In recent years there have been several synthetizing and monographic studies of American religious intolerance, including examinations of the religious underpinnings of anti-Catholicism, anti-Mormonism, and the Ku Klux Klan. Yet there have been fewer studies that address the ways that religions do not only dislike targeted nemeses, but also expend enormous amounts of energy analyzing one another in order to defend sectarian territory. This is despite the fact that the archives of American Protestantism are overflowing with such irritated interreligious analysis. One could even argue that a central practice of religions in the United States is sizing up—and systematically cutting down—the competition.

This volume offers a history of the critical relationship fundamentalists had with Pentecostals during the early twentieth century. Previous historiography focused on the differences between fundamentalists and Pentecostals, whereas Gerald W. King finds in their relationship a bickering kinship borne of genealogical and theological proximity. This family relation included moments of pronounced spite: in 1928, the World's Christian Fundamentals Association (WCFA) passed a resolution that the convention would “go on record as unreservedly opposed to Modern Pentecostalism,” and described Pentecostals as a “menace in many churches and a real injury to the sure testimony of Fundamentalist Christians” (129). Such a proclamation might suggest an irreconcilable divide between the two groups, but the resolution did not pass unanimously, an indication of the confusing familiarity and discomfort shared by fundamentalists and Pentecostals. Whatever the ambiguity felt by fundamentalists, their 1928 collective anti-Pentecostal resolve caused many Pentecostals to feel as if they had been Disfellowshiped.

How then did these two groups join forces in 1943 under the auspices of an umbrella organization, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE)? King narrates this mid-twentieth century rapprochement. From 1906 until 1909, Pentecostalism spread through camp meetings and itinerant promotions, and slowly co-opted holiness networks to establish Pentecostal denominational spaces. Along the way, reports of tongues speech and divine healing attracted the disdain of (what King calls) protofundamentalists who perceived in these rites a worrisome sensual abandon and violation of scripture. By the 1920s, Pentecostals had begun to develop their own permanent Bible schools. Due in part to this institutionalization of Pentecostalism, fundamentalist attacks on the movement increased. Despite fundamentalist disregard for Pentecostals, the “fundamentalization” of Pentecostalism continued, as Pentecostals embraced fundamentalist texts (like The Fundamentals and the Scofield Reference Bible) and fundamentalist theology (like dispensationalism and premilliennialism) (201).

King argues that fundamentalists felt intellectually and socially superior to Pentecostals, and he demonstrates that a lot of fundamentalist ink was spilt to decry Pentecostal heresies through comparatively geeky invocations of right scriptural logic. But something else was at stake in this distaste, something much more consequential to the longer story King wants to tell. If fundamentalists were threatened by Pentecostals, it was because Pentecostal emphasis on the Holy Spirit indicated a profound upending of ecclesiastical authority in the history of Christendom. At one point, King writes, “modernists desired freedom to explore the human spirit while Pentecostals desired freedom to explore the Holy Spirit” (27). Such a comparison suggests the way that Pentecostalism was, in its way, an awesome heresy: an untethering of the believer from all religious authority. Fundamentalists named that as an apostasy, again and again, and recommended their scriptural ferocity over and above Pentecostal behavioral abandon.

Pentecostals were wounded by such fundamentalist insults: they admired fundamentalist leaders, and longed for the middle class acceptability so many of these pastoral titans possessed. They “craved” fundamentalist respect, King argues (200). Yet such desire for legitimacy did not deter Pentecostals from their certitude that they had the power of the Spirit. What united Pentecostals and fundamentalists was not an intellectual reconciliation but the determination of a common religious enemy. Pentecostalism originated in the fringes of the holiness movement, or what King calls the “radical evangelicals” of the nineteenth-century (29). Such protesting differentiation from the Christian mainline seemed less important in the twentieth century when their foe was not other Christians as much as it was those who did not claim Christ as a devotional subject at all. And fundamentalists found that “modernism did not creep in through Pentecostal pulpits but rather through the broader culture” (188). Although fundamentalists and Pentecostals differed in ritual practice and sociological milieu, they could agree that children seemed especially vulnerable to the secularizing temptations of modern life. Vacation Bible School played a catalytic role in the history of American evangelicalism, joining many of its factions to a confederate communion. The formation of the NAE, and the related American Sunday School Association (1945) represented the collaboration of “fundamentalists, Pentecostals and holiness leaders . . . against the bête noire of modernism” (202).

The foregoing narrative account might suggest that King's is an institutional and social history, tracking the rise and merger of two modern Protestant movements. This is not so. Early in King's account there is some sense of the social history of Pentecostalism as King mentions how railroads carried copies of The Apostolic Faith hither and yon, and how camp meetings gathered at the far ends of urban streetcar lines. But the vast majority of King's analysis focuses on tracts produced by fundamentalists and Pentecostals about each other. The appendices indicate King's archival obsessions: there, he scrupulously tallies anti-Pentecostal articles, as well as long bibliographies of anti-Pentecostal articles in Holiness periodicals, and lists of the kinds of works advertised in the Christian Evangel and Pentecostal Evangel. The book reads as unending leapfrog from critic to criticism, criticism to critic, whether it is A. C. Dixon railing against Speaking in Tongues, Reuben Archer Torrey's columns in The King's Business bellowing back at Pentecostal immorality, A. C. Gaebelein raging against Aimee Semple McPherson, or D. M. Panton deriding tongues as a branch of “hydra-headed spiritism” (139). King has created a discursive profile of fundamentalist outrage, with a few peeps in reply from Pentecostal defenders. Who was reading this outraged print culture, and how did they understand its relationship to their faith? This is unknown from Disfellowshiped. What is known is that despite their despisers, Pentecostals survived, not merely espousing an inerrant Word, but also—in King's praising evaluation—practicing it. It is this focus on practicing the Holy Spirit, rather than studying holy scripture, that perhaps made Pentecostalism—and not fundamentalism—the more successful of the two Protestant idioms.