In The Fire Spreads, Randall Stephens fills an important lacuna in the scholarship of the holiness and pentecostal movements by providing a regional history of their development in the South. It is a masterful account, guided by outstanding research in a vast array of primary sources, clear and crisp prose, and insightful analysis.
Despite the common association of the holiness and pentecostal movements with southern folk religion, Stephens shows how both movements migrated to the South from outside the region. The holiness movement began in the urban North in the 1830s through the work of Phoebe Palmer, thereafter spreading among many northern evangelicals. But antebellum southern evangelicals were hostile to its perfectionist and egalitarian teachings due to widespread Calvinist sensibilities and the need to maintain social hierarchy in support of slavery. Isolated ministers began to embrace holiness in the 1870s as a result of “carpetbag holiness missionaries,” but the movement really took off in the following two decades (45).
As holiness made inroads among the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS), in particular, critics decried this nefarious northern import, but indigenous leaders soon made it their own. By the turn of the century, some quarter million holiness believers embraced the stringent lifestyle demands and exuberant worship that characterized their fellowship. Yet Stephens notes that the “southernness” of the early movement is questionable, given the holiness tendency to breach sectional standards regarding race, gender, and class and to attack the predominant evangelicalism of the South as morally lax and spiritually deficient. Holiness stalwarts like the Kentucky minister W. B. Godbey preached an egalitarian gospel message that took root especially among upcountry, Piedmont, and hill farmers and laborers. Importantly, Stephens undercuts the long-standing assumption that holiness and pentecostal religiosity served a compensatory function for the dispossessed by demonstrating that adherents of both movements came from all social strata but especially the aspiring middle class. Linked into a transregional network, holiness believers rejected the Lost Cause ideology that salved southern consciences and buttressed Jim Crow in the postbellum era. As Stephens notes, “The holiness press and holiness gatherings in the South served as liminal spaces where blacks and whites could interact and freely share their ideas about Christian perfection” (82). Even as the holiness movement developed among African Americans and promoted interracial communion, “women achieved prominent positions of authority as evangelists and lay leaders” (93). As a pragmatic, populist folk religion, the holiness movement insisted that the Lord could work through anyone, regardless of social standing.
Along with restless preachers and visionaries, the primary means by which the holiness movement spread through the South was its extensive press. Holiness people devoured Christian newspapers, books, pamphlets, and much else, in addition to the Bible itself. Stephens asserts that through this vehicle, holiness folk shaped a community, an imagined sense of themselves and their purpose. Like the pentecostals who followed them, holiness leaders embraced modern communications technology with great vigor and effectiveness. Personal testimonies of entire sanctification and other ecstatic experiences abounded in the literature, providing experiential norms for followers. Holiness papers like The Way of Life and God's Revivalist reached tens of thousands of believers and helped shape a counterculture that defined itself over against prevailing morality and sensibilities.
Not surprisingly, mainstream denominations decried the growth and increasing radicalism of the holiness movement, with the MECS bishops denouncing it in 1894. In the decade after the mid-1890s, holiness clashes with denominational authorities intensified, leading many believers to depart the MECS and other denominations for new holiness churches. Stephens connects this radicalization and fractiousness with an eschatological shift among southern holiness proponents from postmillennialism to dispensational premillennialism. Stephens perhaps overstates the impact of premillennialism. Rather than entailing a larger shift in direction, it produced an intensification of pre-existing holiness tendencies, such as a reliance on the gifts of the Spirit, a climate of supernatural expectancy, and a diminishment in emphasis on certain kinds of social protest. In seeking to restore the apostolic church, holiness believers already claimed divine healings, sought personal and collective evidence of God's power, and questioned the ways of the world, including social activism. But premillennialism no doubt increased holiness expectations of the present power of God and the outpourings of the Spirit in the end times, along with the imminent return of Christ. Expectations and longings heightened in addition due to the failings of perfectionist claims; as believers repeatedly claimed the “second blessing” and then fell into sin, a general clamor for greater experiential assurance arose. In general, Stephens appears to view the adoption of the “negative,” “fatalistic,” and “grim eschatology” of premillennialism as an unfortunate byway that diminished the “progressive” social agenda of early southern holiness believers (138, 168).
As formulated by Charles Parham in the Midwest at the turn of the century and spread by William J. Seymour at the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles in 1906 and following, pentecostalism claimed to provide evidentiary assurance for the baptism in the Spirit, namely speaking in tongues. Stephens effectively charts the diffusion of this teaching through southern holiness ranks by figures like G. B. Cashwell and Charles H. Mason. Early pentecostals were confident the Lord was giving them supernatural knowledge of unlearned foreign tongues to hasten the evangelization of the world before Christ's return. Despite this failed hope, the movement quickly spread through holiness channels as preachers claimed their Pentecost and spread the word through their newspapers.
In his final chapter, Stephens brings the story of southern pentecostalism forward to the present, citing its incredible growth, savvy use of technologies such as radio and television, and increased engagement with politics and culture. In the main, though, Stephens offers a somewhat overwrought declension narrative from the progressive social prospects early pentecostalism inherited from the holiness movement to its social conservatism of today. Stephens asserts that pentecostals “had gone from being challengers of the social order to becoming its most ardent defenders” (281). While in some ways true, this assertion neglects the extent to which contemporary pentecostals challenge prevailing social mores and cultural assumptions regarding sexuality, family patterns, abortion, and more. Stephens's keen eye for diversity within holiness and pentecostal ranks is less evident here than earlier in his book. Nevertheless, this is a first-rate study of an important topic in American religious history, and it would make an excellent addition to many course syllabi.
