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Book Review
Canada and the United States
Grant Wacker. Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2001. Pp. xiii, 364. $35.00.
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This book offers a sweeping look at first-generation Pentecostalism. It is erudite, conceptually sophisticated, and written in a jaunty, readable style. Just when it seemed that there was not much more to say about the origins of Pentecostalism, Grant Wacker says a great deal more. |
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Wacker writes little about church politics and institutional religion. He is after a more illusive target: the "temperament" of early Pentecostals. In fourteen topical chapters, Wacker probes Pentecostals' thoughts, feelings, and behavior in matters heavenly and terrestrial. He offers an abundance of examples and astute commentary as his subjects express their views on tongues, testimony, authority, the cosmos, worship, rhetoric, customs, leaders, women, boundaries, society, nation, war, and destiny. The great and the small have their say. The author has an eye for a good punch line, and the "Holy Ghost people" do have a way with words. |
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Early twentieth-century Pentecostalism is a particularly important topic because of the movement's worldwide visibility at the end of the century. Wacker set out to discover "why the movement survived at all" (p. 9). His answer, elaborately argued and copiously documented, is strikingly simple: early Pentecostals combined an empowering "primitivist" religious commitment with an all-American "pragmatism." |
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