[In
the next several posts, I will share a chapter from my dissertation, The People
of the Name: Oneness Pentecostalism in the United States (Florida State
University, 1985). Each subsequent post
will offer a lengthy exposition of the “deprivation theory” of Pentecostal
origins found in Robert Mapes Anderson’s influential work The Vision of the
Disinherited and a much shorter look at William Samarin’s analysis of
glossolalia as “regressive speech” which is related to such a deprivation
theory. My work offers a meaningful critique of this deprivation theory drawn
from the studies of Gerlach and Hine, but does not offer any meaningful
alternative.
This
analysis is very dated, but is still useful in light of the continued influence
of deprivation theories. Further research is needed in this area – especially
providing positive alternatives to the deprivation theory of classical
Pentecostal origins.]
Oneness
Growth and Development
Multitudes of investigators—both sociological and psychological—have
sought to uncover the social roots of Pentecostalism and the reasons for its
phenomenal growth and development. Sociologists theorize that Pentecostalism spreads
where there is mass social disorganization and dislocation among socially and
economically deprived groups. Psychologists debate whether the Pentecostal experience
replicates a psychological state of schizophrenia or hysteria, results from an
enhanced state of suggestibility and a predisposition to hypnosis, or merely demonstrates
regressive speech patterns and learned behavior. Only in Robert Mapes
Anderson's excellent Vision of the
Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism, have these theories
been incorporated in a social history of the movement's origin and advance.1
This work surveys the genesis of the Pentecostal movement against the
background of the crises of the 1890's and early twentieth-century social
change. Any adequate study of Pentecostal growth and development—including that
of Oneness Pentecostalism—must address Anderson's conclusions before offering
any new theories and interpretations.
Anderson perceives a convergence of social and religious
undercurrents in the 1890's which produced a fertile setting for the
Pentecostal revivals. Various dispossessed populations—rural, racial, and
immigrant—bewildered by the forces of change and complexity in the burgeoning
industrial world rejected those trends and their own insecurities by identifying
with mass movements of protest. Many of these alienated people were drawn to
the emotionalism and millenarian teachings of the Holiness churches. Despairing
of present realities, these believers retreated into a "vision" of
the imminent return of Christ. Rather than purely escapist and world-denying,
these religious communities came to anticipate a worldwide revival preceding
this climactic event. The Pentecostal phenomenon—the imparting of the Holy
Spirit baptism evidenced by enthusiastic worship and charismatic gifts— became
recognized as the divine token of this revival. The Los Angeles area, inhabited
by an uprooted population struggling to adapt to new circumstances in the
nation's fastest growing city, was particularly susceptible to this revival. Following
reports of similar revivals meetings in Wales and the startling headlines of
the San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906, the Pentecostal preaching of
William Seymour exploded into a religious awakening of national and
international proportions.
Anderson correctly recognized Pentecostalism as "one small
part of a widespread, long-term protest against the whole thrust of modern
urban-industrial capitalistic society," a part of "a many-sided
reaction against modernity."2 This, and other voices of
protest, rose amidst the social dislocation of the American masses caused by
rapid industrialization and urbanization. Revolutions in technology and the
means of production facilitated the appearance of large-scale, impersonal
industries and created an employment vacuum into which rural workers were drawn
to the cities. This shift caused a crisis of material sustenance, but also a
spiritual crisis of modernity—alienation and despair, manifest in both
intellectual malaise and the rise of mass movements of dissent. Economic
factors divided the voices of protest: the skilled working classes formed labor
unions which in turn helped these workers to adjust to industrial life, while
the unskilled and semi-skilled classes, barred from labor organizations by their
racial and ethnic status as well as lack of skill, were pushed to more extreme,
even exotic forms of protest—among these, the religious rejection of modernity
and the withdrawal from political and economic spheres found in the Adventist,
Fundamentalist, and Holiness groups.3
More specifically, Anderson shows that Pentecostalism arose
among poorer classes—black, immigrant, and dispossessed white—during the shift
from the competitive, entrepreneurial phase of American capitalism to its more monopolistic,
bureaucratic phase from 1890 to 1925. The "psychic crisis of the
1890's," precipitated by the economic depression of 1893-96, increased
labor-capital conflicts and launched unprecedented farmer militancy. It also
created a crisis of religious faith with mainline bodies embracing modernity in
the form of biblical criticism, evolutionary science, and social activism and with
sectarian bodies emerging to loudly protest this move.4
In contrast to the more "realistic" reform movements
of Populism and Progressivism (both ill-defined and elusive terms in this
presentation), Anderson sees the Holiness and Pentecostal movements as wholly
religious and reactionary, out of step with any secular solution. Not surprisingly,
Pentecostalism flourished in times of great economic trauma: following the
"panic" of 1907,5 during the recession of 1913-14, and
during the economic dislocation following World War II. These economic crises
accentuated the emergence of a stable pool of working poor, the sporadically or
seldom employed urban and rural proletariat of industrial capitalism which form
the lowest base of the nation's work force and a free-floating labor reserve. This
group resulted from the influx of rural Americans— black and white—and eastern
and southern European immigrants into urban industrial centers. Although these groups
came from divergent ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds, all shared two
characteristics: the experience of culture shock, both spiritual and material,
arising from their transplantation from rural to urban-industrial settings and
their almost irreversible social marginality. These working poor were barely
educated, held a limited command of the English language, and had only minimal access
to social institutions and technology. Unlike skilled labor, these marginal
workers received little real aid from the progressive reforms of the period.
Unable to ameliorate their marginal conditions, these working
poor, according to Anderson, responded to their situations by anti-social,
unrealistic, and escapist means. These efforts served a dual function by
protesting their impoverished, alienated social position and temporarily easing
its painful effects. Anderson places the otherworldly religion of some of these
marginal workers, expressed in the escapism of millenarianism and ecstasy, as the
functional equivalent of crime, violence, alcohol and drug abuse, gambling,
prostitution, and sexual promiscuity of the larger whole.
Anderson argues that the Pentecostal response to the malaise of
urban-industrialization and the growing secularity of the churches mixed
millenarianism and ecstatic worship in an "almost wholly otherworldly, symbolic
and psychotherapeutic" solution. Against the reality of the worker's world
in the 1890's, Pentecostals, along with Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and
the emerging Keswick movement, asserted the imminent destruction of the present
world and the creation of a new utopian world of social reversals. This
"oblique expression of social protest" answered the psychological needs
of those whose worlds were indeed collapsing and worthy of destruction. Only
the ecstatic emphasis set Pentecostalism apart from these other religious
responses.6 While Anderson admits that ecstasy has been a prominent
part of all American revivalism and is potential in every evangelical group
emphasizing a "crisis experience" of salvation, he nevertheless
explains the full-flowering of ecstasy in the Pentecostal revival in terms of
the socio- economic deprivation of its adherents.
The poorer, more dislocated and despised, the more marginal and
highly mobile such people are in the social order, the more extreme will be
their ecstatic response. For early Pentecostals, ecstasy acted as an agency for
adjustment for the marginal, uncontrollable social deprivation. Unable to find
adjustment through reason or action, Pentecostals fell back upon the inner
world of desire and imagination.7
In the disassociated state of the baptism of the Spirit, the
Pentecostals "symbolically expressed their disorganized, chaotic social
circumstances and were thus better able to accommodate to them."8
___________________
1Robert M. Anderson, Vision
of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1979).
2Ibid., p. 223.
3Ibid., p. 224.
4Ibid., p. 225. In his conclusions, Anderson links the
"come-outism" of the Holiness and Dispensationalist movements with
the economic crises of the 1890's even though he had already demonstrated that
this process was well under way during the 1870's and 1880's. Only the final
physical separation of these believers occurred in the 1890's.
5Here Anderson mishandles the Azusa information to prove his
thesis. The Azusa revival peaked in late 1906 and early 1907 and faded (as a
national phenomenon) shortly thereafter. The fading of this revival, rather
than its inception, coincided with the actions of the New York banks in the
1907 "panic." Obviously, Anderson's economic thesis clouds rather
than clarifies at this point.
6Anderson, Vision, p.
230. Anderson argues that ecstasy waned in the Holiness movement at this time.
But apparently, Holiness ecstasy subsided in response to, rather than prior to,
Pentecostal extremes. Note especially the case of the Christian and Missionary
Alliance as portrayed in John Thomas Nichol's, The Pentecostals (Plain field,
N. J.: Logos Books, 1966), p. 38-9.
7Ibid., p. 231.
8Ibid.
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