Pentecostal Christians assume that they are involved in a massive invisible spiritual war and that some of the pain they experience is the result of that warfare. Angels and demons clash around them, and Christians are called to join in the fray against the forces of evil. This is not meant as a metaphor. They believe the world is literally infested with evil spirits intent on doing harm, and many believe in territorial demons who seek to undermine God’s will for different specific regions of the world. Across the whole movement there is a strong sense that the world is currently living through the “last days” of human history and that the battle with evil is becoming more intense. In the power of the Spirit and Jesus’s name, Pentecostal Christians are committed to binding the forces of evil and setting people free from the spiritual captivity into which they may have fallen. For some “modern” people this will sound like pure fantasy because modern people believe the world consists solely of what can be observed and measured and that anything else is nonsense. But the great majority of the world’s people, including many people in the purportedly modern West, still believe in demons, evil spirits, and the haunting presence of the dead. In such a world, the message of Pentecostal power can become literally a godsend, a promise of desperately needed protection that allows them to live free of spiritual fear, perhaps for the first time in their lives.
A large majority of the world’s Pentecostal Christians are women. This can be explained partly by Pentecostalism’s assumption that the Holy Spirit can empower women in the same way the Spirit empowers men. In this way, gender equality is built into the theology of the tradition. A theological assumption of spiritual equality has not always led to equality in church practices, but even in the most patriarchal Pentecostal churches women are confident that God can use them to do great things. Over the past century, women have played prominent roles in many Pentecostal churches. Perhaps the most famous is Aimee Semple McPherson, whose popularity in early twentieth‐century America rivaled that of the hottest stars of Hollywood. She was a flamboyant performer (see Figure 4.2), but was also socially concerned. Her church provided free meals for thousands of hungry people during the Great Depression in the 1930s.
The broader appeal of Pentecostalism for many women, however, may reside less in its distribution of power and leadership in the church than in its domestic influence. Simply put, it has helped to bring about improved home lives. Many Pentecostal churches teach that the man is to be the head of the home, but in order to be in charge spiritually a husband must be good and faithful. In patriarchal societies where male domination is a way of life, placing this kind of moral responsibility on husbands can be a huge step forward. Many wives will gladly obey their husbands if their husbands will stop spending their earnings on alcohol, stop their extramarital affairs, and become faithful spouses and responsible fathers. What is more, the language of Pentecostal Christianity provides husbands and wives with a way to negotiate marital difficulties without blaming each other. When tensions flare up, Pentecostal couples can ascribe the fault to Satan rather than to each other. Husbands and wives can then join forces to fight Satan and save their marriages at the same time.
Figure 4.2 Aimee Semple McPherson (second from left) in a performance at her church, Angelus Temple, in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles Herald Examiner Photo Collection.
Pentecostal Christianity emphasizes the miraculous and the supernatural, but perhaps the key characteristic that distinguishes it from the other Christian mega‐traditions is something quite simple and ordinary: joy. Pentecostal believers say they feel joy in the presence of God, and they express that joy in the exuberance of their worship. Many Christian liturgies or services of worship can be dry, dull, and somber. Many Christians think of Sunday worship as an obligatory duty they must grudgingly perform. But this is not the case with most Spirit‐filled Christians. In Pentecostal worship, people dance and sing, they clap their hands, they shout, they march around the room, they hug each other, they “get happy in the Lord,” and they rejoice. Pentecostal believers know how to cry – in fact, tears are often considered a spiritual gift – but the predominant emotion is joy. Awash in joy, Pentecostal Christians don’t go to church reluctantly or out of a sense of duty; they go to church happily and willingly because it is fun. That sense of holy fun goes a long way toward explaining not only how the Pentecostal movement differs from other Christian traditions, but also why it is growing so rapidly.
Salvation
In the Pentecostal tradition, salvation focuses on the future. There is no question that salvation entails the forgiveness of past sins and the righting of past wrongs, but the attention of Pentecostal Christians is on what is yet to come, on the blessings that God has in store for those who believe. In this regard, the Pentecostal movement has more in common with the Orthodox tradition that stresses salvation as deification than it does with the Catholic and Protestant traditions that tend to describe salvation largely in terms of sin and forgiveness. This future‐oriented, growth‐in‐godliness perspective is reflected in the language of fullness that some Pentecostal Christians use to describe the experience of salvation. Salvation is not just about forgiveness, nor is it only about holiness understood as the absence of sin, and it is not something that is simply done once and then is over. Instead, salvation within the Pentecostal tradition is a matter of faith in motion, of moving ever deeper into the fullness of God and into the fullness of life that God intends for everyone.
Yet salvation in the Pentecostal tradition is not solely about the future, it is also very much about the here and now. Pentecostals believe that God has provided “healing in the atonement,” that Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection addressed not just the spiritual needs of humankind, but humanity’s physical needs as well. In the early years of the Pentecostal movement, some leaders instructed their followers to avoid all use of modern medicine because healing was supposed to come directly from God. Visiting a doctor was construed as lack of faith, and some extreme individuals even drank poison intentionally or tossed around poisonous snakes to demonstrate their belief that God would miraculously protect them. Over the years, stridency about faith healing has decreased. Most Pentecostal Christians today believe that God frequently brings healing through a combination of modern medicine and faith, but they also believe God can still miraculously heal people. One individual who strongly nudged the movement in this direction was Kathryn Kuhlman, a Pentecostal healing revivalist whose ministry was based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (see Voices of World Christianity 4.2).
The same kind of overlap between the physical and the spiritual that undergirds Pentecostalism’s belief in healing also defines the prosperity gospel, which in recent decades has become ever more prominent in global Pentecostalism. Every week, literally thousands of Spirit‐filled preachers tell their followers that God wants them to be rich. The standard message is something like this: if you want a nice house or a new car or fashionable clothing, you have the right to claim those things in Jesus’s name, and God will give them to you. The key is to step forth in faith, and the typical recommendation is to demonstrate that faith by donating a “seed offering” to the preacher’s own church. This seed offering, which is often a substantial portion of a poor person’s total assets, will show God the sincerity of one’s faith, and God will then grant the individual – some preachers say God is obligated to provide – a bounteous harvest of wealth.
Voices of World Christianity 4.2 Kathryn Kuhlman on Health and Healing
