Beyond Belief

How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over the World

Elle Hardy

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781787385535
• eBook ISBN:
  9781787387539
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

How has a Christian movement, founded at the turn of the twentieth century by the son of freed slaves, become the fastest-growing religion on Earth? Pentecostalism has 600 million followers; by 2050, they’ll be one in ten people worldwide. This is the religion of the Holy Spirit, with believers directly experiencing God and His blessings: success for the mind, body, spirit and wallet.

Pentecostalism is a social movement. It serves impoverished people in Africa and Latin America, and inspires anti-establishment leaders from Trump to Bolsonaro. In Australia, Europe and Korea, it throws itself into culture wars and social media, offering meaning and community to the rootless and marginalised in a fragmenting world.

Reporting this revolution from twelve countries and six US states, Elle Hardy weaves a timeless tale of miracles, money and power, set in our volatile age of extremes. By turns troubling and entertaining, Beyond Belief exposes the Pentecostal agenda: not just saving souls, but transforming societies and controlling politics. These modern prophets, embedded in our institutions, have the cash and the influence to wage their holy war.

PART ONE

THE GOOD NEWS

THE UNSTOPPABLE RISE
OF PENTECOSTALISM

1

THE LAST VOMIT OF SATAN

The spiritual landscape of nineteenth-century America was among history’s most fertile ground. Prophets and priests wandered the country mending bodies and souls, trading ideas and rancour, and debating the conditions and timetable on which Christ would return. In a nation still far from coming to terms with itself after a series of bloody wars, people were wondering how it would all end, and they were anxious about where they would end up.

Pentecostals have always been great storytellers, and storytellers want nothing more than an audience. Their ability to connect their stories meaningfully to our lives was critical to the movement’s birth, and remains critical to its ongoing rise—personal storytelling has been as important in Pentecostalism as anything that can be read in the Good Book.

How this movement came into being is a tale best told through the cinematic biographies of three unlikely founding figures, who each in turn shaped and furthered the Pentecostal movement. Together, this trio was as significant in transforming Christianity as Martin Luther—but instead of nailing their theology to a door, they crashed straight through it.

There’s Charles Fox Parham, the renegade Methodist whose quickness to judge others was turned back on him as the movement overtook him; then there’s William J. Seymour, the intelligent, humble son of freed slaves who brought the movement’s emerging ideas into one big bang; and Aimee Semple McPherson, the controversial celebrity evangelist who was able to take Pentecostalism to the masses.

The religion they founded, by accident as much as design, was long seen as a bastard child of Christianity. But while many other denominations had a habit of talking down to the dispossessed, from the beginning the Pentecostal faith uniquely empowered women, migrants, African-Americans and the poor. This approach is as important to the movement now as it was then, and goes a long way to explaining its mass appeal: in this life, as much as the next, people want to be lifted up.

Early Pentecostalism took in the orphans and belief systems of a smattering of people seeking salvation and hope, but it was largely an outgrowth of the Holiness movement, which itself emerged from the teachings of John Wesley and his eighteenth-century British Methodists. With an emphasis on personal liberty, as well as being emotional and expressive, American Methodism was, in the words of historian Allan Anderson, the “frontier religion par excellence”.¹

Harnessing the power of the Holy Spirit wasn’t new or exclusive to Holiness Methodists—in seventeenth-century America, the early Quakers may have got their name from what we would call ‘spiritual gifts’, quaking and jerking with the power of the Holy Ghost. Some forms of Scottish and German Protestantism were heavily into gifts, and in the 1800s Joseph Smith and his Latter Day Saints probably indulged in these kinds of practices too. You can trace them through slivers of history and different faiths all the way back to biblical times. But before the Holiness movement, ‘Spirit-filled’ beliefs were fringe elements within fringe movements. It wasn’t until the start of the nineteenth century that they really got going.

Holiness became particularly influential in the religious movement called the Second Great Awakening, between 1790 and 1840. At this time, Holiness was being democratised and decentralised, and Americanised—spreading through camps and revivals, the evangelical saloons that were a distinguishing feature of early-nineteenth-century America. One important early figure in this movement gave a hint of what was to come: Phoebe Palmer (1807–74), one of the first major female preachers in the United States, helped inspire the Higher Life movement, which would lay much of the theological groundwork for Pentecostalism.²

In this time of camp revivals, as the fledgling nation was chasing after the frontier while careering towards civil war, mainstream Protestant churches appeared to be becoming more liberal, and more disdainful of the working classes. By contrast, Holiness churches were both hell-bent on biblical literalism, and far more diverse and accepting. Long after Phoebe Palmer’s death, our three lead actors, each in their own way, would discover that the social element of faith was as important as the theological.

One man clearly influenced by the radical ways of the Holiness movement was Charles Fox Parham. Born in Iowa in 1873, and raised in Kansas in the Methodist faith, his birth coincided with winds of change that were fanning flames across not only America, but the world. The 1875 Keswick Convention in Britain kicked off a series of Protestant tent revivals within the Higher Life movement; a year later at a camp in North Carolina, there were reports of 130 people babbling in strange voices. Ever bent on reform and renewal, by the turn of the century there were three distinct branches of the Holiness faith, all “figuring out how to catch lightning in a bottle.”³

Parham began preaching to congregations as a teenager in the late 1880s, but by the age of 22 had become disillusioned with a Methodist hierarchy that wouldn’t let him deliver by “direct inspiration”. He struck out on his own, becoming a popular itinerant preacher whose silver tongue could clock 250 words per minute.⁴

Throughout his life, Parham’s self-assuredness led people to love and loathe him in equal measure. Unlike many other evangelists of his time, he displayed the hallmarks that have become particular to the Pentecostal movement: addressing the needs of people from all walks of life, in the here and now, with the unerring certainty that Jesus and history were on his side. Lack of humility is a charge that could be levelled against many self-proclaimed men of God, but Parham had a particular knack of rubbing other religious authority figures the wrong way, while appealing to ordinary people. It was his focus on sickness and healing that set him apart from other preachers of his day—and meant that he was never without a desperate and dedicated following.

Say what you like about his character, but this was a time when the biggest theological questions were all up for consideration, and Parham always picked a position and argued for it forcefully. Those who encountered him were left with no doubt that he believed he understood God’s will, and he made big bets on key interpretations of faith. (Unlike the other two members of Pentecostalism’s founding trinity, he had the advantage of staking such claims with house money. For starters, he was a white man, and had married the daughter of a prominent Kansas figure.)

From the outset, the Holiness movement was particularly interested in the idea of a ‘third blessing’. Followers already believed in two blessings—that first you were born again; then you were sanctified, made holy and free from sin and its consequences, such as sickness. But what if there could also be a further blessing, or act of grace, which saw an outpouring of the Spirit in action?

Parham was one of the preachers who not only believed in the third blessing, but actively sought it. As with almost every issue in this emerging faith, the precise steps to salvation were a matter of contention: some thought there were three stages (conversion, sanctification, Holy Spirit baptism); others said it could be done in two (conversion and sanctification both happening at once, before baptism in the Spirit).⁵ Parham was a three-step kind of guy.⁶

While he never shied away from a theological quarrel, Parham had far more immediate concerns. Divine intervention had saved the preacher and his young son from serious illness, and the family resettled in Topeka, Kansas, to focus on supernatural healing and Bible study. On their arrival, at the dawn of the twentieth century, Parham founded the Bethel Healing Home. Needless to say, it wasn’t a debate about second versus third blessings that got people through the door.

Parham also started a Bible college in a suburban mansion called Stone’s Folly. A Catholic church purchased the grounds in the 1940s, and built its rectory over the sandstone foundations.⁷ Today, the remnants of the college are barely a dust speck on the map—on visiting, I was told that I was one of few local or international pilgrims who come to see where it all began; where the first flock was born.

It was at Stone’s Folly, during a prayer meeting on the eerily complete date of 1 January 1901, that a 30-year-old worshipper at Bethel named Agnes Ozman began speaking and writing in ‘Chinese’; she was unable to return to her native English for three days.⁸ We now call what happened to Ozman glossolalia, or speaking in tongues—fulfilling the prophecy of 1 Corinthians 14:2, where St Paul the Apostle writes, “For one who speaks in a tongue speaks not to men but to God; for no one understands him, but he utters mysteries in the Spirit.”

Following the death of Jesus, tongues were widely spoken by the Apostles, in the hope of spreading the Gospel. Yet by the time of St Augustine in 400 CE, the practice was already dying out. Some in the Orthodox East continued it, but in time glossolalia became largely confined to monasteries.⁹ By the Middle Ages, Catholics saw speaking in tongues as a sign of possession that required exorcism. But, written as it was in the New Testament, the practice never disappeared from Christian thought completely. The nine gifts of the Holy Spirit that St Paul described in Corinthians—including prophecy, healing, miracles, and tongues and their interpretation¹⁰—were precisely what Parham’s congregation was seeking on that first day of 1901.

For Parham, Ozman’s gift was confirmation that she had received the third blessing—baptism by the Holy Spirit. For a congregation that suspected the End Times were coming, and soon, “this mighty truth” was a sign that they had the power to convert people in strange lands, following in the footsteps of St Paul two millennia earlier. “And if I was willing to stand for it,” Parham later wrote, “with all the persecutions, hardships, trials, slander, scandal that it would entail, He would give me the blessing.” He asked God for the gift for himself, and two nights later was rewarded with a “slight twist in my throat”, before “a glory fell over me and I began to worship God in a Swedish tongue, which later changed to other languages and continued so until the morning.”¹¹

The Bethel Bible College was derided in the local press as “the Tower of Babel”.¹² But for Parham, Ozman and their small group of true believers in the mansion, lightning had struck their little congregation—and it was up to them to tell the world.

Merging his spiritual and silver tongues, Parham began preaching and publishing news of the blessing that had been bestowed upon his little congregation, throughout Kansas and into neighbouring Texas and Oklahoma. On one of these trips to Houston, in 1905, Parham found a fervent disciple in the form of a fellow travelling man who had recently lost an eye to smallpox.

In 1895, while Parham had been splitting with the Methodist Church, a son of emancipated Louisiana slaves named William J. Seymour had been fleeing the poverty of subsistence farming and growing racial persecution in the Deep South. As was typical of his time and place, Seymour had been raised in an African-American Catholic church infused with strong elements of the supernatural and special revelation.

He was also everything that Parham was not: the opposite of a zealous firebrand, Seymour was a quiet, somewhat austere man who had moved through a number of religious movements before deciding what was right. Reverend Glenn A. Cook, a white Los Angeles journalist who resigned his position to work with Seymour’s fledgling congregation, described Seymour’s “wonderful character”, which drew believers to him. “No amount of confusion or accusation seemed to disturb him. He would sit quietly behind the make-shift pulpit and smile at us until we were all condemned by our own activities,” Cook wrote.¹³ Another important Pentecostal figure we’ll come across later, William Howard Durham, wrote kindly and cruelly that “Seymour was the meekest man I ever met. He seems to maintain a helpless dependence on God and is as simple-hearted as a little child, and at the same time is so filled with God that you feel the love and power every time you get near him.”¹⁴

Before Seymour became a revered figure, he was a young man who moved North many years before the Great Migration of Black Americans from the rural South. He was born again into the Methodist faith in Indianapolis, and introduced to the Holiness movement around the turn of the century. But it was during a smallpox outbreak in Cincinnati that he truly saw the Lord’s hand. The virus cost Seymour his left eye—a punishment, he thought, for being too slow to answer the call to minister.

After they met in Houston, Parham welcomed the “humble” and “unassuming” William J. Seymour into his circle. The sense of the ‘white man’s burden’ to impose himself on recently freed slaves remained strong; in spite, or perhaps because, of Parham’s deeply unpleasant racial views, he invited Seymour to study at his newly formed Bible college in the Texan city, against the South’s Jim Crow laws. Seymour had to take his instruction sitting in the hallway outside the classroom.

The two men began sharing pulpits and street corners together in early 1906, with Parham encouraging Seymour to bring the new Christian bent to the Black community—and only the Black community—while critiquing Seymour’s preaching style. We don’t know how Seymour felt about the indignity of this relationship, but we do know that he was praying fervently for the Holy Spirit to baptise him in the gifts that were so critical to his faith.

Parham’s white disciples took his message to northern cities such as Chicago and New York, and into Canada. Within a month of Seymour’s banishment to the hallway, on the other hand, this gifted orator headed west: to Los Angeles, where he had been invited by Black preacher Julia Hutchins to preach at her Santa Fe Street Holiness Mission.

In what seems to have been a rite of passage for our founding trio, Seymour fell out with the congregation leaders almost as soon as he had arrived. Despite not having received the gift of tongues himself, Seymour had taken on Parham’s strident theology. This insistence that glossolalia was evidence of having received the Holy Spirit saw Santa Fe Street’s church doors padlocked to him. William J. Seymour was no longer welcome.

Undeterred, he began preaching to a group of friends. They planned a 10-day fast and spent several days studying the Bible verse in Acts 2:2–4, which describes the day of Pentecost:

And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part One The Good News the Unstoppable Rise of Pentecostalism
• Part Two Spiritual Warfare the Battle to Build Heaven on Earth
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover