Anderson continues this rather strained psychological analysis
in discussing the "social basis" for tongue speaking among
Pentecostals. He asserts that the limited verbal skills, the handicap of
racial, ethnic, regional, and foreign accents, and the minimal access to education
of the working poor symbolized their social marginality. The early Pentecostals
were virtually "speechless" and, therefore, "powerless" in
modern society.
Glossolalia offered an alternative, albeit illusory, speech and
power. Following the studies of William Samarin, Anderson holds glossolalia to
be regressive speech—the regression to infantile speech patterns produced by
great stress. "The powerless, voiceless position of the Pentecostals and
the anxieties arising from that position provided a social basis for speaking
in tongues."9
The early ecstatic and eschatological vitality of Pentecostalism
diminished shortly after the Azusa revival. Divisive, racist, parochial, and
even reactionary elements depleted the young movement's strength. The movement,
according to Anderson, reached its peak by 1914, after which the emerging
Pentecostal denominations developed into self-perpetuating institutions rather
than centers of religious and ideological ferment. With the stabilization of
Pentecostal denominations and adequate social improvement, early ecstatic zeal
subsided. Only newer, less stable groups, such as the Oneness Pentecostals,
composed of the "most impoverished and socially ostracized
Pentecostals" maintained a higher degree of ecstasy.10 For
Anderson, the amount of ecstatic activity directly correlates with the depth of
economic and social deprivation.11
The maturing Pentecostal bodies also experienced a loss of
intensity of the founders' millenarian emphasis. No longer driven to extremes
of evangelistic action by expectations of Christ's imminent return, the
Pentecostals, nevertheless, retained their founders' aversion to political
activism. According to Anderson, this lack of civic responsibility has made
modern Pentecostalism just another "bulwark of the status quo." The
doctrinal emphasis on Spirit baptism as the great sign of the impending return
of Christ has, in turn, shifted to speaking with tongues as a "psychic
escape."
As Pentecostalism became more institutionalized and modified its
extremes, it came to attract higher social classes. Only after World War II did
the larger, more stable Pentecostal denominations move beyond the patterns of
socially deprived sects and begin to demonstrate "churchly
characteristics." Neo-Pentecostalism, or the Charismatic Renewal movement
of the 1960's, further confirmed this movement from sect to church. But the appearance
of tongue speaking and other charismatic phenomena among middle and even upper
class Protestants and Catholics—an appearance independent from any classical
Pentecostal activities—calls into question the deprivation and dislocation
theories of Pentecostal origins. Here Anderson modifies his position: while the
neo-Pentecostals do not share the economic deprivation of their predecessors,
they do "suffer a real or imagined deprivation of respect or
prestige." Anderson hypothesizes that "status deprivation and an
anti-rationalist, anti-bureaucratic— i.e., anti-modern—temper has combined to
predispose most of the recruits to the neo-Pentecostal movement."12
Both classical and neo-Pentecostals demonstrate an inarticulate "emptiness"
prior to their conversions.
Although in his lengthy discussion of Pentecostal social origins
and development Anderson remains thoroughly convinced of the formative forces
of social dislocation and economic deprivation, he willingly concedes three
areas explained only in religious, rather than sociological or psychological,
terms. First, Anderson is well aware that only a minority of those uprooted by
industrialization were drawn into Pentecostalism. Thus, he concedes that a "different
religious orientation" distinguished the early Pentecostals from the
majority of the working poor. Despite the divergent former religious
affiliations of those converting to Pentecostalism, they all held to "a religion
of the Spirit," that is, to these, religion was a "matter of the
heart in which miracle and wonder held a central place."13 Such
recruits almost uniformly came from backgrounds in the Holiness movement, more
emotional, revivalist Protestant roots, or more "crudely superstitious"
forms of Catholicism. Second, based on case studies of Pentecostal leaders,
Anderson argues that among the socially alienated, those suffering some
personal crisis—illness, career failure, death of a family member—were
particularly susceptible to Pentecostal conversion.
In a final concession to the religious explanation of
Pentecostal survival and growth, Anderson admits that the structure of
Pentecostal millenarianism and ecstasy, although functioning to meet social
needs, arises from the biblical traditions of ecstatic millenarianism expounded
most clearly in the Acts of the Apostles, Paul's first epistle to the
Corinthians, the Revelation, and to a lesser extent Daniel.14 With a
crudely naive, literalistic understanding of the Bible, the Pentecostals sought
to consciously duplicate these aspects of the life of the New Testament church.
Anderson also embarks on a discussion paralleling the social experience of the
first century Christians and the early Pentecostals to explain their common
emphasis on millenarianism and ecstasy.15 Anderson concedes that the
form of ecstatic millenarianism of early Pentecostals arose from their
biblicism, not their social condition, although their social marginality linked
them with this biblical tradition.
___________________
11Ibid., p. 231.
12Ibid., p. 229.
13Ibid., p. 228.
14Ibid., pp. 231-2.
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