In early January, The Conversation, an academically oriented website affiliated with Religion News Service, ran an explainer with this headline: “What is Pentecostal Christianity?”

That’s a big, complicated question. While I appreciated the article’s emphasis on how Pentecostals are a little-noticed component in American Christianity, it was very much a Cliffs Notes version of a complex, 123-year-old movement. And it didn’t even mention the Charismatic Renewal movement, a massive spiritual shift in the 1960s that brought millions of mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics into the wider Pentecostal fold.

Pentecostalism has hit the news in recent years with revelations of the “Trump prophets,” but their rise has a long back story that few journalists understand. For many years, pentecostals have been seen as evangelicalism’s crazy sister and media coverage has hardly been incisive.

Thus, tmatt suggested that we post the following comprehensive look at the history of the movement here in the United States. I wrote this as a backgrounder for a meeting of religion reporters at the University of Maryland in 2000. I have updated it twice because the movement keeps on shifting. Some of this will sound very basic, but it’s important to know who the main players have been.

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Without a doubt, the portion of Christianity known as Pentecostalism was — by far — the fastest-growing movement of the 20th century, going from zero members on Jan. 1, 1901 to 644 million adherents worldwide now. It is the primary expression of Christianity in the Global South. It is the one form of Christianity to mount a serious challenge to the growth of Islam, mainly because of its appeal to the very poor and its reliance on the miraculous.

During my travels in places like India and Egypt years ago, I was told by religious leaders that the heavy hitters in evangelism in Hindu and Muslim contexts were the Pentecostals. When I was in Israel researching a piece on the country’s messianic Jews, my sources told me half of them, at least, were charismatic. The world’s largest churches in Korea and Nigeria are Pentecostal.

The largest charismatic populations in the world include Brazil, Guatemala and the Philippines. Roughly 65 million people in the United States count themselves as Pentecostal or charismatic. These are people who are comfortable with exorcisms, prophecy, healing and other “gifts” of the Holy Spirit and although it’s a subset of American Christianity, it is a large one.

Harvard University theologian Harvey Cox called it Christianity’s “primal religion” growing at a rate of 20 million members a year or 55,000 a day. Its music, language, worship styles and language have seeped into every denomination. Uplifted hands, once the sign of charismatic worship, are now seen at all kinds of churches.

The phenomenon is defined by the gifts (“charis” in Greek) of the Holy Spirit, such as healing, prophecy, speaking and interpreting unknown tongues, discernment and its sister phenomena, deliverance or casting out of evil spirits; gifts of teaching, wisdom, knowledge, such as “word of knowledge” that the Rev. Pat Robertson used to exercise on his CBN network when he looked into the camera and said something like, “The Lord is telling me that someone watching this has a tumor in their neck. God is healing that tumor right now. …”

These gifts were present in the very early church and lasted about a century before persecution, indifference and just plain lack of teaching pushed them to the sidelines. (Some Catholic sources say the miraculous gifts were exercised in church life for several centuries).

Pentecostalism is based on an experience known as the “baptism in the Holy Spirit,” which is first mentioned in the Gospels but more fully illustrated in the book of Acts. Key to this movement are three dates: Jan. 1, 1901; April 3, 1960 and Feb. 18, 1967.

Modern-day Pentecostalism began Jan. 1, 1901. For several decades before that, 19th century holiness groups, such as Methodists, were talking of a “second blessing” available to Christians after conversion. Some called it a “baptism in the Spirit” after the language used by John the Baptist in the first chapter of John in the New Testament.

In 1895, both R.A. Torrey and Andrew Murray, famous preachers of the day, wrote books on the baptism in the Spirit and the blessings of Pentecost. But no one had quite latched onto how to get this blessing. In 1897, Pope Leo the XIII had written an encyclical on the Holy Spirit and in the first moments of Jan. 1, 1901, in St. Peter’s in Rome, he dedicated the 20th century to the Holy Spirit and chanted the “Veni Creator Spiritus” in the name of the whole church.

A few hours later in Topeka, Kansas, some 115 people were gathered for a New Year’s Eve watchnight service at Charles Parham’s Bethel Bible School in Topeka, Kansas, also praying for a new Pentecost to descend. Previously, Parham had assigned his students to search the scriptures to see if this baptism carried with it any indisputable proof. Students reported back to him that the New Testament carried differing accounts of pentecostal blessing, but the one common ingredient was that people had spoken in tongues. One student, Agnes Ozman, who was 30 years old, asked Parham to place his hands on her head and pray for the baptism with the “biblical sign.” Then, she began speaking in what sounded like a foreign, Chinese-like language.

Several days later, more students began praying for the baptism in the Spirit and they, too, along with Parham, began speaking in tongues. The late Pentecostal historian Vinson Synan says this was the first time that Christians in the modern era had pieced together two elements — baptism in the Spirit and speaking in tongues. There had been some isolated incidents of tongues speaking before that; in fact, St. Francis was said to do so, but no one had linked it with an enduement of power from the Holy Spirit.

That first day of the 20th century is known as the birth of classical Pentecostalism. Another student at Topeka, William Seymour, spread this Pentecostal revival in 1906 during a three-year prayer meeting in Los Angeles known as the Azusa Street revival. This spread Pentecostalism around the country, as people visited this church and reported the availability of this baptism in the Spirit with the gift of tongues for anyone who asked. Pentecostalism was racially diverse from very early on, as Seymour was black and thus, black Christians felt welcome at Azusa.

Such practices did not go over very well with the theologians of the day, and before long, Pentecostalism was relegated to the sidelines as either heretical or unbiblical and many Pentecostals were ejected from their churches. Thus, pentecostals formed their own churches: denominations such as the Assemblies of God and the Church of the Four Square Gospel, the Pentecostal Church of God and several others were formed around this time.

Pentecostal churches were extremely conservative; women did not wear makeup or jewelry and one did not watch television, much less movies. A number of strange off shoots developed, including a segment of Pentecostals in Appalachia who believed a verse in Mark 16 not only told them to pray in tongues and heal people but also to handle poisonous snakes. They grew to be quite numerous for a few decades until the 1940s and 1950s, when enough people were dying from snake bites to cause several states to pass laws against the practice. (This practice has ebbed and flowed over the years, seeing a resurgence in the early 21st century when young Pentecostals began putting photos of their serpent handling on social media).

Tennessee serpent handler Andrew Hamblin in 2014. Photo by John Morgan.

The main Pentecostal movement grew slowly for several decades, blossoming after World War II into the Latter Rain movement in the late 1940s. This is where the Rev. Oral Roberts, a Methodist, got his start as a healing evangelist.

Pentecostal practices such as speaking in tongues, dancing in the Spirit, singing with uplifted hands, crept into the more educated and mainline churches starting in 1950, when Demos Shakarian, an Armenian immigrant founded a group called the Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship International. They had their highly charged charismatic prayer meetings in neutral places such as hotels, where they could attract their primary target — the American businessman. Such meetings attracted persons who would never be seen dead in a pentecostal church. This went on all through the 1950s.

This brings us to the second date. Some of those businessmen were Episcopalians and, by 1959, several Episcopal priests had gotten secretly involved, among them Father Dennis Bennett, who was pastoring a large parish, St. Mark’s, in Van Nuys, Calif. Friends had prayed with him to be baptized in the Spirit in November of 1959 and he had spoken in tongues then. He sat on this experience for several months, then, because word was starting to get out about it, revealed on April 3, 1960 — Palm Sunday — that he had learned how to pray in tongues. His 2,600-member congregation was fairly accepting until the end of the second service, when one of his assistant priests tore off his vestments and strode out of the church, exclaiming, “I can no longer work with this man!”

Bennett decided that the divisiveness of his experience would split the church and so he resigned that day. He made the headlines, got into Newsweek and Time magazines — you have to remember how unusual this was back in 1960 for Episcopalians to do anything that appeared enthusiastic — and he went on TV to demonstrate how speaking in tongues sounded. Back then, it was mistakenly thought that tongues was an ecstatic gift and that you had to be a trance state to use it. So, Bennett put on his clerical collar and quietly prayed in tongues, showing to the world that one did not have to revved up into some altered state to be a charismatic.

Bennett eventually took on a dying parish in Seattle, called St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. The church did incredibly well, in 12 years becoming one of the largest parishes in the largely unchurched Pacific Northwest. It drew huge crowds for its Friday night prayer meetings centered on people getting prayed over to be baptized in the Spirit. Bennett always insisted no one leave there until they had also received the gift of tongues. People came from all over the world because, during that decade, there were few churches you could go to for this type of prayer.

Soon after the Bennett event, a book came out in 1963 called “The Cross and the Switchblade,” which told the story of how the Rev. David Wilkerson, a young Pentecostal pastor from Pennsylvania, went to New York City in 1958 to minister to the street gangs there — the same people immortalized in “West Side Story.”

What made his ministry different is how he insisted that converted gang members, who were even then into drugs, had to go cold turkey. The way they would get through it was to be prayed for the baptism in the Spirit. Wilkerson’s mixture of Pentecostalism and drug rehab was unusual, to say the least, but it worked. His organization, Teen Challenge, claimed an 88% success rates among addicts. His book was the first Christian book to explain the pentecostal experience in a popular format.

In late 1963, an Episcopal priest, Father Graham Pulkingham, read that book in Houston and drove to New York in August 1964 to seek out Wilkerson. Graham was working with teenage gangs in Houston and knew the difficulties. His ministry was failing, and he was desperate for a way to reach these kids.

Wilkerson was not happy about ministering to an Episcopal priest — remember back then the Pentecostals were just as suspicious of mainline Christians as the mainliners were suspicious of Pentecostals — but he reluctantly prayed over Pulkingham for the baptism in the Spirit.

Pulkingham returned to Houston a transformed man and ended up being one of the founders of the Episcopal charismatic movement. This movement was the same as Pentecostalism but its adherents elected to stay in their mainline churches. (Remember, the Pentecostals were kicked out of theirs.) When I moved to Houston 12 years later, Graham pointed out to me that he was the first Episcopal priest in the charismatic movement who was not kicked out of his church. Bishops such as James Pike of San Francisco were forbidding the speaking in tongues in his diocese, calling it “heresy in embryo.” Losing one’s church was the price most clergy had to pay.

Evangelist Munday Martin prays during a healing revival in the Seattle area.

The book even reached Catholics, which brings us to the third pivotal date.

By 1967, the influence of “The Cross and the Switchblade” had even spread to the faculty of Duquesne University, a traditional Catholic college in Pittsburgh.

A campus Catholic fraternity was meeting for a weekend retreat at a center north of Pittsburgh and their professors had asked them to read” The Cross and the Switchblade” beforehand, plus the first four chapters of Acts, which is the account of how the first Christians experienced Pentecostal. A charismatic Episcopal laywoman was invited to share her experience with the students. Afterwards everyone went to an upstairs chapel where some of them prayed for the baptism in the Spirit until 5 a.m. Some fell prostrate on the floor, some spoke in tongues and others wept. The changes the students underwent caused some turmoil back on campus.

Meanwhile, word of this February retreat reached students and faculty at the University of Notre Dame and at Michigan State. The Notre Dame people took an unusual tack; they called the president of the South Bend chapter of the Full Gospel Businessmen and asked if he could explain a few things to them.

That man, Ray Bullard, agreed, then brought in 40 Pentecostal friends as reinforcements. The world’s first Catholic-Pentecostal dialogue happened that night, March 13, 1967 — about 3 weeks after the Duquesne retreat — at Mr. Bullard’s home. It was quite a culture clash: nine university-trained Catholic intellectuals meeting several dozen blue-collar Pentecostal fundamentalists.

What did they argue over the most? According to the Catholics I talked to years later, it was not over the pope or the Virgin Mary. It was over whether they needed to speak in tongues. The Catholics did not think they needed to. The Pentecostals said if they did not, then they were not truly baptized in the Spirit. Finally, the Catholics agreed to letting the Pentecostals pray over them. They lined up on opposite sides of the Bullard basement. The Pentecostals walked forward, armed outstretched, praying in tongues. Before they were halfway across the room, the Catholics were also praying “in the Spirit.”

That summer, about 3,000 people were at the University of Notre Dame for summer classes. By then, the nine Catholic charismatics had increased their numbers to a point where they were holding prayer meetings and of course, the summer students, who were nuns and priests from around the country, looked in on these meetings. For instance, that’s how the charismatic movement started at the University of Portland, a Catholic school in Oregon, because in the summer of ‘67, some of their priests had been at Notre Dame.

Notre Dame started having yearly summer conferences, beginning with 85 attendees in 1967. By 1976, 30,000 people were attending vast conferences in the school stadium. It spread so fast that first in 1969 and again 1975, Pope Paul VI gave it his blessing, saying “How would it be possible that this spiritual renewal not be a chance for the Church and for the world?”

Watching these Catholics go charismatic, the Protestants were in some shock. As Synan said, “Most Protestants assumed Catholics were not even Christians, much less candidates for the baptism in the Holy Spirit.” What made this saleable in the Catholic Church was that charismatic theology could be assumed into Catholicism. The baptism in the Spirit did not require one to leave the Catholic Church — or the Episcopal or Presbyterian churches either. One started hearing of Reformed Presbyterian charismatics, Mennonite charismatics, even Greek Orthodox charismatics.

The genius of the charismatic movement was its ability to involve every stripe of Christian. This was made evident in 1977, when 45,000 Christians gathered for three days in Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium; the largest ecumenical gathering in America to date. It served notice that this renewal was a force to be reckoned with and it had displaced the National Council of Churches as the ecumenical movement of the 20th century. Here you had Episcopal bishops side by side with messianic Jews and Pentecostals with charismatic Catholics providing the music. Plus, the most amazing prophecies given during this event were given by the Catholics. Another phenomenon surfaced at this gathering — the nondenominational church. Within a few decades, these churches had emerged as one of the primary forms of U.S. Christianity.

By 1980, Christianity Today was saying 19% of the total population of the United States was pentecostal or charismatic.

Then several bombs hit the Pentecostal/charismatic renewal. Two of its bright lights: Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, both Pentecostals, got involved in tawdry affairs. The secular media for the first time began figuring out what this Pentecostalism was all about. Then Roberts in 1987 had this fundraising letter sent out, by his son, saying that if his debt-ridden university didn’t receive several million dollars in contributions, God would “take him home” by March. That and his vision of a 900-foot Jesus ended up in him getting raked over the coals in the media. Also in 1987, Robertson began his short-lived run for the presidency. He flamed out early in 1988, but not before getting discredited — again in the mainstream media — by several things, including being less than truthful as to the dates of his marriage and the birth of their first child.

By this time, the nondenominational part of the charismatic movement was in the ascendancy. John Wimber, a former Quaker who founded his own denomination, Vineyard Fellowship, in Anaheim, California, was quite famous by the late ‘80s. In a time when the renewal was running low on steam, Wimber was a burst of power. For instance, in 1985 at a conference in Los Angeles; he would merely point to a section of the congregation, saying something like, “I see the Holy Spirit moving over there” and whole rows of people would drop to the floor. Vineyard was known for its concentration on “signs and wonders, “ especially physical healing, a gift of the Spirit that Christians had not done too well on up to that point.

Then in 1994, a Vineyard pastor — the Rev. John Arnott in Toronto and his church, the Toronto Airport Vineyard — began experiencing a phenomenon known as “holy laughter,” which is something the charismatic renewal had never seen before. People who were being prayed for would helplessly collapse on the floor, or lie there “slain in the Spirit” for several hours. This got huge publicity and similar phenomena repeated itself in American churches and in Europe from people who had “caught it” in Toronto.

The Pentecostal and charismatic movements went through a decline in the USA starting from the mid-1990s. Other than the 100th anniversary celebrations of the Azusa Street revival in 2006, very little hit the news.

Why? Pentecostals stayed out of politics; every so often, a public figure like Sarah Palin would crop up and the media would find out she attended a Pentecostal church north of Anchorage.

But things were changing below the surface. Wimber taught alongside another man, Peter Wagner, at Fuller Seminary with a focus on “power evangelism,” or using miracles to basically convert people. He was also convinced that the worldwide church needed to be led by apostles and prophets knit together in vast networks. The word he came up for this was the “New Apostolic Reformation;” which sounded innocent at the time but has become enormously controversial. (To examine the NAR would take a whole separate essay.)

Starting with the second Bush Administration, Pentecostals had formed larger intercessory prayer networks. And dozens of prophets — people who claim the ability to predict the future based on dreams, visions and other supernatural phenomena — began to form networks.

Some prophets were church leaders, while others operated independently. There are no official requirements for prophet status, though followers generally expect prophets to get at least a few prophecies right. In the late 1990s, a group of 32 Pentecostal leaders formed the Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders to exert some quality control. But the new century brought the rise of social media platforms: YouTube, Twitter, Facebook to name a few and basically anyone claiming he or she could prophesy got a hearing.

But the movement didn’t seriously get involved in politics until the 2016 election where several of their leaders prophesied — well before the GOP National Convention — that Donald Trump would win. Then, in July 2015, Jeremiah Johnson, a 27-year-old prophet, predicted that Trump would be a latter-day Cyrus, the Persian king who allowed Babylonian Jews to return to their homeland. A firefight-turned-prophet called Mark Taylor predicted that Trump would nominate three Supreme Court justices, a very distant possibility pre-2016.

When these predictions came true, that electrified their followers. Meanwhile, televangelist Paula White, who was unknown outside Pentecostal/charismatic circles, rose to prominence through her friendship with Trump. She rounded up support for Trump among all her Pentecostal televangelist friends before she widened her circle to better-known evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell Jr. and Ralph Reed. Once the new president named her as his spiritual advisor, White began bringing in a whole new clientele of Pentecostals to pray with Trump during Oval Office photo ops. The press, to say the least, noticed this.

The Pentecostals and charismatics made the most of their access to the presidency during those four years until cracks began to show. None of the hundreds of prophets who emerged during this period prophesied the rise of COVID-19. But many did prophesy that Trump would win a second term; when he did not, the movement experienced a crisis that has yet to be resolved. A few prophets publicly apologized for being wrong; the majority did not and some, like Jeremiah Johnson, left the prophetic ministry altogether.

In conclusion, part of the genius of Pentecostalism is its ability to shift quickly with the tides of society, so a massive failure like that of the Trump prophets will be forgotten in a few years. The present focus seems to be fostering revival. I’m betting Pentecostals will find creative ways to rise again.

FIRST IMAGE: Tongues of fire at Pentecost. Feature art at the Andrew K. Gabriel website.

OTHER IMAGES:: The photo of the serpent handler was taken by John Morgan. Photos of St. Luke’s Episcopal, Paula White and a revival service in suburban Seattle featuring evangelist Munday Martin (plaid shirt) were taken by the author.