THE CHARISMA CHASM:

Christianity reborn: A century after its birth Pentecostalism is redrawing the religious map of the world and undermining the notion that modernity is secular (The Economist, 12/19/06)

IN 1906 Ambrose Bierce, one of America's finest satirists, published a guide to bulls[quat], “The Cynic's Word Book” or, as it was later rechristened, “The Devil's Dictionary”. Bierce reserved his sharpest barbs for religion. To pray, he said, is “to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy”. Religion is “a daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable”. For Bierce, Christianity was an antiquated superstition with no place in the modern world.

In the same year an itinerant black preacher arrived in Los Angeles. William J. Seymour was “disheveled in appearance”, blind in one eye and scarred by smallpox. He was also on fire with a vision—that Jesus would soon return and God would send a new Pentecost if only people would pray hard enough. He began to preach from a makeshift church in Azusa Street, in a run-down part of town. Soon thousands joined him. People spoke in tongues, floated six feet in the air, or so we are told, and fell to the floor in trances, “slain by the Lord”. The faithful prayed day after day for three years on the trot, and dispatched dozens of missionaries abroad.

At the time, the Azusa Street revival looked like an aberration. Surely the future belonged to the cynical secularists such as Bierce rather than the tongue-speaking preacher like Seymour? Intellectual fashion had turned sharply against religion. Marxists dismissed it as a tool of class oppression; Freudians regarded it as a collective neurosis; economists thought that because it had no market price it had no value; and sociologists, such as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, pronounced its death rites. The year before, France had passed a tough law banning religion from the public square.

You did not have to be a card-carrying intellectual to think that Azusa Street was a flash in the pan. The Los Angeles Times complained about a “weird Babel of tongues” and a “new sect of fanatics” who “work themselves into a state of mad excitement”. Respectable people were outraged that Seymour encouraged inter-racial worship, particularly given that it involved hugging and ululating. The religious establishment was equally hostile, believing that the future of religion lay in reconciling itself with reason. Fundamentalists condemned Seymour for focusing on the Spirit rather than the Letter. “The last vomit of Satan” was one preacher's verdict on the movement.

Yet, with the possible exception of Europe, history has moved in Seymour's direction rather than Bierce's. The great secular ideologies of the 19th and early 20th centuries—from Marxism to Freudianism—have faded while Seymour's spirit-filled version of Christianity has flourished. Pentecostal denominations have prospered, and Pentecostalism has infused traditional denominations through the wildly popular charismatic movement.

No one believes History is moving Europe's way, least of all Europeans.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 23, 2006 7:41 AM