Randall Stephens presents a carefully researched narrative of how Holiness and Pentecostal churches and organizations arrived and flourished in the southern United States. This is a much-needed volume, for as Stephens indicates, even though we associate Holiness and Pentecostal Christians with the American South, neither of these groups originated there — hence the need for some explaining — and up to this point there has not been an academic synthesis that looks at the entirety of the Holiness and Pentecostal movements in the South, although there have been very good works on individual groups and their leaders or on the movements generally in the United States and world by Donald Dayton (The Theological Roots of Pentecostalism), Grant Wacker (Heaven Below), Edith Blumhofer (Restoring the Faith), and David Martin (Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish), among others. Stephens, however, is the first to examine, in scholarly detail, the establishment of these movements from the northern and western United States as a biracial movement in the American South.

Stephens starts in the antebellum period with the emergence of the Holiness movement and its insistence that Christians can become sinless (sanctified or perfect) in this life. Because this theological position was taught by many of the same people who advocated abolition, it, needless to say, found little acceptance in the South. After the war, Holiness gained a toehold in the South, but memories of its antebellum connections to abolition, its postbellum connections to reconstruction, and, among some, its inversions of gender and race and often times stress on ecstatic worship, made it unacceptable to many southern evangelicals.

Like the Holiness movement, Pentecostalism also developed outside the South (although one of its primary leaders was a black southerner — William J. Seymour). Arriving around 1906, it drew on Holiness ideals and constituencies but also emphasized healing, ecstatic worship, and especially the theological innovation of speaking in tongues as the evidence that one was empowered, or “baptized,” by the Spirit of God. Unlike the Holiness movement, however, it expanded rapidly among both blacks and whites in the South, eclipsing and subsuming the fledgling southern Holiness movement. From the 1920s to the present, even though it began as an exotic, like kudzu, it fastened itself to the South as it did nowhere else in the United States.

By the 1970s, Pentecostalism had become the most important 20th-century Christian movement in the world, attaining in the neighborhood of 500 million adherents worldwide by 2000. In the United States, with its strength in the American South, it formed the backbone of the Religious Right there and in California (via Route 66), the Southwest, and elsewhere. Of particular interest to political scientists is Stephens' description of how Pentecostalism, which started out apolitical and even pacifist, became the marrow of the red-state Religious Right.

There is much to commend in this volume. Stephens lays out in a single volume what would otherwise have required a bookshelf's worth of denominational histories or narrow monographs. That said, its weakness, if it can be called that, is at the same time its breadth, for while we find meticulous detail in the first two-thirds of the book that cover the emergence of Holiness up to 1906, the pace from 1906 to the present leaves, it seems, many stones unturned (perhaps his research could have yielded two volumes). For example, as with many other studies of Pentecostalism, we learn many details about the movements' leaders, but we find out little about regular adherents' lives other beyond their theological leanings (which are, of course, vital). We learn little, for instance, about their occupations, social standing, or political inclinations before they became so apolitical. In short, we learn little about key social factors that might have connected in important ways to their acceptance of Pentecostal theological ideals (as an aside, Stephens, as have the best studies of Pentecostalism, rejects the idea that Pentecostals sought other-worldly religion to assuage poverty or social dislocation). More generally, then, we never fully understand why a movement that was so anathematized by southerners before 1906 suddenly took to the South like bright-leaf tobacco. That's all to say that, even with the importance, clarity, and contribution made by The Fire Spreads, there is still more work to do before we understand why Pentecostals more often than not speak in tongues with a southern accent.