The Fire Spreads Holiness And Pentecostalism In The American South

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 31 (2009) 105-160

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Randall J. Stephens. The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2008). xi + 393 pp. $27.95 hardback.

“Although the holiness movement and its successor, Pentecostalism, are often considered quintessentially southern,” Randall J. Stephens contends in The Fire Spreads , “both origi- nated outside the region” (pp. 15-16). His important book draws together familiar and fresh sources to give historians a reliable chronicle of the holiness and pentecostal move- ments’ spread across the southern region of the United States from the mid nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Beyond providing a useful narrative of the slow but ultimately pervasive transplantation of holiness-pentecostalism to the South, this book also bristles with keen arguments and suggestions — too numerous to delineate here — which should stimulate further investigation.

Stephens, who teaches history at Eastern Nazarene College, combines his considerable skills as researcher and storyteller to provide the ﬁrst comprehensive history of the holiness revival’s migration from northern cities to provincial southern settings ranging from Vir- ginia to Texas. Four of six chapters in The Fire Spreads take the holiness movement in the South from initial resistance to eventual embrace. “T eological perfectionism and entire sanctiﬁ cation,” Stephens tells us, “claimed amazingly few adherents south of the Mason- Dixon line in the years between 1840 and 1885” (p. 16). In fact, the close connection of early holiness advocates to abolitionism and other social reforms made the South a particu- larly hard ground to cultivate.

Beginning with the 1880s, however, a generation of southerners warmed up to the holi- ness message. As railroads tied the South more closely to the Northeast and Midwest — and as literacy of both black and white southerners increased — northern holiness periodicals, evangelists, and colporteurs ﬁ nally struck a responsive chord with enough southerners to establish the movement in the region. Tese converts were not usually the poorest or the richest southerners, according to Stephens; rather they tended to be middling folks dissatis- ﬁ ed with the dominant culture of the postbellum period. Politics appeared hopelessly corrupt and churches irredeemably dead to spiritual populists of both races. Fiercely inde- pendent and concentrated among the small farms and industrializing towns of the upland South, these increasingly peripatetic and prickly “religious mavericks” felt “ill at ease in a southern evangelical Zion” (p. 57) and proved ready to reach across regional, economic, doctrinal, and even racial lines to recapture the kind of intense religious experience that prospering Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian churches were trying to leave behind. Once a critical mass of talented and committed southerners adopted radical holiness in thought and lifestyle, a core of indigenous preachers and writers “reshaped the movement to suit their plain-folk, largely rural needs” (p. 55). Stephens is at his best in chapters 3-5 as he utilizes many new sources — especially secular newspapers, black holiness publications, and non-holiness religious papers — to show how natives like Bud Robinson, C. P. Jones, Mary Lee Cagle, and J. H. King compellingly translated the late nineteenth century fusion of holiness perfectionism and dispensational premilleniallism into a southern idiom. T eir writings and revivals swept thousands of southerners into the holiness camp by 1900 and set the stage for the pentecostal surge into the region shortly thereafter.

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 31 (2009) 105-160

Stephens argues that the pessimism inherent in the idea that the world would soon end proved disproportionately popular among both blacks and whites living in a region where so few working people were strangers to defeat and disappointment. Reconstruction had failed, farms were failing. Church leaders were trading vital religious experience for the “Sodom-like luxuries of Victorian Methodism” (p. 57). Jesus could hardly postpone his coming much longer. This “Eleventh Hour” mentality, especially following the Panic of 1893, produced an profound urgency among holiness initiates in the South which addi- tionally opened them to the concomitant argument that God was poised to restore ﬁrst century pentecostal power — gifts of healings, supernatural utterances, miracles — to the faithful believers. This radical stance led to experiments in interracial worship, female preach- ing, and extreme asceticism. Some in the 1890s even embraced a “third blessing,” a Baptism of Fire subsequent to sanctiﬁ cation and marked by some deﬁ ning supernatural sign.

Radical holiness adherents in the South may have been especially pessimistic about the future of the world, but they were extraordinarily optimistic about the Holy Ghost’s plan to empower them for a colossal endtime harvest. This apocalyptic longing for a “pentecostal holiness” prepared the southern faithful to give unique acceptance to the Asuza Revival’s understanding of the Spirit Baptism as a distinct “third blessing” initially evidenced by glos- solalia. Entering the South in late 1906, the emerging pentecostal movement found uniquely fertile soil in the region. In Chapter Five (“The Emergence of Southern Pentecostalism”), Stephens contends not only that the new pentecostal groups grew best in the South, but that holiness denominations lost larger percentages of their members to the pentecostals in that part of the country. The message of holiness continued in the South, however. As pen- tecostal organizations based primarily outside the region proved ready to reject sanctiﬁ ca- tion as a second, instantaneous work of grace (in favor of William Durham’s “ﬁ nished work of Calvary”), those situated the most squarely in the South, Stephens argues, adhered to the “second work” teaching with the greatest fervency.

Stephens’s ﬁ nal chapter, a quick jog from the 1920s to the present, will appeal to observ- ers of contemporary pentecostal expressions as divergent as the “sanctiﬁ ed mammonism” of media-savvy megachurches and the over-studied serpent handling of a few mountain con- gregations. T ough Stephens concludes by observing that “some of the basic underlying themes of pentecostalism have remained the same” (p. 282) — particularly its enthusiastic and eschatological commitments — he clearly laments that the most socially radical impulses of the founders proved dificult to maintain. However, the tenor of this chapter — particu- larly if read alone — risks obscuring the author’s overall appreciation of the very history he so successfully chronicles.

Reviewed by Daniel Woods

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