Numerous histories of gender in American Protestantism focus on the struggles of women who sought ordination, the organizational changes that eventually led to their acceptance in some denominations and not others, and the significance of women's informal leadership within Protestantism. What Payne's analysis adds to these histories is an assessment of the processes through which celebrity preachers bypassed theological debates about women's lack of spiritual authority and established successful ministries. She does so by focusing on the ministries of two famous women—Maria Woodworth-Etter and Aimee Semple McPherson. The former emerged as a celebrity Pentecostal revival preacher at the turn of the twentieth century, and conducted a thriving church planting and healing ministry between 1880 and 1912. McPherson, who represents the following generation of women revivalists, began a preaching tour across the United States in 1916, by 1923 had opened a “mega-church” revival center in Los Angeles, and in 1927 founded the Four Square denomination. In terms of media attention and audience, both women's ministries were remarkably successful. What were the keys to that success?
Both women identified with the emerging Pentecostal and holiness movements of the early twentieth century, traditions within which religious authority has been located in the individual's experience more than ecclesiastical hierarchy or mainline hermeneutical approaches to biblical texts. Payne draws on gender theory and classical sociologies of religion to explain the particulars of these women's religious authority. From Weber she draws on the idea of religious authority/power as exercised via legitimation, where subjects accept authority as binding. In the case of charismatic authority, legitimation is based on the character or “heroism” of the leader. Payne makes the point that historians often use charismatic leadership as a catch-all for authority that is not linked to rational hierarchies or tradition—an overuse Payne argues dilutes its usefulness as a concept. Instead she makes the case for adopting a more interactive and performative perspective—drawing on gender theorists such as Catherine Bell, Amy Hollywood, and Judith Butler. Although Weber's theorizing authority is more interactive than Payne seems to credit (given that those subject to charismatic authority have subjected themselves in response to the person of the leader), her approach does allow the integration of more nuanced notions of gender bending, ritualized acts, and bodily practices as signifiers to which congregations respond and through which revivalist's authority is embodied and enacted. Payne gives a nod to Hollywood's concept of “misfiring”—the practice of engaging in unconventional behavior that creates room for improvisation and resistance within authoritarian organizations—and uses it to frame her analysis around women's “misfiring” of male revivalist practice to establish authoritative female ministries. The heart of her analysis seems less about “misfiring” of conventional male revival behavior, than a cogently articulated description of the appropriation, bending, and blending of cultural and religious ideals to establish the authority of Woodworth-Etter's and McPherson's ministries.
The book begins with an overview of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century gender norms—the emergence of good-provider, robust masculinity during the machine age, and the exaggeration of submissive, nurturing, femininity that was the hallmark of privileged white middle class American married women's lives. She moves then to assess debates on the role of women within Protestantism. Here the analysis is strongest, as she describes the ways in which Woodworth-Etter and McPherson drew on biblical imagery to reframe ideals of women as wives and mothers. Rather than engage in debates over the appropriateness of women's ordination, Woodworth-Etter took up the mantle of Deborah, a “mother in Israel” who protected and fought for the children of God. For McPherson, ministerial authority drew on the image of a believer as bride of Christ. Literally adopting the posture and dress of female heroines in Los Angeles's nascent film industry, McPherson comported herself as an icon of submission and devotion to Christ, dressing in Hollywood-style costume to illustrate characters and themes in her preaching.
Later chapters contrasts the preaching styles of these women with their male counterparts, the close association of Woodworth-Etter and McPherson with the sacred spaces they created, and how the their embodiment of feminine cultural norms reinforced the hegemony of white middle class ideals in the face of increasing ethnic and racial diversity in America. Both women also faced public criticism for their questionable relationships with men. Although Woodworth-Etter sidestepped the scandal of a divorce by taking up the mantle of widow when her husband died shortly after their separation, critics accused her of being a hypnotist and a fraud. In turn, McPherson faced a wave of public outcry and criticism following her sudden disappearance in 1926, which she described as a kidnaping and miraculous escape, but detractors argued was a “love tryst” with a former staff member, Roy Ormiston. Charges of perjury and criminal conspiracy were eventually dropped, but the accusations of sexual impropriety lingered. In both cases, Payne argues that celebrity women preachers faced harsher criticism than their male counterparts—some of whom were accused of mismanaging funds or, in one case, shooting a man. Finally, Payne returns to the question of the how the public ministries of these two preachers influenced early Pentecostalism. Both moved toward and away from that movement in terms of their theology—the tracing of which itself provides a lens into the shifting boundaries among fundamentalist, holiness, evangelical and Pentecostal strands of theological tradition and practice in America.
Gender and Pentecostal Revivalism is a readable cultural analysis of two of the most influential women preachers in America's last century. The linking of women's authority to the Bible, while skirting theological debates about women's ordination rooted in the Bible; the reframing of deeply held (to this day) cultural norms equating femininity with the roles of wife and mother; the blending of emerging cultural norms around individualism, agency, and expressivism with a new iteration of Christian belief and practice; and the appropriation of symbols of modernity (costume, amphitheater seating; religious identity rooted in experience and emotion) are all central to this analysis—an analysis that illustrates the uses of studying exceptional cases to highlight religious, as well as cultural, change.
