Darryl Li on "Essential" Humanitarianism in Gaza (January 2009)

 This is one of many posts tracking the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as it appeared in my old blog.

The metaphor of the Gaza Strip as the world’s largest prison is unfortunately outdated. Israel now treats the Strip more like a zoo. For running a prison is about constraining or repressing freedom; in a zoo, the question is rather how to keep those held inside alive, with an eye to how outsiders might see them. The question of freedom is never raised. The ongoing electricity crisis helps to illuminate this shift, so to speak.

Nearly all of Gaza’s energy is supplied by Israel, both directly, from its electric grid, paid for by tax revenues collected by Israel on behalf of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), and indirectly, through fuel supplied by the Israeli company Dor Alon to Gaza’s only electrical power plant, and paid for by the European Union.

Gaza has been experiencing a power crisis since June 2006, when Israeli helicopter gunships fired rockets at the power plant’s transformers following the capture of an Israeli soldier, rendering it inoperable. Israel has subsequently hobbled repair efforts by blocking or delaying the entry of replacement parts and equipment into the Strip. The power plant now operates at a fraction of its former capacity, meeting less than a third of Gaza’s electricity needs. Even before the plant’s fuel supply ran out on 20 January 2008, most Gazans were enduring frequent power cuts of up to eight hours per day.

Compounding this problem, the Israeli security cabinet announced its intention on 19 September to slash supplies of electricity and fuel to Gaza. On 29 November 2007, the Supreme Court agreed that cutting fuel supplies was permissible, deciding that the state’s decision to cut the amount of fuel transferred to Gaza would not harm the “essential humanitarian needs” of the population. The court allowed fuel cuts to go ahead but reserved judgment on the planned electricity cuts, in the meantime demanding extensive data from the state to help it to make its decision.

The interaction between the state and the court is telling as regards the post-disengagement management of Gaza and the mentality of zoo-keeping. In 2006, Israel decided that the best way to punish Gazans for the capture of one of its soldiers was a one-off, spectacular act of violence that would lead to widespread deprivation. Now it seeks similar results – the loss of electricity and the resulting disruption of everyday life – through more calibrated, long-term means. This shift in approach is akin to the difference between clubbing an unruly prisoner over the head to subdue him and taming an animal through careful regulation of leash and diet.

This reorientation first required a clearing of the legal slate, hence the lack of any reference in the decision of 29 November to legal precedents, treaties, or statutes, thus mirroring the state’s view of post-disengagement Gaza as a zone devoid of any legal obligations on its part. The international law of occupation, which the Court used to apply to Gaza, at least theoretically – minus the prohibitions against colonization – is absent, including the absolute prohibition on collective punishment (Art. 33 of the Fourth Geneva Conventions). The decision reads purely as a kind of hypothetical exercise in utilitarian calculation; the court is acting more as administrator than as adjudicator, a partner in the calibration of how much pain Gazans are to be made to feel.

In place of any legal framework the state has proposed – and the court has now endorsed – a seemingly simple standard for policy: once “essential humanitarian needs” are met, all other deprivation is permissible. If it is possible to ration fuel for hospitals and the sewage network, then Gaza’s economy need not play a role: “We do not accept the petitioners’ argument that ‘market forces’ should be allowed to play their role in Gaza with regard to fuel consumption.”

This logic reflects the radical transformation of Israel’s policy of blockade since the summer of 2007: from frequent and crippling closure to indefinite blockage of all but “essential humanitarian items.” Israel has shifted from trying to punish the Gazan economy to deciding that the economy is a dispensable luxury (though Israel still allows commercial goods to enter Gaza when Israeli producers need to dump surplus goods). This policy has forced 90% of private industries in Gaza to shut down, frozen all construction works, and driven unemployment to record highs. Approximately 80% of the population now relies on food aid and the other 20% lives mainly on the incomes of civil servants, NGO workers, or the employees of international organizations, i.e. people whose economic dependence on outside goodwill is indirect but nonetheless real.

In practice, the neat and simple distinction between vital needs and luxuries is often impossible to implement. Gaza’s overstrained electrical grid can and does rotate distribution between areas, but hospitals and sewage pumps are too dispersed to be supplied with electricity separately from the rest of the population. Granting permits to seek medical treatment outside Gaza to those with “life-threatening” conditions – a standard endorsed by the Israeli Supreme Court last summer– has nevertheless caused deaths through the denial of permits for mere “quality of life” procedures, including open-heart surgery.

The notion of “essential humanitarianism” (it is unclear what would constitute the “inessentially” humanitarian) reduces the needs, aspirations, and rights of 1.4 million human beings to an exercise in counting calories, megawatts, and other abstract, one-dimensional units that measure distance from death. It distracts from, and even legitimizes, the destruction of Gaza’s internal capacities and resources: its economy, institutions, and infrastructure. And even if implemented in good faith and with the best of intentions, it promises nothing more than turning Gazans one and all into beggars – or rather, into well-fed animals – dependent on international money and Israeli fiat.

If Israel’s past efforts at narrowing the terms of debate are any indication, the international community, domestic litigants, Palestinian “leaders” and others may soon find themselves expending most of their energy on begging for an extra truckload of fuel here or a few extra megawatts of power there. Confronting the consolidation of the zoo regime, however, requires a broader approach.

Stepping back, Gaza seems less like a zoo and more like an animal pen in the backyard of a larger manor, namely the State of Israel. The Gaza Strip is not its own separate world, but rather a holding area for a quarter of the Palestinian population living under Israel’s control. Gazans are on the lowest rung in a hierarchy of legal exclusion that encompasses the half of the population of Israel/Palestine that is not Jewish, and which is fragmented into citizens of Israel, residents of East Jerusalem, and West Bankers (whether living under PNA administration or direct Israeli military jurisdiction). Gaza’s tomorrow is inextricably linked to that of Israel, and Gaza’s today provides the most urgent example of the need to define a more just political dispensation and legal framework for the state that has de facto spanned the territory from the river to the sea for four decades.

Darryl Li is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology & Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University and a JD Candidate at Yale Law School. He is also a consultant for Trócaire, the Irish Catholic overseas development charity. Most of this piece was written in Gaza between power outages; the views expressed in this essay reflect only his own. The article was written before the Supreme Court’s decision in HCJ 9132/07, Jaber al-Basyouni Ahmed v. The Prime Minister of 30 January 2008.

This post first appeared February, 2008. Israel's "Cast Lead" war with Hamas in 2009 made this essay timely once again. The casualty numbers were revealing -- seven or eight hundred dead in Gaza, a third of whom are children. Israel reported fewer than fifty civilian deaths and a smaller number of IDF losses. Hamas forces mix with the non-combatant population to insure maximum "collateral damage" to influence world opinion.

Footnote documentation can be found at this link, which was provided by Laila El-Haddad whose blog I came across two years ago.

I'm sure some readers will dismiss this essay as yet another anti-Israel screed, but how else can Gaza commentary be seen as long as Israel is regarded as the sole guardian of Gaza? I can't find any evidence that any other country is either trying or being invited to join Israel in the management of Gaza.

the Egyptian border is closed, and the tunnels used for smuggling have been bombed by the IDF. Those tunnels were apparently how Hamas was getting arms and rockets as well as cigarettes, foodstuffs and the like. Last I heard, the more primitive rockets that were coming from Southern Gaza into Israel have been stopped, but more long-range rockets are now being launched from areas with dense civilian populations.

Watching Gaza is like watching a tree grow or waiting for the hands of a clock to move. It seems as though I have been doing it my whole life.

Twitter thread from Israel

Quick thread of videos showing what Palestinians are facing right now...

Here, Palestinian children (citizens of Israel btw) break down crying as an Israeli mob tries to break into their home in Haifa:

Here, another mob of Israelis are destroying Palestinian-owned businesses:

Here, a crowd chant "death to the Arabs" as they assault a Palestinian driver as he frantically tries to get away:

Here, Israeli police break into a Palestinian home in Nazareth & attack the residents:

Here, a mob of Israelis in Ramla is checking vehicles passing by -- ones with Jewish drivers/passengers are allowed through unharmed, while ones with Palestinians are violently attacked with rocks:

Here, an Israeli fanatic is asking the mob for the addresses of Palestinian citizens in his city: "Give me the addresses of Arabs in Netanya"

Here, an Israeli mob viciously beat a Palestinian man unconscious. They continue beating him as he's out cold.

Here, Israeli soldiers joke on video about selling the Palestinian children they've kidnapped ("arrested" in Palestinian areas where the soldiers don't belong) for a hundred shekels:

Here is a mob in Bat Yam going on a rampage of Palestinian-owned businesses:

Here is a driver repeatedly reiterating to the mobs in the streets that he's Jewish (a different answer to this question would've made this a very different night for him):

Here, the daughter of a Palestinian man brutalized & beaten unconscious by Israeli mobs under Israeli police protection in Akka (Acre) rushes to check if he's alive:

Missing from this list are the videos of the torn bodies of Palestinian children in Gaza from Israeli bombardment. I won't be sharing them, but I will remind you that Israel killed more than 550 children in the span of 6 weeks in 2014 (17 children killed in the last 3 days). 

David French Remarks about a Clarence Thomas Opinion

David French is a senior editor at The Dispatch and a columnist for Time. His new book is Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation. He is a former major in the United States Army Reserve. 

This is from Time, April 9, 2021

A Surprising Opinion From Justice Thomas May Signal an Ominous Shift on Free Speech

A curious thing happened at the Supreme Court a few days ago. One of the justices, Clarence Thomas, broke from his traditional judicial role and weighed in on a matter of public policy. He tried to put his thumb on the scales of a political dispute and floated legislative ideas that would profoundly and negatively impact First Amendment rights.

The issue is so-called Big Tech censorship. Thomas wrote a concurrence to a Supreme Court decision vacating a court of appeals opinion that had held that Donald Trump violated the First Amendment when he blocked Twitter users from following his account. But since Trump was no longer president (and indeed had been kicked off Twitter entirely), the case was moot.

Thomas, however, wrote separately to opine not just about the merits of the case itself, but about Big Tech censorship more broadly. He wrote to suggest ways in which legislatures could limit the freedom of tech companies to block or ban people from their sites. In other words, he wrote to suggest ways in which the government can override the liberty of private citizens to manage and moderate speech on their own private platforms.

The context here is important. Millions of Americans are deeply concerned about the power and reach of America’s largest tech companies (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon, etc.), but their concerns often diverge sharply depending on their partisan affiliation. As a general matter, progressive Americans are concerned that Big Tech censors too little speech while conservative Americans are concerned that Big Tech censors too much.

Many progressives look at Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other tech companies and demand that they do more to combat disinformation, conspiracies, and so-called “hate speech”—words or images that are deemed to demean others on the basis of characteristics such as race, ethnicity, sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation.

Conservatives, by contrast, are deeply suspicious of Democrat-dominated Silicon Valley and demand that companies leave their speech alone. They argue that hate speech policies are vague and biased and that tech companies put their ideological thumb on the scales to favor progressive speech and suppress conservative ideas.

The two sides are increasingly united in wanting more government regulation. They’re deeply divided as to what those regulations should say.

But there’s another factor in play—the First Amendment. A long line of precedent, featuring rulings by justices on both sides of the ideological aisle, holds that private corporations possess their own free speech rights. They can speak, advance corporate values in the public square, and give donations to politicians they favor. In the famous words of Mitt Romney, “Corporations are people, my friend.”

When Major League Baseball pulls its all-star game from Georgia to protest Georgia’s voting law, that’s corporate free speech. When Hobby Lobby resists the Obamacare contraceptive mandate, that’s corporate religious freedom. Newspaper editorials are corporate free speech. So are union endorsements. So are church statements of faith. So are party platforms. In many ways, the American marketplace of ideas can’t properly function without corporate free speech. It represents a key way in which Americans organize and express ideas.

Make no mistake, social media moderation decisions are free speech. Even the way in which social media companies design algorithms to feature certain kinds of content at the expense of others is a form of free speech. They have created communities that reflect their own private visions of what a marketplace of ideas should look like and how it should function, and the result is a series of apps and websites that have different cultures, different customer bases, and different moderation rules.

And that’s what makes Thomas’s opinion so constitutionally unsettling. It is not the job of a Supreme Court justice to opine on matters of public policy, but that’s exactly what he did. He described what he called the “problem” of “private, concentrated control over online content and platforms available to the public” then went on to raise “two legal doctrines” that might “limit the right of a private company to exclude.”

Not only is it improper for a justice to make such a suggestion, the suggestions themselves are deeply problematic. First, he argued that perhaps “common carrier” legal doctrines could be deployed to regulate Big Tech. While there are different definitions of common carrier, they are typically companies that hold themselves out to the public as a means of transporting goods and some forms of information. FedEx and AT&T are modern examples of common carriers.

But to compare phone service and package delivery to social media is to try to jam a square peg into a round hole. Facebook is a moderated, curated platform that both hosts speech and speaks directly to its users and the public. It’s designed to create communities, not just transmit information. The same goes for every other social media corporation. The communities they create reflect not just the company’s economic interests, but its values as well (including the extent to which it values free expression.)

Social media posts, YouTube videos, and internet comments are more like letters to the editor or op-eds than phone calls or packages. They’re intended or at least available for broad public consumption. The regulatory arguments from right and left are thus often intended to commandeer the speech policies of private corporations to publicly spread (or suppress) ideas against their will.

Thomas also suggested that “legislatures might still be able to treat digital platforms like places of public accommodation.” Yet public accommodation law, which prohibits most businesses from discriminating against customers, typically protects access on the basis of identity, not expression. If Facebook or Twitter blocked users on the basis of race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity (common protected categories under public accommodation law), then the comparison would work. Instead, tech companies tend to block users on the basis of viewpoint or content. Anti-vaxxers come from all races and religions. So too do pornographers or election conspiracy theorists. If the government aims to protect particular ideas, then it’s aiming directly at the expressive autonomy of American citizens—and companies.

Interestingly enough, in other circumstances, Thomas has repeatedly protected corporate free speech, including a right not to deliver another person’s message. Justice Thomas recently authored an opinion that explicitly rejected requiring corporations to deliver a message they despised. Thomas wrote for a five-justice majority that struck down California’s requirement that pro-life pregnancy centers provide notice that the state offered free or low-cost abortions. That same term, he also joined a seven-justice majority that protected the right of another corporation, Masterpiece Cakeshop, to refuse to design a custom cake for a same-sex wedding.

Thomas was also in the majority in one of the most consequential corporate speech cases in modern American jurisprudence, Citizens United v. FEC, which affirmed and protected a First Amendment right to corporate political speech.

To say that tech companies enjoy robust First Amendment freedoms is not to argue that they always exercise those freedoms responsibly. The public record is replete with examples of unfair or biased decision making, but, individually problematic decisions should not obscure a larger reality. We enjoy a greater ability to speak to the public on matters of public concern than we’ve ever enjoyed in the history of the nation. Even as conservatives often claim to live under a Big Tech “tyranny,” right-wing speech flourishes online.

Simply put, many Republicans are demanding government intervention—including intervention that could contradict decades of vital First Amendment precedent—to address a “crisis” that does not exist. It’s a shame that Justice Thomas fed unnecessary fuel to a fire that could consume key constitutional freedoms, the same freedoms that have helped provide Americans unprecedented access to the public square.

Ezra Klein NY Times Op-ed about Joe Biden

Four Ways of Looking at the Radicalism of Joe Biden

NY Times Op-ed by Ezra Klein
April 8, 2021

Joe Biden didn’t wake up one day and realize he’d been wrong for 30 years.

I covered him in the Senate, in the Obama White House, in the Democratic Party’s post-Trump reckoning. Biden was rarely, if ever, the voice calling for transformational change or go-it-alone ambition.

But you’d never know it from his presidency. The standard explanation for all this is the advent of the coronavirus. The country is in crisis, and Biden is rising to meet the moment. But I don’t buy it. That may explain the American Rescue Plan. But the American Jobs Plan, and the forthcoming American Family Plan, go far beyond the virus. Put together, they are a sweeping indictment of the prepandemic status quo as a disaster for both people and the planet — a status quo that in many cases Biden helped build and certainly never seemed eager to upend.

Over the past few months, I’ve been talking to White House staff members, to congressional Democrats, to policy experts and to the Biden administration’s critics to better understand why President Biden is making such a sharp break with Joe Biden. Here are a few of them, though this is by no means a complete list.

The collapse of the Republican Party as a negotiating partner.
Most discussions of the renewed ambitions of the Democratic Party focus on ideological trends on the left. The real starting point, however, is the institutional collapse of the right. Before Biden, Democratic presidents designed policy with one eye on attracting Republican votes, or at least mollifying Republican critics. That’s why a third of the 2009 stimulus was made up of tax cuts, why the Affordable Care Act was built atop the Romneycare framework, why President Bill Clinton’s first budget included sharp spending cuts. Both as a senator and a vice president, Biden backed this approach. He always thought a bipartisan deal could be made and usually believed he was the guy who could make it.

But over the past decade, congressional Republicans slowly but completely disabused Democrats of these hopes. The long campaign against the ideological compromise that was the Affordable Care Act is central here, but so too was then-Speaker John Boehner’s inability to sell his members on the budget bargain he’d negotiated with President Barack Obama, followed by his refusal to allow so much as a vote in the House on the 2013 immigration bill. And it’s impossible to overstate the damage that Mitch McConnell’s stonewalling of Merrick Garland, followed by his swift action to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, did to the belief among Senate Democrats that McConnell was in any way, in any context, a good-faith actor. They gave up on him completely.

The result is that Obama, Biden, the key political strategists who advise Biden and almost the entire Democratic congressional caucus simply stopped believing Republicans would ever vote for major Democratic bills. They listened to McConnell when he said that “the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan.” And so Democrats stopped devising compromised bills in a bid to win Republican votes.

This has transformed policy design: These are now negotiations among Democrats, done with the intention of finding policies popular enough that Republican voters will back them, even if Republican politicians will not. Biden still talks like he believes bipartisanship is possible in Congress, but his administration has put the onus on Republicans to prove it, and to do so on the administration’s terms. That, more than any other single factor, has unleashed Democrats’ legislative ambitions.

A new generation of crises created a new generation of staffers.
I’ve been struck by the generational divide within the Democratic Party. Washington is run by 20- and 30-somethings who run the numbers, draft the bills, brief the principals. And there is a marked difference between the staffers and even the politicians whose formative years were defined by stagflation, the rise of Reaganism and the relief of the Clinton boom, and those who came of age during financial crises, skyrocketing personal debt, racial reckonings and the climate emergency. There are exceptions to every rule, of course — see Sanders, Bernie — but in general, the younger generation has sharply different views on the role of government, the worth of markets and the risks worth taking seriously.

I put this observation to Brian Deese, the 43-year-old head of the National Economic Council. Deese was a young economic policy prodigy in the Obama administration. Now he’s the guy running the N.E.C., and he agreed that the new generation of staff members see the world very differently. “There has been a lot more work done to try to understand what the roots of economic inequality are over the course of the last decade, and openness to thinking about power and power dynamics,” he told me.

Deese said that this has revived interest in ways to strengthen labor unions — the American Jobs Plan calls for the Protecting the Right to Organize Act to become law, which Richard Trumka, the head of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., calls “a game changer” — and in industrial policy, where the government directly subsidizes various industries to guide the path of economic growth. This is a break with the economic ideas that dominated from Jimmy Carter’s presidency through Obama’s.

“The next generation of the economics profession is rebelling against its predecessors by being all about inequality in the same way that my generation rebelled against its predecessors by being all about incentives, and this is a good thing,” said Larry Summers, who served as Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and N.E.C. director under Barack Obama.

Biden has less trust in economists, and so does everyone else.
Obama’s constant frustration was that politicians didn’t understand economics. Biden’s constant frustration is that economists don’t understand politics.

Multiple economists, both inside and outside the Biden administration, told me that this is an administration in which economists and financiers are simply far less influential than they were in past administrations. Some were frustrated by the change, others thought it a proper rebalancing of roles. But there is nothing like the axis of influence held by Summers, Tim Geithner and Peter Orszag at the dawn of the Obama administration, or that Robert Rubin and Summers held in the Clinton administration. Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, holds real weight in internal discussions, and so do some others, but economists are one of many voices at the table, not the dominant voices. This partly reflects Biden himself: he’s less academically minded, and more naturally skeptical of the way economists view the world and human behavior, than either Obama or Clinton. But it goes deeper than that.
The backdrop for this administration is the failures of the past generation of economic advice. Fifteen years of financial crises, yawning inequality and repeated debt panics that never showed up in interest rates have taken the shine off economic expertise. But the core of this story is climate. “Many mainstream economists, even in the 1980s, recognized that the market wouldn’t cover everyone’s needs so you’d need some modest amount of public support to correct for that moderate market failure,” Felicia Wong, the president of the Roosevelt Institute, said. “But they never envisioned the climate crisis. This is not a failure of the market at the margins. This is the market incentivizing destruction.”

Deese, the N.E.C. head, is notable for being a climate wonk who’s now in charge of the nerve center of White House economic policymaking. And the scale of the climate disaster, and the speed at which it must be addressed, simply demands a different role for the government. “If you think across the big systems in our country — the transportation system being one, the power and energy system being another — in order to actually solve climate change, we’re going to have to transform those systems,” he told me.

Economists have their ideas for solving climate change — a hefty carbon tax chief among them — but Biden and his team see this as fundamentally a political problem. They view the idea that a carbon tax is the essential answer to the problem of climate change as being so divorced from political reality as to be actively dangerous. Deese gets animated on this point. “I want to double down on that and say, it’s not just a messaging and narrative imperative,” he told me. “It has to be that Americans see and experience that the investments in building out a more resilient power grid actually improve their lives and create job opportunities for them, or their neighbors.”

Even beyond climate, political risks weigh more heavily on the Biden administration than they did on past administrations. This is another lesson learned from the Obama years. The Obama team had real policy successes: They prevented another Great Depression, they re-regulated the financial sector, they expanded health insurance to more than 20 million people. But Democrats lost the House in 2010, effectively ending Obama’s legislative agenda, and then they lost the Senate in 2014, and then Donald Trump won the White House in 2016, and then Democrats lost the Supreme Court for a generation.

Many who served under Obama, and who now serve under Biden, believe that they were so focused on economic risks that they missed the political risks — and you can’t make good economic policy if you lose political power. The Biden team is haunted by the fear that if they fail, a Trump-like strongman could recapture power. This helps explain why, for instance, they’re unmoved by arguments that the $1,400 stimulus checks, though wildly popular, were poorly targeted. As one of Biden’s economic advisers put it to me, “if we don’t show people we’re helping the dickens out of them, this country could be back to Trump way too quickly,” only he used an earthier word than “dickens.”

Biden is a politician, in the truest sense of the word.
Biden sees his role, in part, as sensing what the country wants, intuiting what people will and won’t accept, and then working within those boundaries. In America, that’s often treated as a dirty business. We like the aesthetics of conviction, we believe leaders should follow their own counsel, we use “politician” as an epithet.

But Biden’s more traditional understanding of the politician’s job has given him the flexibility to change alongside the country. When the mood was more conservative, when the idea of big government frightened people and the virtues of private enterprise gleamed, Biden reflected those politics, calling for balanced budget amendments and warning of “welfare mothers driving luxury cars.” Then the country changed, and so did he.

A younger generation revived the American left, and Bernie Sanders’s two campaigns proved the potency of its politics. Republicans abandoned any pretense of fiscal conservatism, and Trump raised — but did not follow through on — the fearful possibility of a populist conservatism, one that would combine xenophobia and resentment with popular economic policies. Stagnating wages and a warming world and Hurricane Katrina and a pandemic virus proved that there were scarier words in the English language than “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,” as Ronald Reagan famously put it.

Even when Biden was running as the moderate in the Democratic primary, his agenda had moved well to the left of anything he’d supported before. But then he did something unusual: Rather than swinging to the center in the general election, he went further left. And the same happened after winning the election. He’s moved away from work requirements and complex targeting in policy design. He’s emphasizing the irresponsibility of allowing social and economic problems to fester, as opposed to the irresponsibility of spending money on social and economic problems. His administration is defined by the fear that the government isn’t doing enough, not that it’s doing too much. As the pseudonymous commentator James Medlock wrote on Twitter, “The era of ‘the era of big government is over’ is over.’”

A Charismatic Looks at the Birth of Pentecostalism

Old readers and those who know me will be surprised, if not shocked, to find this content at my blog.  And one look at my profile in the sidebar will tell new readers that this is a radical departure from the usual duke's mixture of political/ social/ curiosity content. In any case, my interest in Charismatic/ Pentecostal Christianity has deep roots, in both my family history and much of my adult life. Long story. Some other time.

I'm posting this for two reasons. First, the author, Bill DeArteaga, is a close personal friend. He and his late wife have been friends with me and my wife well over twenty years. He is a published writer of several books, some of which are academic resources for future ministers and counselors.  Second, this piece is published elsewhere, but the site (linked with the end notes) has quite a slow server causing this article to be divided among several screens that take quite a long time to load. Curating it here is my way of furnishing Bill and others ready access without waiting for it to load several screens. 

A Charismatic Looks at the Birth of Pentecostalism

October 17, 2014 

The grace that Pentecostalism brought to Christendom was to make the use of tongues and the other gifts described by Paul in I Cor. 12 and 14 normal in the life of ordinary Christians.[1] This was something not seen since Apostolic times. Before we examine how tongues came to be normal (or at least well known) we need to look at an almost forgotten revival to learn a negative lesson. That is, what happens when the Spirit gives His gifts but there is no theology to receive the experience?

The Cherokee County Revival

The revival in question took place in Cherokee County, North Carolina.[2] This county is part of the Unicoi mountain region bordering North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia. It occurred during the summer of 1896.

Ten years earlier a tiny eight member church formed called the “Christian Union” by the Rev. R.R. Spurling. The founder’s rather grandiose intentions were to restore the church to the holiness of “primitive Christianity,” avoid divisive creeds, and ultimately unite all the churches – thus its name. Spurling died shortly after the church’s launch, but not before he ordained his son, R.G. Spurling, Jr., to carry on his vision of the new church.

The Christian Union grew slowly, and in 1892 a second congregation formed. Two other preachers joined the denomination, one was a Methodist preacher, William Martin, and the other F. W. Bryant, a Baptist. By then, all three had experienced a Wesleyan-like “second blessing” of sanctification in their lives and were influenced by Holiness doctrines.

Under the leadership of these ministers, a series of local revivals took place in the homes, barns and meeting houses of the Unicoi mountain region. This intensified in the summer of 1896 when the three ministers began a revival in the Shearer schoolhouse in Cherokee County, a humble, one-room frame building. They preached the Methodist-Holiness message of sanctification and soon return of Jesus. A. J. Tomilinson, writing about the revival fifteen years later, recounts:

…the Holy Ghost began to fall on the honest, humble, sincere seekers of God. While the meetings were in progress one after the other fell under the power of God, and soon quite a number were speaking in tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. The influence and excitement then spread like wildfire, and people came for many miles to investigate, hear and see the manifestations of the presence of God.[3]

The tongues surprised the ministers, who “sought the scriptures.” They correctly identified the phenomenon with Acts 2:4, 10:46 and 19:6 and felt very blessed by the experience. The revival, including tongues, lasted all summer, but faded by the fall. The ministers and congregation thanked God for the season of revival and the tongues, and prayed that all of the Churches would be similarly blessed.

The Rev. Spurling, Jr. and the others who led the revival had no theology, accurate or inaccurate, to understand that what had happened was a universally important and a repeatable gift. They did not make a “big deal” of the tongues. A decade later, when the Azusa Street revival received national publicity, the churches of the Christian Union accepted the theology developed by Charles Parham and joined the budding Pentecostal movement. Ultimately, the Christian Union changed its name and grew to become the Church of God (Tennessee), now one of the biggest Pentecostal denominations of the world.

One other pre-Pentecostal revival needs to be mentioned, a revival that took place among several Holiness congregations in Corsicana County, Texas, in the 1870s. This revival began with a burst of worship and enthusiasm which included tongues and, significantly, an understanding that the gifts of the Spirit described in 1 Cor. 12 were for the present. Unfortunately, like many revivals before, the leaders drifted into false prophecy, which included the idea that a person baptized with the Spirit would be regenerated physically to the point of being able to live a thousand years. The revival disintegrated further as local prophets urged their followers to sell all and await Jesus’ return in 1875. Jesus didn’t make it, and the only thing achieved by the revival was the discrediting of future Pentecostal efforts in the area.[4]

Charles Parham and the theology of tongues

These two revivals give us a backdrop to understand the achievements of the Pentecostal revival that did succeed and was able to discern a way forward through its own temptations to false prophecy and exaggerated theology. For this we need to turn to pioneer of all of this, Charles F. Parham (1873-1929).[5] Parham was born to a rural family in Iowa, and as an infant had an attack of encephalitis which left him weak and stunted his growth. At age nine he contracted rheumatic fever which further weakened him. Thankfully his devout mother prayed for him continuously.

In 1890 Parham entered Southwest Kansas College, but the next year suffered a severe relapse of rheumatic fever. In a weakened state he overheard his physician say that he would die, and this brought him to intense prayer. Shortly, he began to recover. But it was an incomplete healing that left him partially crippled and with his ankles turned outward. Seated under an apple tree at Southwest he made a re-commitment to God to pursue the ministry and be obedient to God’s direction. Immediately he was healed and walked normally.[6]

Parham left Southwest in 1893 to become a Methodist pastor, and successfully pastored several Methodists congregations. But by 1895 he felt a call to pursue an independent ministry, dependent solely on God’s inspiration and direction. He came to accept the “radical” Faith-Cure position, that recourse to medication or doctors was lack of faith. He added faith healing to his preaching of salvation and holiness and in fact ministered many healings in his evangelistic efforts.[7] During this period he married Sarah Thistlethwaite, who would be his life-long assistant and co-worker, and with her help founded the Beth-el Healing Home in Topeka, on the model of healing home from the Faith-Cure movement of the 1880s.[8] The focus at Beth-el was to build up the patient’s faith so that his or her own prayers would result in healing. He also published a Holiness journal called Apostolic Faith.

In 1899 he read in another Holiness journal of a Christian missionary who received a special gift. She was able to open her mouth and speak in unknown tongues, and her audience in Africa could perfectly understand what she said in their native languages. This is similar to what happened to Peter in Acts 2:5-12.[9] This unusual spiritual gift is called “xenolalia,” by scholars, and it has been reported sporadically in both Catholic saint’s tales and Protestant missionary literature.[10] Later, Parham went on a twelve week tour of Canada and the U.S. to visit several Holiness centers. At his stop at a large Holiness church complex in Shiloh, Maine, he again heard an account of Holiness missionaries speaking in unknown tongues which the natives heard and understood in their own language.

These reports impressed Parham who had strong belief in pre-millennialism and the soon return of Christ. Parham combined these elements into a theological system. The Holy Spirit was about to pour out a new baptism on the Church which would enable missionaries to communicate the gospel with whoever they encountered, and demonstrate the power of the Gospel with healing. This combination would trigger an immediate and glorious world-wide revival, and in turn usher in the rapture and second coming. In Parham’s mind, tongues/xenolalia was the key and identifying mark of Spirit-baptism and of the end-times great missionary expansion.

Parham returned to Topeka at the end of 1899 and urged his students at Beth-el to seek the marks of Spirit-baptism. He guided them to study the book of Acts, and especially Acts 2. They reported to him that the single evidence for the reception of the Holy Spirit was the speaking in tongues. A night-watch service was called by Parham to usher in the New Year for Parham’s students and his local congregation. Parham recalled later what happened:

About 75 people beside the school which consisted of 40 students, had gathered for the watch night service. A mighty spiritual power filled the entire school. At 10:30 p.m. Sister Agnes N. Ozman, (now La Berge) asked that hands might be laid upon her to receive the Holy Spirit as she hoped to go to foreign fields. At first I refused, not having the experience myself. Then being further pressed to do it humbly in the name of Jesus, I laid my hands upon her head and prayed. I had scarcely repeated three dozen sentences when the glory fell upon her a halo seemed to surround her head and face and she began speaking in the Chinese language, and was unable to speak English for three days.[11]

We should note that Parham guessed that the tongues spoken was Chinese, since there are many languages spoken in China. Parham believed his theology was authenticated and that his discovery would usher in the great end-time revival immediately. Instead, it immediately caused opposition and negative publicity. There followed two years in the “desert” where he cultivated a small following and tried to spread the message of tongues as mark of Spirit-baptism. In Galena, Texas in 1903 he did trigger a local revival and it was there that tongues and divine healing were united into what we would recognize as a Pentecostal service. The Galena revival received some favorable local publicity, and Parham was able to lead further revivals in Texas and especially in the Houston area. There he settled and establish the “Houston Bible School” where he combined Holiness sanctification, divine healing, tongues and the pre-millennial end-times into a “Pentecostal package.” He also spread this theology via his journal Apostolic Faith.

Parham missed being a major player in the Azusa Street revival which began in 1906 because he was busy bringing the message of tongues to the people of Alexander Dowie’s “Zion City” complex north of Chicago. For a while it seemed that Parham was going to win over a majority of Zion’s residents to his leadership. However, that did not happen, and Parham went back to Kansas and then Texas.[12] He did make it to Azusa Street in October of 1906 to attempt to assume leadership of the revival there. He was appalled by the exuberance, noise, and general “messiness” of the revival (see below).[13] He tried to “correct” these faults, but was rebuffed by the church board and asked to leave. He founded a separate Pentecostal church in Los Angeles which did not flourish. He left that church to another pastor and went back to Texas.

The worst was yet to come. He was accused of and arrested for a homosexual affair with a young man – a felony in Texas and an almost “unforgivable sin” among Holiness advocates. Although the charges were never proven and the case dismissed, the charges made headlines in the religious press across the nation. Parham’s ability to be a major leader in the new Pentecostal movement was ruined. He died in 1929, largely forgotten by the Pentecostal movement he founded. He went to his death-bed still believing that the gift of tongues was always xenolalia.[14] This in spite of the fact that the Pentecostal missionaries who went on foreign missions demonstrated, to their surprise and embarrassment, that he was wrong.

Pentecostals would grapple with tongues-as-xenolalia for several decades and come to an understanding that tongues were related principally to Paul’s description in 1 Cor. 12 and 14.[15] That is, that tongues were a special form of heavenly language used in communication with God, useful for edification, and, when matched with the gift of interpretation, functions as prophecy. Paul says clearly in 1 Cor .14:2, “For anyone who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God. Indeed, no one understands him; he utters mysteries with his spirit.” Xenolalia was a related but different and rare event. The idea that tongues was the necessary first step or “initial evidence” of Spirit-baptism remained as basic to Pentecostal theology, although there was always some opposition to this interpretation. For instance, the well-known Pentecostal healing evangelist, F F Bosworth, believed there were “multiple’ evidences to being baptized in the Spirit. Because of his opinion, he had to leave the Assemblies of God and joined the Christian and Missionary Alliance.[16]

In spite of his inglorious later years, Parham’s achievements must be counted as enormous. He brought the phenomenon of tongue speaking to the forefront of Christian thought and practice as never before. This opened up also clearer thinking about the other gifts of the Spirit enumerated in 1 Cor. 12, and Romans 12.

The contrast between the Cherokee County revival and the Azusa St. revival reminds us of what the famous philosopher science, Karl Popper, said on the progress of truth. That it, truth is discovered through some hypothesis that focuses on a phenomenon, and by testing it is affirmed, modified, or eliminated.[17] From the perspective of one hundred years we can see that Parham’s two hypotheses, that tongues was xenolalia, and that tongues were the necessary “initial evidence” of Spirit-baptism were respectively a mistake and an exaggeration. However these hypotheses were close enough to the truth to make tongues desirable to many Christians and do what the Cherokee Revival did not – spark a world-wide movement and recovery of the word gifts of 1 Cor. 12.[18]

An African-American preacher ignites Pentecostalism

Parham’s other major contribution to Pentecostalism was in mentoring the person who would subsequently lead the Azusa Street revival, a African-American Holiness preacher named William Seymour (1870-1922).[19] Seymour was borne in Centerville, Louisiana, to parents who had been slaves. Raised as a Baptist, as a boy and young man he received multiple spiritual dreams and visions. He moved north and eventually settled in Cincinnati where he joined a local Holiness congregation called the “Evening Star Saints.” They preached entire sanctification and anticipated a great outpouring of the Holy Spirit just before the rapture of the Church.

Seymour caught smallpox which blinded him in his left eye, but while recuperating from his illness accepted a call to preach. He was licensed and ordained by the Evening Star Saints. Providentially, Seymour moved to Houston and there attended a local Holiness Church pastored by a woman preacher, Lucy Farrow. Farrow asked Seymour to be pastor of her congregation while she accepted a position as governess in the home of Charles Parham in Galena, Texas. When Farrow returned to Houston with the Parham family (1905) she had the gifts of tongues. Parham had returned to Houston to establish a new Bible school.

Seymour became a student at Parham’s school, but due to the Jim-crow laws, had to sit in the hall and listen to Parham’s instruction via the open door of the classroom. Seymour accepted Parham’s Pentecostal theology and especially his understanding of tongues – although he did not immediately speak in tongues.

An African-American Holiness congregation in Los Angeles invited Seymour to come and preach (and audition to become its pastor). When Seymour arrived in California, February, 1906, many of the local Holiness and other evangelical churches there were in anticipation of revival. This had been sparked by the news of the great revival in Wales (1903-1904).[20] In Los Angeles one of Seymour’s first sermons to his potentially new congregation was on the necessity of tongues for the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. In response, they locked him out of the church – and with that went his job as pastor.

However, he continued preaching and holding Bible studies in several private homes. These meeting had an unusual anointing from the beginning. Both Blacks and Whites mingled together – very unusual for the era. At this point Seymour and several others received the gift of tongues, and this sparked curiosity and growth that could not be contained in any private home.

A search found a vacant two story frame building that had recently served as a warehouse and stable – 312 Azusa Street. It was quickly cleared and prepared with crude pews (planks set on empty barrels) and a “mourner’s bench” to receive converts. Seymour named the church “Azusa Street Mission.” In its first meetings, April 1906, the church did not even possess a preacher’s stand. But from the first services there was a tremendous anointing with tongues and other revival manifestations present, such as “falling under the power.” News of the new “tongues” manifestation spread quickly in Los Angeles and the small church attracted both the pious and the curious. Within a week, The Los Angeles Times sent a reporter to investigate. The result was a negative, but lengthy report on the meetings. The headline read: “Weird Babble of Tongues.”

In September 1906 another reporter described the events taking place and wrote that the Azusa Street mission:

[It is a] disgraceful intermingling of the races…they cry and make howling noises all day and into the night. They run, jump, shake all over, shout to the top of their voice, spin around in circles, fall out on the sawdust blanketed floor jerking, kicking and rolling all over it. Some of them pass out and do not move for hours as though they were dead. These people appear to be mad, mentally deranged or under a spell. They claim to be filled with the spirit. They have a one eyed, illiterate, Negro as their preacher who stays on his knees much of the time with his head hidden between the wooden milk crates. He doesn’t talk very much but at times he can be heard shouting, ‘Repent,’ and he’s supposed to be running the thing… They repeatedly sing the same song, ‘The Comforter Has Come.’[21]

These newspaper accounts attracted even more people. More importantly, people began coming in from across the country to see what was happening. The Holiness preacher named Frank Bartleman, who ultimately became Azusa Street’s first historian, came and left us a more discerning account of the early meetings.

Brother Seymour generally sat behind two empty shoe boxes, one on top of the other. He usually kept his head inside the top one during the meeting, in prayer. There was no pride there. The services ran almost continuously. …The people came to meet God. He was always there…

No subjects or sermons were announced ahead of time, and no special speakers for such an hour. No one knew what might be coming, what God would do. All was spontaneous, ordered of the Spirit….

Someone might be speaking. Suddenly the Spirit would fall upon the congregation. God himself would give the altar call. Men would fall all over the house, like slain in battle, or rush for the altar enmasse, to seek God. The scene often resembled a forest of fallen trees…The shekinah glory rested there. In fact some claim to have seen the glory by night over the building. I do not doubt it.[22]

Seymour maintained order with a firm but gentle hand. He often ceded the preaching to visiting preachers. The upstairs served for overflow crowds and for a “tarrying” place for those seeking the Baptism of the Spirit. That is, a period of prayer and pleading in which the seeker waited for God’s power as in the Acts 2 “upper room” Pentecost.

After the LA Times articles the crowds increased to about 200-300 per evening. The initial revival at Azusa Street lasted between 1906-1909, with another burst occurring after 1911. Besides bringing thousands of skeptics and non-believers to the Lord, many thousands were Baptized in the Spirit, and many healed. But, the major work of the revival was to broadcast the “Pentecostal package” of Holiness sanctification, Baptism of the Spirit with tongues, divine healing, Faith-Idealism, and premillennialism. Eventually Seymour deemphasized tongues as “initial evidence” and stressed tongues and the Baptism of the Holy Spirit for empowerment in service, but not before Parham’s original doctrine of initial evidence became the majority view among the newly forming Pentecostal churches.

Faith-Idealism was an integral part of this package, though most often lived rather than preached. We catch a glimpse of it from Bartleman’s own comments on an attack of mumps as he spread the word of Pentecost through the south: “The mumps were working on me, though I refused to acknowledge it.”[23]

Besides the many visitors to the Azusa Street mission, Pentecostalism spread through the wide circulation of Seymour’s newspaper, The Apostolic Faith. He directed the paper and wrote many of its articles. Seymour had the help of two female employees on the Azusa Street Mission staff, Miss Clara Lum, and Mrs. Florence Reed Crawford.[24] Miss Lum had experience as an editor of a missionary journal, and Mrs. Reed Crawford, was also experienced in Christian publishing. Mrs. Reed Crawford also served as Pentecostal apostle and evangelist for California. The Apostolic Faith’s first printing in 1906 numbered 5,000 copies, a substantial figure for the times. It grew to 40,000 by 1907 – fed by a mailing list of visitors from the United States and overseas which was managed by Miss Lum. It was of critical importance in spreading the “Pentecostal Package” in the initial years of the revival.

What ultimately happened to Seymour and his paper is a tragedy of Shakespearian proportions. Seymour and his staff, like many Holiness revivalist of his times, were absolutely certain of the very soon return of Jesus Christ – as in next week, or at most a few years. However Seymour had a romantic interest in Miss Lum, a white woman, and considered marrying her. He consulted with his church board which advised him that such an interracial marriage would destroy the budding revival (this was 1907, not 2007). Seymour stopped that romance.

At bit later he fell in love and married Jenny Moore (1908) – a very attractive Black woman. Before his marriage to Moore, Seymour began preaching that marriage was OK in spite of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. This was disappointing to both Miss Lum and Mrs. Crawford who considered Seymour’s marriage a scandal and violation of Paul’s admonition not to marry because the “time is short” (1 Cor. 7). With indignation (and jealously?) two of the women ran off with The Apostolic Faith mailing list to Portland, Oregon.[25] They continued printing the The Apostolic Faith from Portland without even letting the readers know that Seymour was no longer in charge. Mrs. Crawford went on to found a separate Pentecostal denomination called the Apostolic Faith Mission, and she made sure that none of her ministers married.[26]

The theft of the mailing list cut off Seymour from his national following and short-circuited his continued leadership in the Pentecostal Movement. His church, The Azusa Street Mission, lingered on as an African American Pentecostal church with small numbers until his death in 1922. It would go on under the pastorship of his widow, Jenny, until 1931 when she retired.

But the Azusa Street revival had fulfilled its providential task. Tongues and the gifts of the Spirit became part of normal, repeatable events in the life of dedicated Christians. Unlike the Irving revival in England of the previous century, the Azusa Street revival did not generate an exaggerated prophetic legacy that it could not correct. Through its visitors, and The Apostolic Faith, varieties of the “Pentecostal package” became established throughout the world. These formed “beachhead” churches that planted Pentecostalism amid a public and clergy that generally rejected the new insights, and often bitterly persecuted the messengers. In the American South, Pentecostalism had its greatest initial gains. Many Methodist and Holiness congregations quickly added the Pentecostal package to their Holiness theology.

One prophetic element of the Azusa St. Revival that did not last a decade was its interracial quality to include Hispanics from the LA region. This racial diversity did not last long either in The Azusa Street Mission itself or in the new Pentecostal denominations and churches. By 1920 Pentecostal churches were generally as segregated as other churches in the United States.[27]

The Holiness Veterans

Part of the reason that Pentecostalism succeeded was that many of its leaders were the battle tested and often wounded veterans of the Holiness and Faith-Cure movements. They had been bruised in the scandals of Dowie’s Zion City, opposed and ridiculed as cultists for their participation in the Faith-Cure movement, and told they were fanatics for upholding their Holiness code of morals. Some like Carrie Judd Montgomery had survived the scandals and had established successful, if marginalized ministries of their own.[28] These Holiness Faith-Cure veterans persisted and kept fellowship with each other. As Paul wrote of his own life: “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.” (2 Cor 4:8-9) Grayed and spiritually scarred, they flooded into Pentecostal denominations and churches with their wisdom and spiritual maturity. For the first time in modern church history, the leadership of one revival (the Faith-Cure) lived long enough so that they could mentor the leadership of another revival. It was a continuity of wisdom, suffering and experience. Bartleman, who we quoted earlier, was quite aware of this:

One reason for the depth of the work at “Azusa” was the fact that the workers were not novices. They were largely called and prepared for years, from the Holiness ranks, and from the mission field, etc. They had been burned out, tried and proven. They were largely seasoned veterans.[29]

Naturally, the Pentecostals faced persecution and ridicule in their home churches. Some of the fiercest opposition arose from Holiness churches and pastors who did not accept Pentecostalism as a fulfillment of Holiness quest of the Holy Spirit. In fact, one of the cruelest early critiques of tongues originated from a Holiness pastor’s wife, Alma White, who in her book Demons and Tongues, claimed that tongues were demonic in origins.[30] This was a position that many were prone to accept without much further investigation, and it remained influential for decades.

Opposition to Pentecostalism was not just in writing. Especially in the American South, where the Klan believed itself to be the arbiter Protestant Christianity, opposition meant beatings and burnings. As late as 1947 a sniper fired a rifle bullet at Oral Roberts during one of his early tent crusades.[31] In many foreign countries, especially in Latin America, Pentecostals suffered martyrdom.

Within a few years of the original outbreak it became clear that the established churches would reject the “Pentecostal Package.” New fellowships had to be forged. Forming a new religious group out of older ones is difficult because the general enthusiasm of the “innovators”, which unites them, often clashes with their conflicting expectations and histories when the time comes to organize and live together as a new group. Not surprisingly, the Pentecostals formed multiple Pentecostal denominations and independent fellowships. Among the most important development was the formation of fellowships that were not from Wesleyan or Holiness traditions. The largest of these, the “Assemblies of God” denomination formed in 1914 to be a home to Pentecostals from the Baptist tradition – and also, most unfortunately, to assure the segregation of the races. 

Pentecostalism’s “irregular idea”

Forming a new theology of the gifts of the Holy Spirit where there was so little in the received traditions and theology of Christendom was no easy matter. Unexpectedly, it was the theology of baptism, not tongues or the other gifts, which caused the worst division among the early Pentecostals. It took the form of the “Oneness” or “Jesus Only” movement.

This new division began in 1913, at a Pentecostal camp meeting. There the minister in charge of Baptism noted that in the Book of Acts, the converts were baptized in Jesus’ name, and not in the Trinitarian formula found in Matthew 28:19. He baptized that day in the name of Jesus only. This stirred up a controversy and another Pentecostal minister, Frank J. Ewart, “searched the scriptures” and came to the conclusion that this innovation was correct. Further, he developed the idea that God was only Jesus, and the Trinity a superfluous doctrine. For him, Jesus was the Father and the Holy Spirit all in one.

This idea had occurred in the first centuries and was called modalism but was dispatched as a heresy back in the early church councils. It is true that the Holy Trinity is a difficult concept – more properly a “mystery” that humans can never fully grasp. However, this new modalism was not a good way to understand the relationship of Father, Jesus and Spirit as revealed in the New Testament.[32] Ewart began touring Pentecostal congregations, especially Assemblies of God churches, and re-baptizing believers in the Jesus formula. Many accepted re-baptism without Ewart’s modalism, but some did slip away from Trinitarianism.

By 1915 leaders of the Assemblies of God were concerned about the issue and called a general council to discuss the matter. Ironically, many of the early Pentecostals believed that church creeds were unimportant (and somewhat “Catholic” – and thus bad). They believed one could rely on the guidance of the Spirit for all issues of doctrine. They were reluctant to fashion a new “creed” for this crisis, and so nothing was settled that year. What did happen was that the Oneness pastors were removed from leadership positions. This was not enough, and by 1916 the Assemblies of God issued a “statement of faith” (a creed with a different name) reaffirming Trinitarianism and forcing the Oneness faction out. The Oneness ministers then reorganized into several denominations, but it was almost three decades before they could come together in what is now the “United Pentecostal Church International” (1945).

We should note that the issue of the correct baptismal formula continues to shadow even Trinitarian Pentecostals to this day. In fact, it is a valid issue. A majority of biblical scholars are convinced that the Trinitarian formula was an “add on” to the Gospels from the early Church. [33] This does not mean that the Trinitarian formula, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” is invalid. It may mean the opposite, that the Early Church understood the necessity of the Trinity and its implication for the Christian at the beginning of his spiritual life.[34]

Marginalization of Pentecostalism

Oneness controversy gave further excuse for the mainline churchmen and theologians to marginalize and write-off all forms of Pentecostalism as sect and heresy. The educated clergy of the Second Great Awakening had understood and tolerated the “exercises” of that revival largely because Edward’s revival writings were both widely read and respected. But that situation had changed by the beginning of the Twentieth Century. The “modern” seminaries had little interest in Edwards’ revival writings.[35] Thus the Pentecostals were ridiculed and marginalized as “holy rollers” because of their exuberant “exercises.” Edwards had explained it perfectly a century and a half earlier, but he would not be listened to in the 1900s.

The legalists and liberals had a field day. By the 1930s, mainline Christians had all sorts of “explanations” that reduced Pentecostalism, its “exercises’ and its tongues to a sociological phenomenon and/or psychological aberration. Just one example, a Yale professor, George Bernard Cutten, wrote Speaking with Tongues, Historically and Psychologically Considered, in which he concluded that tongue speaking was a form of hypnotism related to mental illness.[36] It took well into the 1960s for non-prejudiced and well executed scientific surveys using control groups to conclude that tongues were not a psychological abnormality.[37] Their pacifist stand in World War I added to the unpopularity of the Pentecostals.

The Slow Expansion of Pentecostalism

After the first two decades of growth, Pentecostalism settled in to a pattern of routine pastoral ministry and slow growth. The most exciting aspect of Pentecostalism in the between wars period (1918-1941) was its itinerant healing evangelists. For instance, Maria Woodsworth-Etter came into full Pentecostalism in 1912 when she teamed up with F.F. Bosworth for a revival in Dallas. Her prestige as a Holiness healing evangelist nudged many of her followers to embrace full Pentecostalism. She continued a schedule of healing/evangelistic (and now Pentecostal) crusades until her death in 1924. But the most exciting of all (and controversial) in this period was Aimee Semple McPherson, “Sister Aimee” whose unusual and controversial ministry pioneered many of the things that were to become commonplace decades later in the charismatic renewal, such as a relaxed dress code.[38]

During World War II Pentecostals began to acquire a grudging acceptance from mainline Christians. In 1942 Pentecostals became charter members of the National Association of Evangelicals – a major breakthrough in acceptance by other Protestants. After the war TV became a major factor in American life, and in 1953 Oral Roberts began broadcasting his healing crusades on TV. Suddenly Americans could catch a glimpse of “faith-healing” that was exciting, and seemed to work – and came without snakes.

Immediately after World War II there came another outburst of Pentecostalism called the “Latter Rain Movement.” The revival started in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, at a Pentecostal school and church campus (Feb., 1948). It was marked by a renewed anointing for healing and the usual revival phenomenon of “falling under the power.” But this revival also had the repeated occurrence of a phenomenon called the “heavenly choir” – where music supernaturally flows from the heavens without any apparent source.[39] One person who experienced it wrote:

From a little distance it sounds like a master choir accompanied by a matchless symphony orchestra. It seems difficult to credit that such a sound could be reproduced by human vocal organs. There is such perfect order and timing…[40]

 Another unusual element was that instead of “tarrying” for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the revivalist would lay hands on the supplicant’s head for the impartation of the Spirit. In July 1948 there was a weeklong camp meeting in the Canadian town of North Battleford widely attended by Pentecostal laypersons and ministers from all over Canada and the United States. By 1949 the revival had spread to dozens of churches north and south of the border, especially among churches that were independent of the major denominations.

In fact, many pastors in the established Pentecostals denominations looked askance at this new movement and found fault with its emphasis on prophecy. They could point to trivial and false prophecies being uttered, as if this was anything new. Some Pentecostal leaders called the movement heretical, because of its prophesying, and because of the new use of laying on of hands for impartation of the Holy Spirit.[41] This was an overkill for a movement that was bringing thousands of converts to Christ, having major healings, and imparting the Baptism of the Spirit to other thousands. In spite of opposition, the Latter Rain revival continued to spread and influence many churches, and many of those touched by it became the leaders of the coming Charismatic Renewal. For example, the editors of Logos Magazine, which became the first and most important journal of the early Charismatic Renewal, came from of Herald of Faith/Harvest Time which was the journal of the Latter Rain Movement.

On reflection, in spite of its mistakes, “irregular ideas” and failures of its leaders, the Pentecostal revival ushered what is perhaps the greatest move of the Spirit since Apostolic times. Ironically, it began with a mistake and an exaggeration, that tongues was xenolalia, and that tongues must always be the initial evidence for anyone who had the Baptism of the Spirit. The noted Pentecostal historian William Faupel carefully studied the documents of Pentecostalism’s first decades and concluded that the confusion of tongues as xenolalia was indeed a major cause of its ridicule and rejection by the majority of Evangelicals of the period.[42] But God was in the movement, amidst its human frailties and theological imperfections. And Pentecostalism, combined with its later sibling, the charismatic movement, ultimately became the most important and widespread church reformation since Apostolic times.

About the Author: William L. De Arteaga, Ph.D., is known internationally as a Christian historian and expert on revivals and the rebirth and renewal of the Christian healing movement. His major works include Quenching the Spirit: Discover the Real Spirit Behind the Charismatic Controversy (Creation House, 1992, 1996), Forgotten Power: The Significance of the Lord’s Supper in Revival (Zondervan, 2002), Agnes Sanford and Her Companions: The Assault on Cessationism and the Coming of the Charismatic Renewal (Wipf & Stock, 2015), and The Public Prayer Station: Taking Healing Prayer to the Streets and Evangelizing the Nones (Emeth Press, 2018). Bill pastored two Hispanic Anglican congregations in the Marietta, Georgia area, and is semi-retired. He continues in his healing, teaching and writing ministry and is the state chaplain of the Order of St. Luke, encouraging the ministry of healing in all Christian denominations.

The original & end notes can be found at The Pneuma Review, a Journal of Ministry Resources and Theology for Pentecostal and Charismatic Ministries & Leaders