Street revival in California to the Holiness revivals at Charles H. Mason's church in Tennessee. And it was a convert to that religion, to the Apostolic Faith movement in Los Angeles, a white minister George Cook, who arrived to the Memphis prison with another white minister and vouched for Ford and secured his release. Cook explained to the chief that he was in town for a revival at Mason's congregation and there, “on Sunday afternoon, Ford fell into a stupor and lay out in front of the altar where he remained until Monday morning when he awoke with the gift of tongues.” Sufficiently persuaded by the testimony, the police chief granted the release, but reminded the departed that his employer had fired him and that he was banned from the house. To that, Ford said, “glory be ter Gawd” (38).

Filled with these types of stories, vignettes of Pentecostalism outside the church, The Rise to Respectability is more than the denominational history it claims. Calvin White Jr. offers the “first full-length academic-study of [the Church of God in Christ] from its inception [in 1907] to the civil rights movement” (5). His focus on the “denomination as a whole” distinguishes the book from historical narratives of Pentecostalism in America that include the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) among others, such as Randall Stephen's The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), and detailed accounts of religious practitioners within COGIC, specifically Anthea D. Butler's Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). Tracking the life of COGIC founder Charles H. Mason and the institutions he left behind, White argues that COGIC accepted or rejected progressive ideas that defined public respectability based on its own internal standards of sanctification and glossolalia. The spiritual practices of sanctification, which included “personal standards of dress, pure living, and avoiding worldly amusements,” placed Holiness believers outside mainstream middle-class America, where White locates secular standards of respectability (9). And the spiritual expressions of glossalia further removed COGIC, and other Pentecostals, from those religious outsiders. This was how it was at the beginning, when almost all of COGIC members were African Americans from lower classes. Religious distinction often meant social disdain, from white and black middle-class Protestants. A century later, though, the denomination defined a new racial class prestige.

In six chapters that roughly move chronologically, White narrates how COGIC developed from the Memphis church of an outcast Mason to a transnational denomination with a list of wealthy congregations, including the L.A. church that counts Denzel Washington and Angela Bassett among its members. The chapters examine Mason's relationship to the Holiness movement and the significance of glossolalia to the identity of COGIC and its struggle for respectability, court cases regarding COGIC property, Mason's controversial comments on conscientious objectorship during World War I, COGIC missionary efforts in Africa, the local development of COGIC in Memphis, and the relationship of COGIC to the Civil Rights Movement, with particularly attention to the lynching and funeral of Emmett Till, who had family ties to the denomination. The chapters rely on a range of sources, including archival collections, government documents, denominational print materials, author interviews with COGIC members, court cases, and newspapers and periodicals.

To this reviewer, chapters 2 and 4 stand out from the rest, because they address the relationship between “possession” and “property,” a topic that should interest religious studies scholars across disciplinary boundaries who are concerned with the social construction of the interpretive categories that define religious history. Along with the above case of Frank Ford, we see in chapter two Mason's ministerial rival, Charles P. Jones, try to gain institutional control through legal means. At the denominational convention, Jones accused Mason of being “possessed with a spirit of deep delusion” (40). In the county courts, Jones organized members of Mason's congregations to file claims to control church property. Legal arguments against Mason depended upon the charge of “spirit possession,” and depicted him as “erratic,” “juvenile,” and the type of minister to stir members into a “frenzy” (45). By speaking in tongues, the plaintiffs maintained, Mason no longer used church property as it was intended. (Some of the courts upheld Jones's position, others ruled in favor of Mason. The legal reasoning of the varying decisions said much about how respectable American religion was constructed in the first half of the twentieth century.) In chapter 4, White explains how COGIC missionaries later displaced public criticism of their worship style as “possessed” by projecting that label onto African religions, distinguishing, for example, the “spirit possession” of “African dance” from the joyful expressions of “sanctified dance” among North American believers. What these chapters suggest is that in order to achieve public respectability, COGIC members had to demonstrate that the indwelling of the Holy Spirit was not the same as spirit possession; that is, by implication, they had to prove their religion modern.

Attention to those themes brings COGIC in particular, and American Pentecostalism more broadly, into what anthropologist Paul Christopher Johnson has described as an Atlantic genealogy of “possession” that is entangled with the discursive constructions and circulations of “property,” “the modern political subject,” and “African and Afro-Atlantic religions” (see Paul Christopher Johnson, “An Atlantic Genealogy of ‘Spirit Possession,’” Comparative Studies in Society and History 53, no. 2 [2011]: 396). North American convergence with that trans-Atlantic story—of spirit possession, Holiness-Pentecostalism, and African religions—has yet to be fully told. While White tethers middle-class respectability to denominational history, his willingness to follow the sources where they lead, whether from revival to revival, domestic work to police station, local church to African mission, offers the reader an opportunity to imagine numerous subplots of economic disruption, reconfigured property, personal freedom, and religious construction.