I have reviewed Paul Alexander's book Signs and Wonders: Why Pentecostalism Is The World's Fastest Growing Faith for Pneuma, the journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies. It will appear in the forthcoming issue, but is available online now.
You can download the PDF here. Or, you can read the review below...
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Paul Alexander, Signs
and Wonders: Why Pentecostalism is the World’s Fastest Growing Faith (San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009). xiv + 175 pp. $24.95 cloth.
With the publication of Philip
Jenkins’ academic blockbuster, The Next
Christendom (2002), Pentecostalism became the undisputed “Next Big Thing”
in the study of Christianity. Jenkins’ work was perceptive and synthetic,
standing atop an ever-growing tower of scholarly research into the persistence
of global Christianity in the wake of the moribund “secularization thesis.” Most
members of this society were probably not surprised by Jenkins’ conclusion that global
Pentecostalism (and its genealogical relations) represents the majority future
of Christianity. The Pentecostal future has been taken as a fact for decades by
those with “eyes to see.” Jenkins’ book, arriving as it did among the urgency
of post-9/11 debates about religion and America’s global position, simply
served to make the point loudly and clearly to the average New York Times reader.
But once awakened,
surprised and alarmed, to the widespread beliefs and practices of
Pentecostalism, the average New York
Times reader still did not know why
this movement was growing at such a rate all over the world. This is the
question Paul Alexander attempts to answer in his recent book, Signs and Wonders: Why Pentecostalism is the
World’s Fastest Growing Faith. Complete with larger than average print, a
winsome, anecdotal writing style, and the rare imprimatur of a glowing foreword
from Martin Marty, Alexander takes on the role of a self-disclosing tour guide
who wants to show the curious reader, from a comfortable distance, what the
appeal of Pentecostalism is.
This distance does
not mean Alexander is cold to Pentecostalism. On the contrary, he challenges
his reader to maintain a generous, open mind, with such comments as “For who
knows, maybe miracles really do happen” (p. 18), or “Tongues issue from the
depths of the human experience and open up new ways of living, being and doing”
(p. 58). For Alexander, this tour is personal. One of the great merits of the
book is that he is open about his own experiences with phenomena associated
with Pentecostalism.
However, though he
has had many experiences that he names “Pentecostal,” Alexander is ambivalent
about the application of the category Pentecostal to himself. He writes, “I
went from being an arrogant Pentecostal to an embarrassed and shame-ridden
Pentecostal to a non-Pentecostal to an anti-Pentecostal—and now I’m just trying
to be a faithful follower of Jesus who also prays in tongues sometimes” (p. 98).
This categorical evasion is illustrative of the strategy Alexander employs
throughout the book. He plays on a distinction between historical
Pentecostalism and Pentecostal experiences. Alexander spends no time developing
either a historical or a theological definition of Pentecostalism. Rather, he offers
a description of Pentecostalism that is entirely rooted in the embrace of
particular phenomena. Each of his eight chapters (miracles, music, tongues,
prosperity, testimony, angels and demons, prophetic experience, and emotional
hope) deals with the particular appeal of a certain type of experience that
Alexander classes as typically Pentecostal. Thus, in his hands, the category
“Pentecostal” has little necessarily to do with particular history, theology,
or culture, and far more to do with a presentized set of spiritual experiences
typically associated with historic Pentecostalism but which, through “mere”
participation, can leave Pentecostal fingerprints on a wide variety of faith
traditions.
As such, the best
and most explanatory parts of the book are his stories about Pentecostal
experience. The pages are redolent with real-life stories of miracles, demons,
prophecy, and healing. Alexander says he has no interest in proving their
reliability but rather in showing their attraction, that is, the attraction of
having a life full of practical hope for God’s intervention in the face of
struggle. Such stories are, he believes, ultimately why Pentecostalism is
exploding because they are, in some significant way, what Pentecostalism is. Alexander rehearses the contested
chestnut that modernity (and, by extension, most evangelicalism) has advanced a
practically disenchanted worldview that forecloses on such experiences. But, according
to his sociological sources, disenchantment fits with neither a biblical
outlook nor the outlook of an average Global Southerner nor even the average
American. Thus Pentecostal practices are, in his view, already resonant with the outlook of most people in the world,
though they run counter to the worldview of those Alexander calls “American
Evangelicals,” bound as they are by modernity (113-4).
My response to
this approach is mixed. I have little doubt that Alexander would admit that the
twentieth century Pentecostal expression of these phenomena can be thoroughly historicized, located in
a tradition that reinforces their validity through theologies and practices. I
have even less doubt that the explosive growth of historic Pentecostalism has
significantly contributed to the fact that the phenomena Alexander describes
have become commonplace in a wide variety of “non-Pentecostal” denominational
traditions, e.g., his story of the shy Baptist who speaks in tongues. However,
I question the validity of explaining Pentecostalism simply by it’s
characteristically emphasized experiences, particularly given that those
experiences have been variously shared by Christians throughout the history of
the church, even “American Evangelicals.” It seems that there is a far more
complicated story to be told than Alexander’s conclusion that Pentecostalism has
grown because it offers emotional freedom, dynamic spiritual experiences, and
equality before a provider God. These are among the stated offerings of a wide
variety of religious communities, but for some reason, Pentecostalism has been particularly apt to grow. As to why that
is, Alexander does not offer a compelling answer. He cites a Pentecostal pastor
saying that “people are tired of dry religion. They are looking for a
relationship” (p. 133). This could have been said by any evangelical, and has
little explanatory power. One wants deeper explorations of the dynamics of
race, class, nationalism, the rising stock of the therapeutic, Western primacy
in globalizing culture, the spiritual cosmologies of the Global South, and so
on. Perhaps those are the cultural concerns of a historian, and perhaps this is
not the book that Alexander has set out to write. Nonetheless they are issues
crucial to adequately answering the question posed by his title.
Caleb Maskell
Graduate Student
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
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