Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . INTERVIEW . Harvey Cox . April 28, 2006

Read more of Kim Lawton's interview about Pentecostalism with Harvard Divinity School Professor Harvey Cox:

Q: What differentiates Pentecostals from other streams of Christianity?

Photo of Harvey Cox

A: What Pentecostals did at the beginning was to bring together a lot of streams that had been there before: emotionally expressive worship, expectation of the near ending of the world, healing, speaking in tongues, various things like that, especially direct experience with God through the Spirit that doesn't have to be mediated. All these things were around. What they did at the Azusa Street revival in 1906 was to put these all together for the first time under the leadership of William J. Seymour, who was the gentle leader there, into a very, very powerful package that especially appealed to people on the margins -- poor people, outsiders -- and it grew very rapidly.

Q: Why has it grown so rapidly? What is the appeal?

A: It has a lot of different appeals. For one thing, I think people in the 20th century and into our time grew rather suspicious and weary of institutions, of theories, of dogmas, and this is a movement that emphasizes enormously personal experience and only secondarily institution and dogma and so on. I like to call it the poor man's mysticism. This is direct contact with God that doesn't need to be mediated by any of these institutions, and that's, I think, increasingly appealing to a lot of people around the world. The other thing is they offer a kind of community to people, a kind of feeling of belonging, which sometimes is just not that evident in some churches, where you can go in and pray and listen to a sermon or get Communion, and then you leave and there isn't that much feeling that the people are closely related to you or care about you. Pentecostals do, and that's one of their major attractions. The other one that I think, and many people don't notice this, is it gives people a real sense of dignity. If you can stand up, as you can in a Pentecostal church, and pray even though you're an uneducated person, you can even pray what they call "tongues," which is the prayer of the heart. It equalizes people, it declericalizes the movement. Anybody can come in and do this, and it's very appealing to people who are not fond of being part of big institutions with the hierarchies.

Q: What is the difference between a Pentecostal and a Charismatic?

A: Well, not a whole lot. Pentecostals like to call Charismatics "Pentecostal lite." It's usually the word that's used to refer to Pentecostal-like forms of worship and praise and singing and music that are found in denominations other than Pentecostal denominations. There are Charismatic Lutherans, there are Charismatic Roman Catholics, Methodists, and so on. That's what, really, we mean by the Charismatic movement. It tends to be a little bit more contained, a little less spontaneous. One of the main things about Pentecostal worship is that it tends to be very spontaneous. You never know quite what's going to happen. But they are closely related, and usually when you're counting people for statistical purposes, you count Pentecostals and Charismatics together because they look very similar in the way they act and the way they worship.

Q: Are Pentecostals evangelicals?

A: I would say they are and they aren't. They're evangelicals in that they have a lot of the same beliefs that evangelicals have, but they differ on one very major tenet. Evangelicals tend to emphasize very strongly that God speaks to us through the text of the Bible. Either literally or authoritatively, that's the main source of the connection between human beings and God, whereas Pentecostals emphasize the direct, unmediated experience. They believe in the Bible, they talk about the Bible, but the actual biblical text is not that central, and therefore they're often criticized by evangelicals for not being sufficiently grounded in what evangelicals call the word of God. And the other thing that perhaps differentiates them is that only recently has the idea of divine healing or even faith healing found its way back into evangelical churches and even mainline churches. It was there from the very, very beginning among Pentecostals. That was one of their strong suits.

Q: Describe some of their beliefs and practices.

A: One of the streams that fed into early Pentecostalism was the 19th-century Holiness movement, where people wanted to be sure that they were set apart from worldly standards and therefore they discouraged earrings and lipstick and makeup and wanted to live simply and set themselves apart that way, not be drawn into the kind of changing styles and competitive beauty contests and all the rest. And early Pentecostals picked up on that. However, one of the most striking changes that I've observed in the last 10, 15, maybe 20 years in studying Pentecostalism, is how far they've moved into allowing and even encouraging that sort of thing. I mean, you would not have found miniskirts in Pentecostal churches a decade or two ago. Now you do. You wouldn't have found earrings, you wouldn't have found lipstick. They have moved very much toward more middle-class standards of or styles in dress, and I think that's, frankly, one of the reasons why they're drawing a lot of young people that the older Pentecostals might not have reached. You don't have to give up looking the way you like to look -- "come as you are" sort of idea in Pentecostal churches.

Q: Is this trend even broader? Pentecostals used to be so inwardly focused. Now is there more acceptance of interaction with "the world"?

A: Oh, they've always interacted with the world. I mean, these are the people who were out on the street corners preaching and putting up tents in various places. They've always felt they had a mission to the public. But they also believed early on that they were really on the threshold of the second coming of Jesus Christ. That was one of the main characteristics of early Pentecostalism. And when that didn't happen decade after decade, they found themselves, willy-nilly, involved in the world. They found themselves in families, in schools, in political considerations, and all of that. A very important adaptation they've had to make is how do you live as a Pentecostal Christian in these secular institutions and responsibilities? That was not something the early Pentecostals thought much about. They thought the whole show was going to be over pretty soon. And in fact, they believed that the reason why they had been gifted with these Charismatic gifts -- healing, prophecy, tongues, and the rest -- was that these were signs that the last days were upon us, or almost upon us. These were the showering of gifts. And that has faded. You don't hear that much in Pentecostal churches now about an imminent second coming. They are much more concerned now with day-to-day living, how you live your faith at your job, in your family, in your neighborhood. That's what they concentrate on now.

Q: Are they mainstream now?

A: Well, they're certainly not at the fringes anymore. This is the fastest-growing Christian movement by far in the whole world, up there now between 450 and 500 million people, starting with that little handful in Azusa Street nearly 100 years ago. That is phenomenal growth. That's astonishing. In fact, there's very little precedent in all of Christian history for a movement which has grown as rapidly as they have and spread around the world as rapidly. It makes it a little ironic to talk about who is mainstream and who isn't. I mean, in a sense they are forming the mainstream and the rest of us are a little more marginated. The tables have been turned. They have also influenced the other churches much more than they thought they were going to, or anybody thought they were going to.

Q: How have they influenced other branches of Christianity?

A: One of the main things you can notice is the music. Pentecostals from the very, very beginning had absolutely nothing against bringing in guitars, trap drums, the musical instruments of the ordinary people. First of all, they didn't have the money or the resources to buy pipe organs. They brought them in, their songs are quite simple, and they were looked down upon by a lot of people at that time for this kind of cheap, rinky-dink music that they used. But that also attracted a lot of people. Now almost every church, including a lot of Catholic churches, are using guitars and keyboards and trap drums. That's a very, very big influence. I also think the emphasis on healing, prayers for healing, healing groups has become quite common in most other churches, when it was really pretty well confined in the early days of Pentecostalism to Pentecostals, to Christian Scientists, and to those Catholics who went to Lourdes or one of the healing shrines. Now you find it everywhere. I think that's a Pentecostal influence.

Q: Let's talk about some of the challenges the movement faces now. In the past, Pentecostals were sometimes criticized for being too emotional, not intellectual enough. Is this still a criticism that gets leveled at them?

A: It's still a criticism, but it's a criticism that Pentecostal leaders take very seriously, and [they] are really working hard at strengthening the intellectual side of the Pentecostal tradition. Several books have been written in the last few years about Pentecostal theology, and the content of the teaching is emphasized more than it used to be. There are now two scholarly journals devoted to Pentecostal theology and Pentecostal history and thinking. So they come into the ranks of academic papers and conferences. They have an annual conference for something called the Society for Pentecostal Studies, which I've attended several times. Very, very helpful and thoughtful, informative papers are written. Although the criticism is still made, the Pentecostals themselves are aware of that, and I think what they're doing is enlarging what they mean by Pentecostalism to include the mind as well as the body and the spirit. And they're making pretty good strides in that direction.

Q: You referred to the lack of hierarchy. Does that lead to problems of accountability?

A: Oh, well, I wish there were a church in the world that didn't have the problem of accountability -- or sexual scandals. Various churches have their share of those, as we all know. It is a problem and continues to be a problem in many Pentecostal churches, in part because of the very loose organizational structure that they have. They do not have a hierarchy. They do not have a College of Cardinals or a pope or a presbytery. Therefore, the oversight can be a little casual. And also, since the local pastor can also be very powerful in a Pentecostal church, the temptation for financial misbehavior is perhaps more tempting than in some other churches. But I think it's a little hypocritical to criticize Pentecostals for their scandals. I live in Boston, and we know what's happened here in the Roman Catholic Church and other places in the world. The Pentecostal preachers like Jim Bakker and others have gotten enormous, perhaps undue, publicity for their various sexual adventures. It's certainly there, but it's not enormously more important than it is in other churches.

Q: One more problem is the many divisions that seem to have come out of Pentecostal circles over the years. Is this still a challenge for the future?

A: I think this tendency toward fragmentation is at one and the same time Pentecostals' weakness and their big strength. This is the way they grow. It's almost like a cell going through mitosis. It splits and then those cells split and those cells split. Sometimes it's over personalities, sometimes it's over some kind of doctrinal dispute, sometimes it's just that one church is getting too big and they want to split off other branches and go to other places and found them, and that's what they've done. And then they really go out after people, they're real recruiters, they're real evangelizers. If you're competing with your neighboring Pentecostal church to find people, search them out, pick them up in your bus, get them to your church, and so on, that's going to lead to more growth. But the fragmentation is still a problem. And there are internal arguments. A lot of them that still go on are rather debilitating among Pentecostals. Again, however, [it is] certainly not the only church that has that. Think of the huge dispute going on right now in the Anglican Communion over gay ordination, which threatens to split the whole Anglican Church. They're not the only denomination or movement that has this danger of fragmentation.

Q: What do you see as the biggest challenges?

A: Without hierarchy and without any kind of overall body of consensus, some Pentecostal churches and branches can veer off into what I and many Pentecostals would consider to be quite suspect directions. The one that's especially under dispute and scrutiny right now is the so-called "health and wealth gospel." Some people call it the "name it and claim it" theology, which promises you not only salvation but health and wealth if your faith is strong enough, which many people feel is not really in accord with the central gospel but still is very attractive to many people. If you have enough faith and contribute enough money to the church, you're going to prosper. That message is spreading widely, and there are many Pentecostals who are afraid that it's diluting the central message. The other most significant challenge they have now on a world scale is a church called the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, which began in Brazil 20 years ago, which is very different from any other Pentecostal churches. It really has a hierarchy. It's almost a kind of client and manager relationship, almost a pay-for-services kind of arrangement that they have there. They emphasize very, very strongly exorcism, getting rid of the demons that are bothering you and ruining your life. They've built huge temples all around the world. They [are in] something like 110 countries around the world. They're growing very rapidly. But most Pentecostals I know of in the historic Pentecostal movements think of them as really pseudo-Pentecostals. They've taken one little bit of the Pentecostal message and blown it up and made it into everything and transformed it into a very, very profitable business. That church owns the second-largest television station in Brazil now. They are making millions of dollars, and it's an embarrassment to many other Pentecostals, and there's no way of reining them in. There they are, they're doing what they're doing, and I think there may be other things like that developing because of the freedom and spontaneity and flexibility of this movement. I mean, almost anything could happen.

Q: Any other reasons the Pentecostal movement exploded so quickly in just 100 years?

A: People do really take care of each other and think about each other in Pentecostal congregations, especially in Pentecostal congregations of immigrants, of which we have many, many, many throughout the United States. There are hundreds of thousands of Latino immigrants who are coming here and joining Pentecostal congregations, and the people in the congregation help take care of their children and they help them find a job. They give them a place to live until they've found their own quarters. They really take responsibility for each other in a way that most other churches don't. Also, you don't have to study a catechism, you don't have to know any dogmatic teachings. You go in there, you sing, you pray, and you have this experience, and that appeals a lot to 21st-century people. It's the experiential element of many religions now that seems to be the one that's most attractive. And the sense of dignity is very, very important. You are important in the eyes of God. Think of a poor, virtually illiterate woman in the slums of some city in South America who goes in and she hears that message: You are important in the eyes of God. God has something he wants you to do for other people in the world, and furthermore you can stand up and speak and pray, which you can't do in most churches. You become an agent and not just a recipient of the message. In fact, you're expected to go out and bring this message to other people. It gives you a sense of empowerment. I don't think you could underemphasize how important that is. At the Azusa Street revivals in 1906, a black minister, William J. Seymour, was presiding. There were white people [and] black people in his leadership group, there were men and women. It was extremely "equalitarian." In fact, someone once said that Azusa Street in 1906 may have been the most integrated location in the United States. This was at the height of Jim Crow. Furthermore, the Pentecostals didn't think this was just a good kind of sociological arrangement. They thought this was a sign from God, a sure sign, that God was curing the racist divisions and wounds in the church, purifying the church. They saw that this portended a second Pentecost, which of course is where they got their name.

Q: Does that diversity continue today?

A: They had a serious split a few years later. Many of the white ministers left [and] formed the Assemblies of God, which is a Pentecostal denomination. So there are black Pentecostal denominations, the Church of God in Christ,and others, and there are white ones, but still, overall, Pentecostal congregations tend to be, in general, more ethnically mixed, more racially integrated than almost any other denomination. You notice that when you go in.