Over the past decade, scholarship on pentecostal and charismatic movements has expanded rapidly as historians, anthropologists, and sociologists have charted the worldwide proliferation of “Spirit-filled” traditions and analyzed the implications of this exponential growth for political, economic, and cultural life in both local and global contexts. Path-breaking works in this genre such as Harvey Cox's Fire From Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995), Philip Jenkins's The Next Christendom: the Coming of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), and Allan Anderson's An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004) drew attention to the dramatic spread of Spirit-filled faith in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and called upon scholars of Western religion to reevaluate their assumptions about the origins and orientations of pentecostalism in and beyond Europe and the United States. The essays in A Liberating Spirit: Pentecostals and Social Action in North America contribute to a growing body of literature that responds to this appeal. Building on recent studies that explore the relationship between Spirit-filled faith and social action worldwide—especially Donald E. Miller and Tetsuano Yamamori, Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)—contributors to A Liberating Spirit ask whether pentecostals in North America are developing a “theology of liberation” or a “progressive” approach to issues of race, class, gender, and ecology.

In their introduction to the volume, Wilkinson and Studebaker assert that “traditional North American Pentecostalism has often understood the freedom of the Spirit in personal terms” and therefore “has not had a strong propensity toward social engagement” (7). Hoping to amend this individualistic orientation and to challenge scholarly interpretations that stress the movement's inherent otherworldliness, detachment, and/or political conservatism, the authors aim to identify historical and theological resources from within the pentecostal tradition that can enable contemporary North American practitioners to “develop a vision of redemption that encompasses both the personal and social dimensions of human life” (7). A Liberating Spirit, the editors explain, takes on two inter-related tasks: first, to assess whether a “Progressive Pentecostalism” currently exists in North America and, second, to promote a Spirit-filled Christianity that “liberates human persons both from perpetrating and suffering social evil” (12).

The ten essays that follow seek to fulfill these ambitions through a variety of methodological frameworks. Some employ sociological, anthropological, or historical analysis in an effort to critically evaluate the participation of diverse North American pentecostal groups in efforts to resist, overcome, and/or endure racial injustice, economic marginalization, gender oppression, and environmental crisis. Several of the contributions—especially Pamela Holmes's attempt to construct a “Pentecostal Feminist Hermeneutic of Liberation” and the three essays on ecology—are more explicitly theological in their approach. Given this methodological multiplicity, the collection as a whole is somewhat unwieldy. An epilogue highlighting key themes, underscoring how these disparate but sometimes overlapping essays (the two contributions on class are remarkably similar) build on one another or contribute to a common conversation and drawing conclusions based on the analysis presented would have added to the volume's value. Rather than requiring readers to synthesize this rather uneven body of data, the editors might have emphasized how A Liberating Spirit engages broader issues in the study of religion and reflected on the extent to which the book answers the myriad questions they pose at the outset: “Is there evidence of a Pentecostal ‘theology of liberation’ that explains Pentecostal engagement in North America? Are Pentecostals in North America as ‘progressive’ as their counterparts elsewhere? Do these categories fit North American Pentecostal responses to social issues or are other more suitable?” (2).

What the evidence gleaned from these essays does reveal is that the study of pentecostal social action in North America (or anywhere) requires careful attention to the meaning and applicability of terms such as “progressive,” “liberating,” and “social transformation.” Several contributors caution against uncritically adopting frameworks of analysis that derive from liberal Protestantism—a tradition that, as Peter Althouse puts it in his essay, “has a particular interest in aligning Christian faith with modernist notions of universal rationalism” and in so doing devalues and marginalizes religious movements like pentecostalism which resist the “dominant values and norms” that “support modernity's national, consumer, and capitalist interests” (129-130). Here, Althouse echoes scholars such as Tracy Fessenden, Robert Orsi, and others who have argued persuasively that the discipline of religious studies has been deeply shaped by Protestant presumptions and as a result has historically distorted, obscured, and derided forms of faith that seem to threaten liberal conceptions of religion, culture, and political life. Rather than proceeding from such premises, Althouse intimates, students of pentecostalism should seek to interpret the tradition on its own terms.

Clinton Westman makes an analogous argument in his ethnographic study of pentecostalism among Canadian Aboriginal People. Most analysts, he contends, assume that Aboriginal Pentecostals are “monolithically conservative or apolitical” and condemn “Pentecostals for rejecting Aboriginal cultural politics or for being on the ‘wrong’ side of disputes over land claims.” Studies shaped by these biases offer “little insight into the lived experience of Aboriginal Pentecostals” and obscure the “local meanings” and particular relationships between “Pentecostalism and politics” that emerge in specific contexts (107–108).

Attending to lived experience as a means for analyzing pentecostal understandings of “liberation” is also a prominent theme in Estrelda Alexander's essay on the “social and political agendas of African American Pentecostalism” (49). Although early leaders like William Seymour did not produce “sophisticated systematic theological argument[s]” against racial, gendered, and cultural discrimination, their “radically egalitarian” practices of “mutuality” provided a “lived protest of the racial mores of early twentieth century society” (32, 38). Yet “Seymour's project was not so much about liberating the black race from the effects of racism within society,” Alexander argues, “as it was to liberate all men and women from the demoralizing effects of race prejudice within the church” (32). For early pentecostals, the movement's “liberative ethos” offered “adherents a different lens through which to view themselves . . . rather than engaging and challenging the society itself” (24–25).

Like Alexander, most contributors to this volume conclude that North American pentecostals, while more politically and socially engaged than many previous observers have recognized, have consistently conceived of liberation in personal rather than structural terms. Although pentecostals often promote experiences of individual transformation—such as “reduced dependence on drugs”—that “have social consequences, such as improved employment and family stability,” they “have been less successful in addressing the root causes of such widespread despair in their communities” (107). Given these patterns of engagement, Westman asserts, analysts must “be cautious in adopting models that suggest Pentecostalism is mainly motivated by a progressive social politics, in the sense that this phrase would be understood by most North Americans; this would clearly be an overcorrection” (108). Rather than dismissing pentecostal approaches to issues of race, class, gender, and environmental crisis as “totally otherworldly,” however, contributors to A Liberating Spirit urge interpreters to acknowledge both the specific theological meanings and the “socio-political ramifications” of Spirit-filled practices (13). Their essays provide useful models for future scholarship.