The global movements (or movement) of charismatic renewal in both Catholic and historic Protestant Churches during the second half of the twentieth century have attracted surprisingly little attention from historians. This is in contrast to the rapidly expanding volume of scholarship, social scientific as much as historical, dedicated to understanding the explosion of Pentecostal Christianities in Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia. John Maiden's book is the most significant contribution to date to remedying the comparative neglect of the charismatic movement within the historic Christian denominations in the ‘Anglo-world’ of Britain, North America, Australasia and South Africa. It is based on an impressive range of research in the often ephemeral periodical literature generated by the movement, in addition to archival collections of leading figures in the movement, interviews and – not least important – albums containing the songs that were transmitted globally through informal networks of influence.
Should we speak of multiple charismatic movements or only one interconnected movement? Maiden's answer is properly ambivalent. On the one hand, he successfully debunks the received myth of a single origin in the experience of being ‘baptised in the Spirit’ of Dennis Bennett, the British-born Episcopal priest of St Mark's parish, Van Nuys, near Los Angeles, in 1959–60. Maiden traces the long prehistory of varieties of charismatic teaching or experience within the historic denominations. In Anglican and Protestant circles, these were usually associated with the ministry of healing evangelists such as the Australian Anglo-Catholic James Moore Hickson or the Americans William Branham and Kathryn Kuhlman. In the Roman Catholic Church, the key precursor was the lay apostolate, Cursillos de Cristiandad, established in 1944 on the island of Mallorca by Eduardo Bonnín Aguiló. Just as historians of the Pentecostal movement have now largely abandoned the older American-centred narrative of monogenesis in the Azusa Street revival of 1906, Maiden argues persuasively that the charismatic movement had multiple beginnings. Nevertheless, he is correct to suggest that the evidence of polygenesis does not invalidate the claim that independent outbreaks of charismatic renewal fused over time into one many-sided transnational movement that crossed the oceans and denominational boundaries, including the gulf between Catholics and Protestants. Maiden's detailed analysis of what he calls the ‘Spiritscape’, the global spiritual geography in which flows of charismatic teaching, Spirit-focused hymnody and even claims to apostolic or prophetic authority moved from continent to continent, is the most impressive aspect of the book. Future studies of the movement cannot afford to neglect his evidence of the major roles played by Australian and New Zealand charismatic leaders and song-writers. The charismatic movement is perhaps the outstanding Christian example of globalisation. Its transmission depended on the ease of international travel made possible by the jet airliner, and also the circulation of new forms of musical recording, notably the cassette tape. Although the movement reached its peak in the mid- to late 1970s, a decade before the invention of the world-wide web, it functioned as a world-wide web of spiritual connectivity.
Although Maiden makes brief reference (pp. 188–90) to early manifestations of charismatic renewal in the Netherlands and Germany, his primary focus is, as the book title suggests, on the ‘Anglo-world’. Whether other parts of Europe were as marginal to the story as this emphasis might be taken to imply, must await further research. No reference is made to Simon Coleman's The globalisation of charismatic Christianity (Cambridge 2000), a work which, despite its ambitious title, is mainly about the Word of Life Church in Sweden and its missionary activities elsewhere in Europe and beyond. Coleman is an anthropologist and treats European and North American charismatic Churches as essentially belonging to the same phenomenon as the neo-Pentecostal churches of contemporary Africa or Latin America. Is this in fact the case? Maiden devotes pp. 192–208 to the limited interface between White charismatics and the growth of Pentecostalism in what was, in the 1970s, called ‘the Third World’. Awakenings in Indonesia, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Latin America, West and East Africa certainly attracted the attention of Anglophone charismatics and helped to generate a sense that the Spirit was ‘doing a new thing’ world-wide. Leading non-Western Pentecostals such as the Argentinian Juan Carlos Ortiz or the Korean David (Paul) Yonggi Cho wielded some influence on Western charismatics, but they appear to be relatively isolated examples. The English Pentecostal Derek Prince receives regular mention, though the evidence that his demonology was shaped by his missionary service in Kenya (p. 193) is weak; it appears that on the contrary Prince's demonology was shaped in the West and then exported to Africa, where it received a warm welcome. The actors in Maiden's narrative are mainly White, Anglophone and affluent, in contrast to the majority of neo-Pentecostals in the Global South. He rightly points out that they had very limited engagement with the new independent Churches of modern Africa, many of which can trace their roots to British or American Pentecostal missionaries of the early twentieth century. The new Pentecostal-style Christianities of the Global South exhibit both similarities with and stark differences from Anglophone charismatic Christianity. The prosperity gospel, for example, has been relatively unsuccessful in penetrating the Western charismatic constituency. To address these questions adequately would require another book and greater interaction with the anthropological perspectives that now predominate in studies of global neo-Pentecostalism.
There are a few typographical errors in the text and a couple of factual ones. It is very unlikely that John Alexander Dowie was influenced by the Keswick movement (p. 31). The standard authority on Dowie and his global influence, Joel Cabrita's The people's Zion: Southern Africa, the United States, and a transatlantic faith-healing movement (Boston, Ma 2018), makes no mention of any connection. Chiu Ban It, Anglican bishop of Singapore, entered into charismatic experience in Bangkok in 1972, not at an Assembly of the World Council of Churches (p. 195), but at a meeting of the WCC's Commission on World Mission and Evangelism.
Despite such minor blemishes, this is a fine piece of research on a global Christian movement which will set the direction of all future work.
