In Pentecostals in America, Arlene Sánchez Walsh introduces readers to the sprawling, multifarious expression of Christianity known as Pentecostalism with one statement: “Pentecostals tell great stories” (xi). Sánchez Walsh, a self-professed “traveler” within Pentecostalism for many years, knows the power and peculiarities of Pentecostal storytelling. In this contribution to Columbia University Press's Contemporary American Religion Series, readers will find extraordinary yarns and provocative claims about Pentecostals and their relationship to American culture writ large.

Using historical, historiographical, ethnographic, and sociological evidence, Sánchez Walsh examines “how Pentecostalism works in various American spaces” and frames the movement in terms of healing, which she argues is the movement's primary “calling card” (xv). In addition, Sánchez Walsh identifies the act of storytelling as a central Pentecostal characteristic. Pentecostals in America, therefore, is not a chronological history or theological family tree. It is “thematic history” (xii), a series of stories about Pentecostal faith and practice; innovation, gender and sexuality; popular culture, race and ethnicity; and outliers.

Chapter 1, “Pentecostal Faith and Practice,” defines Pentecostalism as broadly “evangelical in outlook” (1) but distinct in terms of three signature practices: speaking in tongues, healing, and prophecy. In chapter 2, Sánchez Walsh explores the Pentecostal practice of innovation by profiling a few key innovators. This is a select list and as such it frames Pentecostal innovation selectively. For example, faith healing Pentecostal forebear John Alexander Dowie is featured, faith healing holiness healer-turned-Pentecostal-architect Maria Woodworth-Etter is not. Viewing the movement's innovative impulse through the man who founded Zion, Ill. brings contours of Pentecostal innovation to the fore that are distinct from those visible through the woman who brought audiences “under the power” of her ecstatic worship services. Many innovators profiled by Sánchez Walsh—including Dowie, Charles Parham, and Aimee Semple McPherson—were quite scandalous, but Pentecostals in America shows that as long as the evangelistic goals of the movement were met, Pentecostals could be forgiving when their leaders transgressed the movement's theological or practical boundaries.

The third chapter, “Gender, Sexualities, and Pentecostalism,” seeks “to go beyond traditional heterosexual identities and relationships and consider homosexuality, the subordination of women, and the construction of a form of genteel evangelical masculinity that privileges their [male] supremacy” (34). To that end, Sánchez Walsh explores Pentecostal marriage and the modesty codes of Pentecostal Bible colleges/universities to illustrate the “cognitive dissonance” and contradictory messages produced and received by Pentecostals. Sánchez Walsh contends that although Pentecostals use clean/unclean binaries to construct idealized forms of gender, “gender and sexuality in most Pentecostal communities will mean one thing, but it will never be lived out that way” (51).

In chapter 4, “Pentecostalism and Popular Culture,” Sánchez Walsh “expands our vista on how diverse Pentecostalism is and how pervasive Pentecostalism is in popular culture, especially as a signifier of one of its most prominent characteristics, healing” (52–53). Sánchez Walsh profiles Elvis Presley, Agnes Sanford, Marvin Gaye, and Joel Osteen to ascertain how certain figures transcend Pentecostal boundaries through theological and practical pop culture “repurposing and repackaging” strict Pentecostal theology and holiness standards (68). Chapter 5, “Race, Ethnicity, and Identity Construction” is, in large part, a historiographical critique. “By focusing on a seemingly endless string of spiritual genealogies tracing who ordained whom, and whether any of those people were black,” Sánchez Walsh writes of the complex history of Pentecostalism in relation to race and ethnicity, “scholars of Pentecostalism, confessional or not, are missing the point. It is not numbers that create racial and ethnic hush harbors; it is unequal power-sharing—something very few, if any Pentecostal denominations believe is subject to human intervention” (85).

The sixth chapter, “Outliers in American Pentecostalism,” argues that the future of American Pentecostalism—at least of predominantly white American Pentecostalism—may be in the hands of so-called outliers like Jay Bakker. Son of infamous Pentecostal media moguls Tammy Faye Messner and Jim Bakker, Jay Bakker has rejected the movement's “theological, experiential, and political” orthodoxies” (101), and Sánchez Walsh sees the younger Bakker's unorthodox approach as one with potential to carry the movement into the twenty-first century. In the epilogue, Sánchez Walsh depicts the movement in economic terms. It is a “growth industry,” Pentecostals in America claims. Its powerful stories and paradoxical vision of the world, its eager “consumers” and tireless “rebranding” efforts mean that it is an industry with international growth potential.

Sánchez Walsh knows Pentecostals. The movement's eccentric aesthetic (e.g. “baptism by dynamite” [xx]), for example, is only observed by discerning students of the movement. Some categories for analysis are more robustly analyzed than others. The chapter “Gender, Sexualities, and Pentecostalism” demonstrates a keen eye for detail; alternatively, the chapter “Outliers in American Pentecostalism” paints in very broad strokes. Pentecostals in America will surely rankle some scholars of Pentecostalism. For instance, the claim that Pentecostalism is a part of “a quintessentially American religious experience” (xiii) will certainly create a stir among those who argue that it is in essence a global movement. In the end, however, newcomer and veteran scholars of Pentecostalism alike will benefit from this skillful analysis of Pentecostals in their American context—and they will have the fun of a good storyteller as their guide.