Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T10:34:48.110Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Sane Gospel: Radical Evangelicals, Psychology, and Pentecostal Revival in the Early Twentieth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Heather D. Curtis
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article examines how radical evangelicals employed psychological concepts such as sanity, temperament, and especially the subconscious as they struggled to understand and respond to the rapidly expanding pentecostal movement within their midst. By tracing the growing tensions over ecstatic spiritual experiences that emerged among Holiness and Higher Life believers during the 1880s and 1890s, this article demonstrates that differing assumptions about the importance of consciousness for the religious life presaged reactions to the pentecostal revivals of the early twentieth century. Although their proclivity for rational judgment predisposed Higher Life evangelicals to question the sanity of involuntary phenomena such as speaking in tongues, some prominent leaders within this community appealed to “mental science” in an effort to revise conventional understandings of the spiritual self and its capacities. For participants in the Christian and Missionary Alliance— an organization in which disputes over the propriety of pentecostalism were particularly contentious—notions of temperament and the subconscious articulated in the works of “new psychologists” like William James offered resources for reassessing Higher Life views of authentic spirituality in light of pentecostal revivalism. By analyzing how a particular faction within the radical evangelical movement made use of psychological theories to contend with the challenge of the revivals at Azusa and elsewhere, this article exposes some of the social divisions that exacerbated debates over the validity of pentecostal religious experiences. Exploring the complicated interactions and creative tensions that arose as Higher Life evangelicals appropriated constructs such as the subconscious in the wake of Azusa Street also shows that this influential contingent of conservative Protestants engaged with aspects of the field of psychology in dynamic and inventive ways that involved both selective borrowing and critical resistance. While there is truth in the common observation that radical evangelicals were deeply suspicious of the “new science of Psychology,” this article uncovers a more complex history that expands our understanding of the interplay among scientific discourse, the varieties of evangelical spiritual experience, and the emergence of pentecostalism in the early twentieth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , Summer 2011 , pp. 195 - 226
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

I gratefully acknowledge support for this article from the Science and the Spirit: Pentecostal Perspectives on the Science/Religion Dialogue Project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, and from the Faculty Research Awards Committee at Tufts University, which provided a Summer Faculty Fellowship. I would also like to thank the many colleagues who read and commented on previous versions of the essay, including Pamela Klassen, Jon H. Roberts, Randall Stephens, Grant Wacker, Christopher G. White, members of the North American Religions Colloquium at Harvard University, and participants in the panel “Psychology and the Spirit: Protestant Experiences of the Self in 20th Century North America” at the American Society of Church History 2010 Annual Meeting.

1. “Weird Babble of Tongues,” Los Angeles Daily Times, April 17, 1906, 1.

2. Numbers, Ronald L., Swain, Janet S., and Thielman, Samuel B., “Theories of Religious Insanity in America,” in The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia, ed. Ferngren, Gary B. (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 582–87Google Scholar. See also Bynum, William F., Porter, Roy, and Shepherd, Michael, eds., The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychology (New York: Tavistock Publications, 1985)Google Scholar.

3. Defining “radical evangelicalism” and outlining both the theological differences and social distinctions between the Holiness and Higher Life wings of this broader movement are extremely complicated processes. Like all late nineteenth-century evangelicals, Holiness and Higher Life teachers emphasized the authority of the Bible, the centrality of Jesus’ atonement, the importance of conversion followed by “growth in holiness,” and the imperative of evangelism. From the mid-1850s on, however, members of these interdenominational and transnational movements increasingly stressed the necessity of “entire sanctification” through “baptism with the Holy Spirit” following the “new birth” that provided purity from sin and/or the energy to engage in effective Christian service, and they also looked forward to a worldwide “pentecostal” outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Despite their common emphasis on the importance of sanctification and the baptism of the Holy Spirit, several important distinctions between these two segments of radical evangelicalism are worth noting here. First, what became the radical Holiness movement emerged primarily within Wesleyan groups (such as Methodist churches or organizations like the Salvation Army) whereas Higher Life forms of holiness evangelicalism spread among traditionally Reformed and non-Methodist denominations (Baptists, Presbyterians, and the Christian and Missionary Alliance, for example). The Keswick movement, which was inspired by the ministries of Presbyterian pastor William E. Boardman and of Hannah Whitall and Robert Pearsall Smith, also played an important role in propagating Higher Life understandings of holiness through annual conferences at Keswick, England, beginning in 1875, and through the ministry of American evangelist Dwight L. Moody and the summer conferences he sponsored in Northfield, Massachusetts. Second, Wesleyan Holiness leaders defined “entire sanctification” as the immediate eradication of the sinful nature and the perfection of a believer's motives and actions. Higher Life teachers, however, viewed sanctification as a distinct postconversion experience that initiated an ongoing process of growth in holiness through which the sinful nature was suppressed and the believer was “endued with power” for service. Many scholars have stressed that these precise theological differences were often obscured among ordinary believers. For more detailed definitions and treatments of these interrelated movements, see Anderson, Robert Mapes, Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Blumhofer, Edith, Restoring the Faith: The Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism, and American Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), esp. 11–42 Google Scholar; Dayton, Donald, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Dieter, Melvin E., The Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century, 2d ed. (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Marsden, George M., Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar, esp. 72–85; Stephens, Randall J., The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Wacker, Grant, “Introduction,” in his Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Wacker, Grant, “Travail of a Broken Family: Radical Evangelical Responses to the Emergence of Pentecostalism in America, 1906–16,” in Pentecostal Currents in American Culture, ed. Blumhofer, Edith L., Spittler, Russell P., and Wacker, Grant (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 23–49 Google Scholar.

4. Helpful studies of these reactions may be found in Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited; Nienkirchen, Charles W., A. B. Simpson and the Pentecostal Movement: A Study in Continuity, Crisis, and Change (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 1992)Google Scholar; and esp. Wacker, “Travail of a Broken Family,” 23–49.

5. For more on the Christian and Missionary Alliance and its reactions to pentecostalism, consult Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited, esp. 71–74 and 142–47; Nienkirchen, A. B. Simpson and the Pentecostal Movement; and Wacker, “Travail of a Broken Family.” The quotation from the Emmanuel movement is drawn from Elwood Worcester, “Mental Healing,” quoted in Taves, Ann, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 319 Google Scholar.

6. Wacker, , Heaven Below, esp. 4 and 179 Google Scholar; Wacker, “Travail of a Broken Family,” 30; and Anderson, , Vision of the Disinherited, esp. 150–52.Google Scholar

7. Pamela Klassen, “The Burden of Anxiety: Mid-Twentieth Century Liberal Protestants and the Healing of Cosmic Guilt” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Church History, San Diego, Calif., January 7–10, 2010), and Healing Christians: Medicine, Modernity, and the Spirits of Protestantism (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming); White, Christopher G., Unsettled Minds: Psychology and the American Search for Spiritual Assurance, 1830–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009)Google Scholar, esp. 126; Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions; and Hayward, Rhodri, “Demonology, Neurology, and Medicine in Edwardian Britain,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 78 (Spring 2004): 37–58 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, and Resisting History: Religious Transcendence and the Invention of the Unconscious (New York: Manchester University Press, 2007). For a broader history of the relationship between psychology and religion in twentieth-century American culture, see Jon H. Roberts, “Psychology in America,” in Ferngren, The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition, 575–81, and “Psychoanalysis and American Christianity, 1900–1945,” in When Science and Christianity Meet, ed. David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 225–44.

8. The literature on the historical relationship between science and religion is voluminous. I am especially indebted to Brooke, John Hedley, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Brooke, John Hedley and Cantor, Geoffrey, Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Ferngren, Gary B., ed., Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Lindberg, David C. and Numbers, Ronald, “Beyond War and Peace: A Reappraisal of the Encounter between Christianity and Science,” Church History 55 (September 1986): 338–54Google Scholar; and Roberts, Jon H., “’The Idea That Wouldn't Die’: The Warfare between Science and Christianity,” Historically Speaking 4 (February 2003): 21–24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For studies that highlight the adversarial relationship between evangelicalism and psychology in the early twentieth century, see esp. Ferngren, Gary B., “The Evangelical-Fundamentalist Tradition,” in Caring and Curing: Health and Medicine in the Western Religious Traditions, ed. Numbers, Ronald L. and Amundsen, Darrel W. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 486–513 Google Scholar; Rieff, Philip, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (New York: Harper and Row, 1968)Google Scholar; Hunter, James Davison, American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Meyer, Donald A., The Positive Thinkers: Popular Religious Psychology from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale and Ronald Reagan (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and Watt, David Harrington, A Transforming Faith: Explorations of Twentieth- Century American Evangelicalism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

9. For a fuller history of the revivals in Wales, Australia, and India, and their relationship to Azusa Street and the global reach of the pentecostal movement, see Anderson, Allan, An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; and Anderson, Allan, Spreading Fires: the Missionary Nature of Early Pentecostalism (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2007)Google Scholar. Studies that chart contestation over “true” Christianity in American religious history are too numerous to cite. Works of particular relevance for late nineteenth- century evangelicalism include Mullin, Robert Bruce, Miracles and the Modern Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions; and White, Unsettled Minds.

10. Mullin, Miracles. See also Curtis, Heather D., Faith in the Great Physician: Suffering and Healing in American Culture, 1830–1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

11. In 1887, A. B. Simpson organized two organizations: the Christian Alliance and the Evangelical Missionary Alliance. In 1897, these two associations formally merged to create the Christian and Missionary Alliance. A. B. Simpson, “The Gospel of Healing; Divine Healing and Demonism Not Identical. A Protest and Reply to Dr. Buckley in the Century Magazine,” Word, Work, and World 7 (July 1886): 52–58; and A. B. Simpson, “The Gospel of Healing; Divine Healing and Demonism Not Identical. A Protest and Reply to Dr. Buckley in the Century Magazine. Concluded,” Word, Work, and World 7 (August 1886): 114–22.

12. Carrie F. Judd, “Ancient and Modern Spiritualism Considered in the Light of God's Word,” Triumphs of Faith 6 (October 1886): 231–33.

13. Simpson, “The Gospel of Healing; Divine Healing and Demonism Not Identical. Concluded,” 114. See also Curtis, Faith in the Great Physician, chap. 4.

14. Woodworth recounts her experiences in various versions of her memoirs. The quotations in this paragraph are drawn from Woodworth-Etter, Maria, Signs and Wonders God Wrought in the Ministry of Forty Years (1916; repr., Bartlesville, Okla.: Oak Tree Publications, n.d.), 48–49, 63–64, 70Google Scholar. For secondary accounts of Woodworth's life and ministry, see esp. Warner, Wayne E., The Woman Evangelist: The Life and Times of Charismatic Evangelist Maria B. Woodworth-Etter (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Anderson, , Vision of the Disinherited, 34–36 Google Scholar; Jonathan R. Baer, “Redeemed Bodies: The Functions of Divine Healing in Incipient Pentecostalism,” Church History (December 2001): 735–71; and Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, 241–47.

15. Kokomo Dispatch, February 5, 1885, 5; and “Woodworth's Wand,” Muncie Daily News, September 21, 1885, 4. For additional examples of press coverage highlighting the ecstatic features of Woodworth's revival meetings and comparing her revivals with magnetism, mesmerism, hypnotism, and insanity, see, for example, “Sister Woodworth: She Knocks ‘Em Cold,” Ft. Wayne Gazette, January 23, 1885; “Trance Evangelism,” Cincinnati Enquirer, January 27, 1885; “Religious Craze in Indiana,” New York Times, January 30, 1885; “The Great Revival,” Cincinnati Enquirer, February 17, 1885; “A Farcical Religion,” Indianapolis Times, May 11, 1885, 1; Halleck Floyd, “Mrs. Woodworth's Work,” Christian Conservator, July 15, 1886, 2; “Riotous Religion,” Indianapolis Sentinel, September 14, 1886; “A Season of Trances,” Indianapolis Sentinel, December 9, 1886; “The Camp Meeting,” Champaign County Herald, August 24, 1887; “Cancer Cured by Faith,” St. Louis Globe Democrat, September 3, 1887, 12; “A Form of Emotional Religion,” Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, December 5, 1889; “The Power,” Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, January 9, 1890, 4; “Ring the Riot Alarm!” San Francisco Examiner, January 9, 1890; “Dangerous Hysteria,” Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, January 10, 1890; “Victims of Hypnotism: Religious Frenzy Inspired by an Insane Evangelist,” New York Times, September 1, 1890; “Quackery and Emotional Religion,” St. Louis Republic, September 3, 1890; and “Magnetic Phenomena,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 21, 1890. I am deeply grateful to Jonathan Baer for sharing his file of newspaper clippings on Woodworth's ministry with me.

16. A. B. Simpson, “True and False Teaching Concerning Divine Healing,” Word, Work, and World 5 (November 1885): 293–94. While Simpson does not mention Woodworth directly, there is evidence to suggest that he may have had her in mind. The New York Times had begun reporting on Woodworth's revival activities in January of 1885. Later that same year, Woodworth traveled to New York City and attended one of Simpson's Gospel Tabernacle meetings; see Maria Woodworth-Etter, Acts of the Holy Ghost, or Life, and Experience, of Mrs. M. B. Woodworth Etter (Dallas: John F. Worley Printing, 1912), 118, quoted in Warner, Woman Evangelist, 31, 155. For a broader discussion of Higher Life reactions to Woodworth's ministry, see Curtis, , Faith in the Great Physician, 130–38Google Scholar.

17. For Carrie Judd's initial reaction to Woodworth's revival meetings, see Carrie F. Judd, “The Work and the Workers,” Triumphs of Faith 10 (January 1890), 19–23. For Sisson's positive assessment of trance as a legitimate spiritual experience, see Elizabeth Sisson, “The Spiritual Priesthood Illustrated in Levi,” Triumphs of Faith 19 (February 1890): 30–33.

18. Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited, 35–37; and Stephens, The Fire Spreads.

19. Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, 336, 334. See also Nienkirchen, A. B. Simpson and the Pentecostal Movement.

20. Baer, “Redeemed Bodies,” 735–71.

21. Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, 335; Frank Bartleman, “How Pentecost Came to Los Angeles” (1925), reprinted in Witness to Pentecost: The Life of Frank Bartleman, ed. Cecil M. Robeck (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985), 71–72.

22. A. B. Simpson, “A Sane Gospel,” Living Truths 6 (May 1906): 357.

23. May Mabette Anderson, “Only Calvary,” Living Truths 6 (July 1906): 426–29.

24. J. Hudson Ballard, “Spiritual Gifts with Special Reference to the Gift of Tongues,” Living Truths 7 (January 1907): 23–31.

25. Joseph Smale, “The Gift of Tongues,” Living Truths 7 (January 1907): 32–43.

26. A. B. Simpson, “Spiritual Sanity,” Living Truths 7 (April 1907): 191–96. See also A. B. Simpson, “The Gift of Tongues,” Living Truths 7 (June 1907): 312, in which Simpson warns that the Pentecostal movement “seems … to have fallen into the hands of persons of doubtful reputation and ill-balanced mind.”

27. Simpson, “Spiritual Sanity,” 196.

28. Schofield, Alfred T., Christian Sanity (New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1908), 153, 114Google Scholar.

29. George Pardington, “Sanctification: A Paper Read at the Annual Convention at Nyack, May 25, 1906,” Christian and Missionary Alliance 25 (June 9, 1906): 348–51.

30. Carrie Judd Montgomery, “Not the Spirit of Fear,” Triumphs of Faith 28 (January 1908): 1–3. Carrie Judd became Carrie Judd Montgomery after marrying George Montgomery in 1890.

31. Ibid. See also Nienkirchen, , A. B. Simpson and the Pentecostal Movement, 116–20Google Scholar.

32. Schofield, Alfred T., “Introduction,” in Revival in India: “Years of the Right Hand of the Most High,” ed. Dyer, Helen S. (New York: Gospel Publishing House, 1907), 9–15 Google Scholar. Schofield's familiarity with certain strains of psychological theory is catalogued in the list of “books quoted which are helpful in studying the subject of ‘the unconscious mind’” in Schofield, Alfred Taylor, The Unconscious Mind (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1898), 419–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33. Schofield, “Introduction,” 9–15.

34. Simpson, A. B., “Paul's Experience of Divine Healing,” Christian and Missionary Alliance 26 (April 20, 1901): 217 Google Scholar.

35. Christian and Missionary Alliance 24 (May 27, 1905): 321. This editorial, as well as the others cited in subsequent references, was most likely written by A. B. Simpson, who served as the primary editor of the Christian and Missionary Alliance and the Alliance Weekly in these years. Simpson also relied on the editorial assistance of others, however, including J. Hudson Ballard, F. E. Marsh, J. E. Jaderquist, and George P. Pardington. For this reason, I have chosen not to attribute the authorship of unsigned editorials to Simpson.

36. Alliance Weekly 37 (October 21, 1911): 33.

37. Alliance Weekly 37 (January 13, 1912): 225.

38. Anderson, “Only Calvary,” 426–29; and Schofield, Christian Sanity, 38.

39. Alliance Weekly 34 (February 15, 1913): 305. On the history of psychology in this period, see Taylor, Eugene, William James on Consciousness beyond the Margin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, esp. chaps. 6 and 7; and Boring, Edwin G., A History of Experimental Psychology 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1957)Google Scholar.

40. Alliance Weekly 34 (February 15, 1913): 305.

41. Ibid.

42. A. B. Simpson, “Sinning Against the Spirit,” Christian and Missionary Alliance 35 (February 25, 1911): 345–46; Alliance Weekly 37 (October 21, 1911): 33; and Alliance Weekly 34 (February 15, 1913): 305.

43. Alliance Weekly 37 (October 21, 1911): 33.

44. Christian and Missionary Alliance 34 (August 6, 1910): 304.

45. A. B. Simpson “The Quest for Wisdom,” Christian and Missionary Alliance 32 (June 5, 1909): 163–64, 170.

46. Christian and Missionary Alliance 34 (August 6, 1910): 304.

47. Taves, , Fits, Trances, and Visions, 309 Google Scholar; and “The Emmanuel Movement. Notes from an Address by Rev. J. Hudson Ballard, Pastor of Gospel Tabernacle Church, Los Angeles, Cal.,” Christian and Missionary Alliance 31 (January 9, 1909): 244–45. For histories of the Emmanuel movement, see Brooks Holifield, E., A History of Pastoral Care in America: From Sin to Self-Realization (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1983), esp. 201–9Google Scholar; Gifford, Sanford, The Emmanuel Movement (Boston, 1904–1929): The Origins of Group Treatment and the Assault on Lay Psychotherapy (Boston: Distributed by the Harvard University Press for the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, 1997)Google Scholar; Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, 308–25; and White, Unsettled Minds, 187–90.

48. “The Emmanuel Movement,” Christian and Missionary Alliance 31 (December 26, 1908): 209–10.

49. Hudson Ballard, J., “The Emmanuel Movement,” Christian and Missionary Alliance 31 (January 9, 1909): 244–45Google Scholar.

50. Ibid.

51. “The Emmanuel Movement,” Christian and Missionary Alliance 31 (December 26, 1908): 209–10.

52. MacKenzie, Kenneth Jr., “What Is the Emmanuel Movement?” Christian and Missionary Alliance 32 (May 1, 1909): 80–81 Google Scholar.

53. Ibid.; Frederic W. Farr, “The New Psychology and the Supernatural,” Alliance Weekly 37 (November 4, 1911): 70–71; and Christian and Missionary Alliance 32 (May 8, 1909): 96.

54. Schofield, , Christian Sanity, xiii–xv Google Scholar, 110–11, and 123–24.

55. Ibid., 123–24, 131, 150.

56. “Miraculously Healed by the Lord Thirty Years Ago, Baptized in the Holy Spirit One Year Ago. Told in the Stone Church by Mrs. Carrie Judd Montgomery,” Latter Rain Evangel 2 (October 1909): 4–10.

57. A. B. Simpson, “Editorial,” Living Truths 6 (December 1906): 706–10; Simpson, “A Sane Gospel,” 357; and Simpson, “Editorial,” Alliance Weekly 37 (January 27, 1912): 258. See also Nienkirchen, , A. B. Simpson and the Pentecostal Movement, 89–96 Google Scholar.

58. Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith; Nienkirchen, A. B. Simpson and the Pentecostal Movement; and Wacker, “Travail of a Broken Family,” 23–49.

59. MacKenzie, “What Is the Emmanuel Movement?” 80–81.

60. White, , Unsettled Minds, 126 Google Scholar.