Commentators, historians, and sociologists have often ignored subgroups within the American charismatic movement. Thankfully, Scott Billingsley correctly turns our attention to two groups within the larger whole and how they negotiated the gendered and racial boundaries of Holiness and pentecostal culture. Working with such figures as Daisy Osborn, Gloria Copeland, and T. D. Jakes, Billingsley demonstrates that these people on the margins of the leadership of charismatic denominations and non-denominational groups managed to find ways to subvert the social order that kept women and minorities largely out of leadership roles. In doing so, these “pioneers” managed to introduce such controversial ideas as equal and civil rights into a culture that did not initially (and some would argue still does not) support them.

It's a New Day begins with a brief examination of the roots of pentecostalism and its first leaders—Aimee Semple McPherson, Oral Roberts, Kathryn Kuhlman, A. A. Allen, and Kenneth E. Hagin. The book then devotes two chapters to women in the movement, moving from the 1940s through the late 1990s. Finally, Billingsley turns his attention to the African American preachers, including Jakes, Frederick K. C. Price, and Creflo Dollar. Throughout, Billingsley makes good use of sources, including the magazine Charisma and Christian Life, various secular and religious periodicals, memoirs, and occasionally sound cassettes and videos. The author's choice of examples, his prose, and his arguments all combine to make It's a New Day an interesting and informative work.

To make his argument that women and African Americans managed to move charismatics into a more “mainstream” position, Billingsley relies heavily on an economic theory of religion that views churches as providing a commodity for consumption. While Billingsley formally eschews a focus on sociology and theology (3), his argument rests on the notion that pentecostalism has a broad appeal for marginalized people. Many of his protagonists, both male and female and white and black, came from the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, and all of his African American ministers had to deal with racial discrimination. While Billingsley does not dwell on their backgrounds, he implies that the hard times they experienced in the past made them more willing to accept the controversial theology known as Word of Faith. This idea, also known as the prosperity gospel and first enunciated by Hagin, holds that when a believer puts his or her faith in God, he or she will see rewards that are both psychological and financial. The theology has drawn its share of criticism, and here Billingsley's use of an economic model works well, with both women and African American men embracing Word of Faith and employing it in their outreach.

Billingsley, though, omits another idea from his analysis, one that would have strengthened this already interesting and needed monograph. His subjects are part of the larger evangelical movement, and that movement has wrestled with the issue of who can preach, given the Pauline injunction against women speaking in church. The evangelical insistence on biblical inerrancy leads to the question of whether women can be ordained or can be recognized as preachers. Billingsley's subjects wade into this fray, but the discussion of their navigation of the conflict does not appear in the book. Instead, Billingsley tends to gloss over the debate and give the women an apparent victory. The women of his study do make enormous progress in pushing the role of women from that of subservient churchgoer to that of behind-the-scenes and sometimes on-the-scene organizers and leaders, but their place in the pulpit is still tenuous at best.

Some of this difficulty could have been addressed if the author had provided a more nuanced discussion of the subtle and occasionally conflicting language the women used. For instance, Billingsley quotes Daisy Osborn, who wrote that mothers should not stay home when their children are at school. Instead they should “become a student … you got twenty years that your husband's gonna pick up the tab and you can get an education! Keep learning! Free education!” (54, italics original). Rather than address the power struggle inherent in that statement, Billingsley moves on to a concluding sentence that both Daisy and her husband, T. L., argued against the psychological and physical abuse of women. He could have pressed the analysis here and elsewhere further.

On the other hand, Billingsley's analysis of the racial discrimination that African Americans faced works well and provides insight into the occasional interracial cooperation (although not always between two equal parties) that has occurred since the initial split of pentecostals after the Asuza Street revivals of 1906. Oral Roberts's mentoring of Carlton Pearson, while motivated by racially questionable reasons, did result in an initial boost for Pearson's fledgling ministry. The African Americans in Billingsley's study are able to rise to positions of importance and prominence in large part because many charismatic leaders were looking to increase the number of African Americans in their pews.

In sum, It's a New Day provides readers with a concise, well-written overview of the inner workings of the pentecostal and Holiness movements and their encounters with the controversial issues of twentieth-century American culture.