Latino Pentecostal Identity

Evangelical Faith, Self, and Society

Arlene Sánchez Walsh

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9780231508964
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Of the thirty-seven million Latinos living in the United States, nearly five million declare themselves to be either Pentecostal or Charismatic, and more convert every day. Latino Pentecostal Identity examines the historical and contemporary rise of Pentecostalism among Latinos, their conversion from other denominations, and the difficulties involved in reconciling conflicts of ethnic and religious identity. The book also looks at how evangelical groups encourage the severing of ethnic ties in favor of spiritual community and the ambivalence Latinos face when their faith fails to protect them from racial discrimination.

Latinos are not new to Pentecostalism; indeed, they have been becoming Pentecostal for more than a hundred years. Thus several generations have never belonged to any other faith. Yet, as Arlene M. Sánchez Walsh articulates, the perception of adherents as Catholic converts persists, eliding the reality of a specific Latino Pentecostal population that both participates in the spiritual and material culture of the larger evangelical Christian movement and imprints that movement with its own experiences. Focusing on three groups of Latino Pentecostals/Charismatics—the Assemblies of God, Victory Outreach, and the Vineyard—Sánchez Walsh considers issues such as the commodification of Latino evangelical culture, the Latinization of Pentecostalism, and the ways in which Latino Pentecostals have differentiated themselves from the larger Latino Catholic culture. Extensive fieldwork, surveys, and personal interviews inform her research and show how, in an overwhelmingly Euro-American denomination, diverse Latino faith communities—U.S. Chicano churches, pan–Latin American immigrant churches, and mixed Latin American and U.S. Latino churches—have carved out their own unique religious space.

1. El Aposento Alto

This book examines the interplay between religious and ethnic identity among Latino Pentecostals/charismatics for clues to how they negotiate their varied identities. The Assemblies of God, Victory Outreach, and the Vineyard are studied to determine how they have created their religious identity and how that identity has intermingled with their ethnic identity. Through field-work, oral histories, and surveys, this project found that Latino Pentecostals/ charismatics have an ambivalent relationship with their ethnic identity. On the one hand, they tend to subsume their ethnic identity under the rubric of their religious identity for very specific reasons: (1) the feeling Pentecostals have that they are commanded to relinquish any identity that deters them from a religious one; and (2) ethnic identity has little to do with the experiential nature of Pentecostalism, and therefore adherents are loosed from their ethnic moorings through a revitalized spiritual life. On the other hand, Latino Pentecostals/charismatics bolster their ethnic identity by retaining their language, founding churches that cater to their constituencies, and teaching their children about their history. Sufficient evidence from the historical and contemporary records indicates that Latino Pentecostals/charismatics, if not overtly, subtly view their ethnicity as an important component to who they are as religious people, and they often use this ethnic link as one of many evangelism tools to reach their community.

Aside from the overarching theme guiding this work, another underlying theme illuminates my contention that there is indeed such a thing as a separate Pentecostal identity inscribed on adherents through varied means that separates them from the Latino Catholic community. Through theological education, spiritual experiences, and reinforcement of an evangelical moral code, Latinos have become grafted onto the larger evangelical world and, within that world, have carved out separate social, cultural, and religious spheres for themselves where they should not be referred to as Catholic converts but as Latino Pentecostals. Latinos have been becoming Pentecostal for nearly one hundred years; therefore to suggest that this is a recent phenomenon, as much of the popular media do, is simply not accurate. To paint this conversion phenomenon as strictly a problem the Catholic Church has to solve, as both the popular media and some academics do, does not account for the generations of Latinos who have never been Catholic.

The umbrella movement that Pentecostals have often reluctantly called home is a rather unwieldy network called evangelical Christianity. This movement’s reach gives Pentecostals a larger measure of their material culture. This adoption of the material culture of evangelical Christianity is crucial to understanding how Latino Pentecostals/charismatics have been able to graft themselves onto this culture. Latino churches play worship music by such industry heavyweights as Hosanna Integrity and the Vineyard Music Group; Latino evangelicals buy books from the latest Christian authors. Latinos are also sending their children to evangelical summer camps and youth conventions, and buy the cultural accoutrements of the evangelical subculture for their children and for themselves, signifying that they are connected to the larger evangelical world. Youth have always been a difficult group for churches to reach and even harder to retain. For example, in the mid-1940s, “Youth for Christ” was fronted by an up-and-coming evangelist dressed in flashy clothes and day-glow socks. Billy Graham presided at hundreds of rallies that catered to teenage audiences with “snappy choruses, instrumental solos, magicians, and Bible trivia contests.”¹ Graham would later ask youth of the 1960s to “tune into God.” Graham’s risky endorsement of the Jesus Movement in 1971 before the National Association of Evangelicals offered the paternal approval the movement never sought but accepted, because it symbolized a generational shift from Graham to hundreds of youth ministries today that are deeply engaged in trying to retain youth through the power of pop culture. It is a subtheme of this work that Pentecostal Christianity needed, and in fact co-opted, pop culture for its own evangelistic purposes, and, in doing so, a generation of Latinos has now been grafted onto a larger, unwieldy network of contemporary Christian music, merchandising, missions organizations, and other parachurch organizations that comprise the American evangelical subculture.

Partaking of and becoming Pentecostal not only includes adherence to theological certitudes; it includes making cultural choices that require study, another subtheme of this work. Before delving into the history of the Assemblies of God missions to Latinos, a few words should be said to place conversion in context both culturally and historically. Historically Latinos viewed conversion to Protestant Christianity as more than a decision to choose belief in Jesus. Conversion often meant casting aside culture and language to become Americanized. Becoming a Christian became equated with, and in some sense still means, becoming American. As historian Vicki Ruiz demonstrates in her examination of the Houchen Settlement House in Texas, Latino children were taught the rudiments of the Bible alongside the rudiments of dressing up like Pilgrims for Thanksgiving.² Even earlier, as historian Timothy Matovina’s study showed, Euro Americans during San Antonio’s early annexation years wondered why Tejanos insisted on keeping their holidays and were often not interested in celebrating the Fourth of July.³ In examining specific examples of Pentecostalism’s growth in the borderlands from the early twentieth through the twenty-first century, my argument is not that Pentecostalism broke away from that Americanization mode, but it did, in radical ways, allow for some measure of autonomy because its early missionaries to the borderlands, especially the Assemblies of God’s Alice Luce, insisted on Latino leadership of the churches. Nevertheless, Luce was never able to resolve issues of maternalism and supervision, as will be seen in chapter 2, and, as a whole, many American-based Pentecostal denominations are still stuck in the missionary mind-set of supervision. Essentially Luce’s problem was emblematic of many Protestant and Catholic missionaries, many of whom had genuine concern for the Latino population and sought to be facilitators of faith rather than supervisors. The question was, did missionaries trust sufficiently that Latinos could develop theological and spiritual lives on their own without slipping into what missionaries viewed as heretical teachings. That Euro Americans thought enough of their own spiritual grounding to be able to supervise Latinos says much about the dynamics of the missionary/convert relationship. Equally, that Latinos took it upon themselves to teach, preach, and train one another despite the lack of confidence displayed by their Euro American overseers says much about the liberating ethos that drives Latinos to become Pentecostal.

Examining the varieties of Pentecostal identity among Mexican and Mexican Americans in Southern California first requires laying several foundations. These include (1) the conditions Mexican immigrants faced in turn-of-the-century Los Angeles; (2) the prevailing religious atmosphere in the city; and (3) the origins of the Pentecostal movement in the United States and the relationship between Pentecostal leaders and Mexican immigrants. The goal of this chapter, and succeeding ones, is to argue for the creation and maintenance of a Latino Pentecostal identity among a variety of communities bound together by their choice to become Pentecostal and often bound by social location. This first chapter seeks to provide historical context for the religious marketplace that Los Angeles became, especially after the Azusa Street revival in 1906. This context is important because it will demonstrate that, despite being viewed as objects of conversion by both Catholic and mainline Protestant missionaries, Latinos made a conscious choice to convert to Pentecostalism and became some of the faith’s most zealous evangelists. Furthermore, once they made the decision to convert, sufficient numbers decided to convert again to Oneness Pentecostalism. Latino Pentecostals, for nearly a century, have sought to carve out social, theological, and cultural spaces in this mostly midwestern and southern import for a variety of factors, which is the focus of the chapters to follow.

Before examining turn-of-the century Los Angeles, it might be wise to encapsulate the historical events that propelled Pentecostalism onto the evangelical stage, where, more often than not, it met with more than a chorus of disapproval; indeed, Pentecostals were often expelled from their brethren’s churches.

The rupture that occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the Pentecostal movement began to sift members away from several religious bodies, caused more than a momentary outburst—Pentecostalism shocked Protestant America. Pentecostalism was anti-intellectual, antirational, ahistorical, nonliturgial, and allegedly sensual, and therefore morally dangerous. Evangelicals, as a diffuse body of Christians, as historian Randall Balmer has described them, form part of a religious subculture. Evangelicalism had its own language, imagery, institutions, and expectations that could not accommodate Pentecostalism’s spiritual tidal wave.

Evangelicals, writes Balmer, pulled away from American society during the half-century between the Scopes trial and Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign. The subculture—composed of warring factions of separatist fundamentalists, mainline evangelicals (from historical Reformed and Holiness traditions), and Pentecostals—provided a place of refuge for evangelicals who felt alienated from the larger society and its values. Disturbed by the social and intellectual trends of American society, evangelicals “devised their own universe of congregations, denominations, Bible camps, Bible institutes, colleges, seminaries, publishing houses, and mission societies.”⁴

One must wonder what evangelicals thought when, over several decades from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, they faced, in succession, the industrialization of America, waves of largely Catholic and Jewish immigrants, and liberal Protestantism’s challenges regarding the Social Gospel and biblical criticism. Compounding this history is that evangelicals rarely got along with one another, especially after 1906, when Pentecostalism posed yet another challenge to the crumbling cosmos of evangelical consensus. Historian Grant A. Wacker delineates the conflict between evangelicals and Pentecostals. Pentecostalism’s antirationalist, anti-intellectualism aside, what stirred up evangelicals about Pentecostals certainly had a theological component. Wacker’s work on early Pentecostals gives us greater insight into who they were, what they believed, and why they succeeded. This insight also helps to explain the evangelical/Pentecostal rift.

Pentecostals placed all their spiritual hopes on what the Holy Spirit did, and therefore they did not bother to produce any systematic theology until after the 1950s. Besides the absence of seminary-trained clergy, Wacker notes that one reason Pentecostals did not develop a specific theology was because the Holy Spirit would explain the Bible and thus no outside help was needed.⁵ Spirit baptism was the central Pentecostal focus, and as long as they preached that message Pentecostals were convinced that they were doing what God had planned for the final days of time—continuing the outpouring of the Holy Spirit as a sign that God was almost ready to wrap things up. Evangelicals, whose many luminaries attended the best seminaries, saw Pentecostals as poor, misguided country cousins who let their emotions get the best of them. I would argue that a subtext of evangelical problems with Pentecostals lies in the role of women and the loosening of tightly proscribed boundaries of idealized feminine spirituality. This should be kept in mind when examining the role of moral codes at the Latin American Bible Institute (LABI), and indeed the values that tend to become privileged throughout the study of Victory Outreach and the Vineyard.

Pentecostal preachers, men and women, traveled together and worshiped together. Under a trancelike state, commonly referred to as being “slain in the Spirit,” men and women fell to the floor together, “side by side … in the most unseemly and immodest way.”⁶ Wacker quotes an unnamed observer who was horrified that, at Pentecostal meetings, women fell in the most “indelicate positions.” Pentecostalism’s alleged carnality no doubt emerged from the fact that women spoke “in groans that words cannot express” (Romans 8:26). Piety, the glue that keeps evangelicalism together, became redefined, under the auspices of Pentecostalism, as submission to a supernatural force that affected both men and women, and risked democratizing the male-dominated offices of apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor, and teacher.

The irony of these criticisms is that evangelicals define themselves by their willingness to evangelize—to preach the Gospel to anyone anywhere—but not if that meant risking the loss of the idealized Christian woman. This last event sums up this evangelical paradox. A delegation of California ministers lobbied the British government to ban Aimee Semple McPherson from preaching in Britain because she might cause an outbreak of mental illness.⁷ The idea of allowing a Pentecostal woman, who founded her own denomination, wore makeup, bobbed her hair, and attracted thousands to her campaigns to preach the Gospel, certainly hit some evangelicals as heretical because they opposed her theologically, but the fact that Sister Aimee oozed modernity was certainly a reason, in some minds, to protect the British public.

Another subtext that influenced the evangelical/Pentecostal split is examined in greater detail in chapter 2, but briefly the issue of Pentecostalism’s attraction to people of color and their potential mixing in churches caused more than discomfort for evangelicals, and eventually Pentecostals, who, despite the rhetoric emanating from Azusa Street that the “color line had been washed away in the Blood,” have never reconciled feelings of Euro American superiority over their African American and Latino brethren. What can be ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. El Aposento Alto
• 2. Workers for the Harvest: LABI and the Institutionalizing of a Latino Pentecostal Identity
• 3. “Normal Church Can’t Take Us”: Victory Outreach and the Re-Creation of a Latino Pentecostal Identity
• 4. Slipping Into Darkness: “God’s Anointed Now Generation” and the Making of a Latino Evangelical Youth Culture
• 5. Worlds Apart: The Vineyard, La Vina, and the American Evangelical Subculture
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index