Reflecting on "Visions of Glory":
Thinking about the Historical Significance of the Azusa Street
Revival
Joe Creech, Assistant Director, Lilly Fellows Program in
Humanities and the Arts and Adjunct Assistant Professor of
History and Humanities, Christ College Honors College,
Valparaiso University
Annual meeting of the American Society of Church History,
January 6, 2007
Dr. Blumhofer, panelists, and colleagues, I'm grateful to
be here with you today to consider for a few minutes the
historical significance, particularly for Americanists and those
interested in religion in America, of the Azusa Street revival
and Pentecostalism more generally.
The Azusa Street revival
began in Los Angeles, California, in the spring of 1906 and is
now considered the birthplace of Pentecostalism.
To get at this issue of historical significance, I want to
revisit my essay, "Visions of Glory: The Place of the Azusa
Street Revival in Pentecostal History," which was published by
Church History in 1996, which also looked at the historical
significance of the Azusa Street Revival, or, more specifically,
at how theological conceptions of the revival have shaped the
way historians interpret it as well as early Pentecostalism.1
What I'll do here is summarize the two main points in that
article and then use those two points to reflect further on what
for me is a key question regarding, again, the historical
significance not only of the revival itself but the movement it
1
2
sparked.
That question is this:
why is it that Pentecostalism,
which, as I'm sure the panelists will testify, is among the most
important world-wide movements in twentieth-century
Christianity, relegated to the sidelines not only in most
historical narratives of twentieth-century America but even in
narratives of American religion and Christianity.
With a few
notable exceptions, such as the attention paid to Aimee Semple
McPherson and Pat Robertson, it seems that American historians
consider Pentecostals or Charismatics side-show novelties
outside the main events that affect American culture, religion,
and society.
It is interesting, for example, that when my
article on Azusa Street was anthologized in a book on American
Church History a few years back, it was included in a section
titled "Alternatives in Religion" (which also included articles
on Adventists, Mormons, and mind cures) rather than in the
section titled "Mainstream Religion" which dealt with Methodists
and the like.2
Now this sideshow status might seem astonishing
to practitioners (or maybe not), for I'm sure these panelists
and many others here would agree that Pentecostalism, a term
that I'll use as a shorthand name for old-line Pentecostals,
Charismatics, and various "third wave" types, has become, if not
in terms of theology, then in terms of style, culture, and
worship, the most important force shaping American and worldwide Christianity.
Again, after I summarize my argument in
3
"Visions of Glory," I'll come back to this problem by suggesting
that thinking about Azusa might provide some avenues for
centering the story of Pentecostalism within the larger American
historical narrative.
On to summary.
In "Visions of Glory," I wanted to examine
what was to many historians of Pentecostalism a thorny problem
about the origins of the movement:
why was Azusa christened the
birth place of Pentecostalism not only by Pentecostals but also
by most American historians when there is no actual historical
evidence to suggest Azusa was any more significant to the
theological, social, or institutional development of
Pentecostalism than other outbreaks of glossolalia, healing, and
revival in places like Kansas or North Carolina.
What I mean is
that if we look at Azusa, there are not the sorts of historical
links we might expect to find for the starting point of a welldefined religious movement.
For example, Azusa did not produce
doctrinal or theological innovations, Azusa did not establish an
institutional legacy, Azusa participants by and large did not
become the most important American Pentecostal institution
builders or leaders over the next half-century (the exception
here would be missionary leaders), and we could go on.
To address this problem in "Visions of Glory," I proposed
two main points.
First, I spelled out what I suggested just a
4
second ago, that there are no doctrinal or institutional reasons
to name Azusa the sole progenitor of the Pentecostal movement.
Again, this was not a new argument--folks like Dr. Blumhofer,
James Goff, and others had been suggesting this for a number of
years--I simply drew on their work and some research of my own
to clarify the obvious--that the Pentecostal theology at Azusa
was already in circulation among holiness folks who learned it
from Charles Parham or others, and that while individual
Pentecostal leaders like Charles Mason of the Church of God in
Christ and G.B. Cashwell who was central to the growth of
Pentecostalism in the Southeast visited Azusa, they returned to
institutions that were already in place and that continued to
develop along pre-existing historical trajectories.3
This paucity of historical connections to Azusa is
significant for at least a couple of reasons.
First, in
imagining Azusa the sole progenitor of the movement, many
theologians and historians have portrayed the whole of early
Pentecostalism as having the same radical, counter-cultural
ethos as Azusa.
There is little question that at Azusa lines of
race, gender, class, and ethnicity broke down under the
charismatic leadership of William J. Seymour, but in this
regard, Azusa was something of an anomaly in early
Pentecostalism.
As Grant Wacker, Blumhofer, and others have
5
confirmed, as Pentecostalism developed among holiness and
higher-life groups, along holiness publication networks, and at
sporadic revivals across the nation, its ethos varied according
to the customs of the holiness leaders and institutions already
in place.4
If local leaders typically frowned on women
ministers, for example, they continued to frown upon sisters
prophesying even if they were doing so in tongues.
The same
went for views on race, for theological peculiarities, antielitism, ecstasy, doctrinal governance, and so on.
In short,
there was never a monolithic early Pentecostalism where lines of
gender, class, and ethnicity disappeared, where leaders drew on
individual charisma to shepherd their flocks, and where
participants regularly had ecstatic experiences.
That might
describe Azusa and a few other places, but not the full sweep of
Pentecostalism, and, as I noted in my essay, this mistaken
understanding of early Pentecostalism has often led to
theological and historical declension narratives that depict an
early, pure, Pentecostalism that was aggressively radical giving
way to a cold, institutionalized Pentecostalism that by the
1920s subjugated women, segregated blacks and whites, and warmed
to the status quo.
If the first point in the essay was, in a sense, to tear
down Azusa's historical prominence, my second point--the point I
6
consider more significant--was to demonstrate why Azusa's place
as the symbolic or mythical point of origin is far more
important to practitioners and to those trying to understand the
movement than the paucity of actual historical ties to Azusa.
It seems most movements--religious or not--have that defining
point of origin (the 95 theses, the Montgomery Bus Boycott)
that, as the late Clifford Geertz might have put it, brings
clarity to and simultaneously confirms a group's cosmological
ideals and longings.
Furthermore, such intense spiritual events
provide a blueprint for communicating and therefore extending or
reproducing these catalyzing rituals (as Azusa promoters like
Frank Bartleman inherently realized).
For holiness folk who
expected a latter rain outpouring of the Holy Spirit accompanied
by signs and wonders that would quickly put in motion the second
coming of Jesus, Azusa conformed to and confirmed their deepest
eschatological aspirations.
They understood the significance
and meaning of Azusa through the gestalt of premillennialism and
certain holiness and higher-life teachings, even as the revival
itself confirmed those beliefs.
In this way, Azusa really is
the progenitor of the movement.
For Pentecostals, Azusa marked
a real event in sacred history.
As I concluded 10 years ago:
Azusa was the sign for which emerging Pentecostals had
hoped; it was the symbolic moment that provided the
7
impetus to believe....If, in their minds, Azusa
represented both the initial outpouring and the
blueprint for interpreting similar stirrings, it is no
wonder it would ultimately shape the way we tell the
Pentecostal story.5
Now that I've reviewed my main points in "Visions of
Glory," I would like to suggest how these two observations--that
Azusa was not the actual, historical progenitor of early
Pentecostalism and yet that Azusa was and continues to be the
symbolic point of origins for the movement--might address the
problem I mentioned a few minutes ago--that is, Americanists'
and historians' tendency to marginalize Pentecostalism.
If early Pentecostalism cannot be characterized by the
radical ethos of Azusa but rather, as folks like Wacker,
Blumhofer, R.G. Robins have shown, displayed a deeply complex
ethos and that varied according to place, class, time, and so
on, (in short, according to historical contingencies), it
behooves us to learn what social, cultural, economic, and
political circumstances and historical events shaped these
emerging centers (not a center--Azusa) of Pentecostalism.6
For
it seems to me one of the reasons Americanists and historians
generally don't factor Pentecostals into their historical
narratives is because we still know so darn little about them.
8
Now, certainly thanks to Grant Wacker and others, we know so
much more than we did even ten years ago about early
Pentecostals' spending habits, worship, theology, outlook,
politics (or lack thereof), and so on.7
What we don't seem to
know much about, however, is what these people were like before
they converted to Pentecostalism (what were their political or
economic activities, social activities, religious activities).
Granted, finding this information is dreadfully difficult, as
anyone who has researched holiness and Pentecostal folks will
tell you (when Jesus is coming next month one typically does not
bother recording even who showed up at church), but it is there,
especially if we look at the records of churches that voted to
leave old denominations or to join Pentecostal ones.8
Why is knowing what Pentecostals did before they converted
important?
For me, it helps draw a broader picture of what
becoming Pentecostal meant for these folks and in this regard
helps us understand better the historical significance of the
emergence of Pentecostalism.
Specifically, I wonder how the
emergence of Pentecostalism (lots of people in certain places
and at certain times becoming Pentecostal) might have been a
response to or catalyst for certain economic, political, or
social change over time (I tend to think "response to").
For
example, in my own study of the third-party Populist movement in
9
the South, my evidence suggests that, while, as Grant Wacker
acknowledges, most Pentecostals were deeply hostile towards
political involvement, that these a-political Pentecostals had
most likely been third-party Populists 10 years earlier.9
What
might such an observation, if demonstrated, say, then, not only
about Pentecostalism, but about the way we understand the
politics of race, gender, and class that brought about the
demise of Populism?
(Many white and black Populists in North
Carolina were stigmatized and even violently assaulted as
traitors to the white race and to America for voting Populist-might this have prompted certain eschatological musings?)
By so
drawing Pentecostalism into dialogue with other events--like
Populism, or anti-Imperialism, or pacifism--that is, by trying
to reconstruct Pentecostals' lives before they converted, it
seems to me we open avenues for weaving Pentecostalism into the
larger narrative we tell about America and American Religion.
On my second point in the Azusa essay--the importance of
Azusa as the symbolic point of origin for the movement--I would
like to propose this question:
if Azusa symbolized--clarified
and made real--the eschatological longings of holiness folk at
the turn of the century (and, again, I want to know more about
why, historically, they had these longings)--why is it that the
radical, egalitarian ethos of Azusa that prompted participants
10
to cross lines of race, class, and gender, continues to clarify
and make real the eschatological--or as Geertz would say, the
cosmological--longings of present-day Pentecostals?
That it
does still symbolize these longings requires little argument.
Simply turning to the numerous celebrations of the centennial of
Azusa last year leaves little doubt about Azusa's place as the
symbolic point of origin for the movement.10
Moreover, almost
all (I'm tempted to say all just from the web sites I surveyed)
focus not only on William J. Seymour as the founder of the
movement (most claim him to be the most important Christian
leader of African descent), but focus also on the
countercultural and especially interracial nature of the
revival.
My question is, then, put bluntly, why do
Pentecostals, who I would wager consider themselves on the far
right politically and socially, place a radical African American
at the center of their movement and celebrate the revival's
counter-cultural tendencies.
In other words, what can we learn
about modern Pentecostals--or American conservatives, for that
matter--from the way they venerate Azusa.
Should we be
surprised, then, if my anecdotal evidence serves me correctly,
that Pentecostal churches are probably the most racially and
ethnically integrated churches in contemporary America (at least
when compared to other Protestant groups).
For those interested
in the history or study of race, gender, and class in America,
11
it would seem to me that Pentecostalism could perhaps provide
one of the most important points of study, and doing so would,
again, center the movement in the way we tell stories about
America and American religion.
In brief, then, to outsiders, the Azusa revival seemed only
one among the thousands of like holiness revivals throughout the
country.
Not so, however, for those who would become
Pentecostal.
Where others saw only a "Weird Babel of Tongues"
and a "Gurgle of Wordless Talk" by a "New Sect of Fanatics,"
Pentecostals heard and continue to hear the voice of God.
As an
historian, I want to know why these people hear something other
folks cannot.
12
Notes
1
Joe Creech, "Visions of Glory:
The Place of the Azusa Street
Revival in Pentecostal History," Church History, 65 (1996), 405424.
2
Joe Creech, "Visions of Glory:
The Place of the Azusa Street
Revival in Pentecostal History," American Church History, Henry
Warner Bowden and P.C. Kemeny, editors (Nashville:
Press, 1998), 369-379.
Abingdon
This comment is certainly not intended
as a criticism of American Church History.
3
Edith Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith:
The Assemblies of God,
Pentecostalism, and American Culture (Urbana:
University of
Illinois Press, 1993), and James R. Goff, Jr., Fields White Unto
Harvest:
Charles F. Parham and the Missionary Origins of
Pentecostalism (Fayetteville:
University of Arkansas Press,
1988).
4
Blumhofer; Grant Wacker, Heaven Below:
American Culture (Cambridge:
5
Early Pentecostals and
Harvard University Press, 2002).
Creech, "Visions of Glory," Church History, 424.
13
6
Wacker, Blumhofer, and R. G. Robins, A.J. Tomlinson:
Modernist (New York:
Plainfolk
Oxford University Press, 2004).
7
Wacker, especially in Heaven Below.
8
An example would be to examine the handful of churches in
eastern North Carolina that left the holiness Cape Fear
Association of the Free Will Baptists to form the Pentecostal
Free Will Baptist Church.
9
Creech, Righteous Indignation:
Revolution (Urbana:
Religion and the Populist
University of Illinois Press, 2006), 178-
180.
10
See, for example:
http://www.icfsr.org/history.html, and
http://www.azusastreet.org/index.html.