22. Fragmentation and Revival: Salvation Army to Foursquare Gospel

Growing up in the 1950s in a farming community in Northern Wisconsin, I was actively involved in a small Christian and Missionary Alliance Church. At the time I was unaware of the painful divisiveness that tore apart our denomination decades earlier over the issue of speaking in tongues. Pentecostal inroads into Alliance churches eventually led to a split and the beginnings of the Assemblies of God, today the much larger sister church.

When my little country church joined with other evangelical churches for occasional special functions, Pentecostals, still on our enemies list, were not welcome. Nor were Methodists, who were too liberal for our tastes. Wesleyan Methodists, however, were part of the mix, having broken from Methodists over “holiness” issues nearly a century earlier.

John Wesley was a hero of our faith as was Luther, though the local Lutherans were too worldly to participate in our functions, had they wanted to. As a young adult I was associated with breakaway fundamentalist movements, including the Bible Presbyterians and Bible churches affiliated with the IFCA (Independent Fundamentalist Churches of America).

I remember a business meeting at the Woodstock Bible Church where discussion centered on the possibility of an outsider coming in and speaking in tongues (though no one had ever done so before). It was decided that a deacon would escort the offending individual out of the church. Today such actions appear harsh, if not humorous. (Unlike early Catholics and Calvinists, however, we did not even contemplate burning an offender at the stake.)

The fragmentation of denominations that I encountered as a youth is a microcosm of the larger evangelical movement that stumbled and split its way through the course of the twentieth century.

The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.

MARC BLOCH, THE HISTORIAN’S CRAFT

As one studies the story of twentieth-century evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Pentecostals, one cannot help but catch the scent of human flesh, knowing that this is where the quarry lies. And there are giants far bigger in this fairy tale than the historian. Indeed, in this century of modern media any scent of celebrity is sniffed out, served up, and devoured by hungry spectators, allured by glamour and novelty. Whether attracted by “Halleluiah Lassies” and a street corner brass band or a sports-star-turned-revivalist, religious seekers are looking for more than the old-time religion of John Wesley or Jonathan Edwards.

But celebrity and novelty do not translate into a modernistic religion. Among these new Christian leaders there is no inclination to question, for example, the reliability of biblical texts or the validity of miracles and mystical experiences. And not all evangelicals, whether fundamentalist or Pentecostal, were enamored of flashy revival preachers. In fact, until the last decades of the twentieth century, most evangelicals were bringing up the rear in cultural innovation. They were conservative in every sense of the word. Among those who stood out and gained wide recognition are Evangeline Booth, Pandita Ramabai, William Seymour, Billy Sunday, Aimee Semple McPherson, and John Sung.

Twentieth-century evangelicalism is a strange mix of innovation and convention, of celebrity and banality, of fragmentation and unity. It divided and subdivided at a rate never seen before in history. With the onset of the Holiness Movement of the late nineteenth century, one group after another sought to out-distance the rest in claims of holiness and sometimes in bizarre teachings. Benjamin Irwin, of the Fire-Baptized Church forbade his male followers, for example, to wear neckties. Other restrictions separated his group from other tightly strung holiness churches. Irwin’s following further fragmented in the spring of 1900, when it was learned that he was involved in “open and gross sin.”

This acceleration of splintering had begun much earlier in the nineteenth century in Europe and particularly in America. The dynamic democracy of the young nation, combined with its westward movement and frontier spirit, only exacerbated the rapid proliferation of splinter groups and sectarian movements. Early nineteenth-century religious leaders like Ann Lee and her followers, known as Shakers, and John Humphrey Noyes, who founded the Oneida Community, sought to create utopian communal living—the former with celibacy as the hallmark; the latter featuring communal marriage.

PARADE OF HISTORY

The nineteenth-century parade of the faithful marched into inner-city degradation—into teaming tenements filled with impoverished peons displaced by the ravages of the Industrial Revolution. Trumpeting the gospel, Salvation Army bands offered good news for body and soul. “Booth led boldly with his big bass drum,” proclaimed the opening lines of Vachel Lindsay’s tribute. Decades later, baseball player Billy Sunday would be lured into the Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago through the ministry of the rescue mission’s band. He was loitering in the street when the band marched by, playing hymns that stirred memories of his mother singing the same songs when he was a small child.

FIRE-BAPTIZED RELIGION

Several developments between 1898 and 1900 prevented the Fire-Baptized movement from developing into the national church that it promised to become. One was the inclusion of additional doctrines that frightened even “radical” holiness people…. [Benjamin] Irwin began to teach that there were additional “baptisms of fire.” These he named the baptisms of “dynamite,” “Lyddite,” and “Oxidite.” By early 1900 the Fire-Baptized faithful were being taught not only a “third blessing” but also a fourth, a fifth, and even a sixth. This “chemical jargon” never took root within the movement and was later rejected. But for a time the movement was pervaded by the “pathetic pursuit of this religious rainbow’s end.”

Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement

Other Christians called for primitivism, the recreation of the lifestyle and practices of the New Testament believing community. This so-called Restoration Movement—the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)—emerged under the leadership of Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone. Campbell pleaded for Christian unity founded on “the testimony of the Apostles” alone. He was distressed by dissention among Christians and by the proliferation of denominations but was unable to prevent his own movement from fragmenting, frequently over minor differences.

Also contributing to the fragmentation was the multiplication of societies. Under the umbrella of the Women’s Missionary Movement, more than forty separate agencies arose. The first of these societies, founded by Sarah Doremus, was the Woman’s Union Missionary Society. The term union was significant. She was seeking to bring women from different denominations together. But the societies proliferated, each representing different denominations and theological and social perspectives. Likewise, the Sunday school movement quickly fragmented in its association with various denominations. Missionaries took the Christian faith, packaged in a multiplicity of denominational forms, around the world, where the church was further fragmented as new leaders and movements sprang up in “foreign” soil, often utterly bewildering to those they sought to convert. An amusing—and confusing—example developed when the Southern Baptists entered northern China and the Northern Baptists, southern China.

Revivalists like D. L. Moody and his successors easily crossed denominational lines. In fact, Moody was one of the leading lights for evangelical unity in the late nineteenth century, refusing to become entangled in controversial issues that were tearing other Christian groups apart. Those who supported his evangelistic campaigns hailed from a wide spectrum of denominations and social classes. Women also played important roles in his outreach. Indeed, women’s roles were greatly expanded in virtually every new religious movement. But as religions became institutionalized, lay ministers and women were pushed aside in favor of status-conscious, ordained, career clerics. Women were particularly active in the Pentecostal movements that sprang up around the turn of the century, although two of the leading figures associated with one such movement, the Azusa Street Revival, were men: Charles Parham and William J. Seymour.

Women’s active involvement in leadership roles, in the eyes of their critics, would lead to a more emotional and less intellectual form of faith. While this may have actually been true, there was certainly no emotion lacking in the fiery fundamentalism of Billy Sunday and other male evangelists who traveled the circuit. Sunday, and later Aimee Semple McPherson, sought to save souls while hammering against the twin evils of alcohol and evolution. The “Scopes Monkey Trial” in 1925 pitted William Jennings Bryan against Clarence Darrow in a climactic showdown between biblical creationism and the theory of evolution.

The “muscular Christianity” of Sunday and Bryan was worlds away from the boys-only club of Princeton Seminary and its corresponding Princeton theology that flourished between the American Civil War and World War I. Among its leading lights were Charles Hodge (1797–1878) and Benjamin Warfield (1858–1921). Both sought to hold the line against the liberalism in biblical and theological studies that was raging in Europe, particularly in Germany. Their Old School Presbyterianism represented Calvinist orthodoxy, holding to a high standard of scholarship in the context of a warm evangelical spirit.

But the Princeton theologians were surely not spared fights and fragmentation. Even Princeton (previously known for biblical orthodoxy) became the target of those who were more conservative. Theologians wrangled and churches split in the wake of J. Gresham Machen’s blast against liberal theologians and ministers. A professor of New Testament at Princeton, Machen led what has been called a “conservative revolt” and left Princeton to form Westminster Theological Seminary in 1929. Later difficulties with the Northern Presbyterian Church prompted him, along with others in 1936, to form the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Splitting from him was the all-time king of splits, Carl McIntire, who founded the Bible Presbyterian denomination.

CARL McINTIRE: “P. T. BARNUM OF FUNDAMENTALISM”

For nearly three-quarters of a century, the irrepressible McIntire used Collingswood, New Jersey, as a launch pad for firing opinions on matters ranging from the Westminster Confession of Faith to the Communist Manifesto. At the height of his influence during the Cold War, McIntire’s empire extended from Collingswood, the home of his Bible Presbyterian Church and Faith Christian School, to Elkins Park, Pennsylvania (Faith Theological Seminary), Cape May, New Jersey (Shelton College), and Pasadena, California (Highlands College).

He ran a conference center in Florida and had designs for a theme park there that would have celebrated America’s military campaign in Vietnam. McIntire’s radio program, 20th Century Reformation Hour, reached homes throughout North America, until his bombast and blatant violation of the fairness doctrine prompted the Federal Communications Commission to force him off the air….

McIntire was so prone to separatism that … he separated from the very congregation he had formed 75 years earlier. His separatism recalled that of Roger Williams in the 17th century. A Puritan minister in Salem, Massachusetts, Williams parted ways with the Puritans in 1636, going away to Rhode Island, where in 1639 he formed the first congregation of Baptists in North America. Then he separated from them four years later. By the end of his life, Williams believed that only he and his wife were truly regenerate.

Randall Balmer, “Fundamentalist with a Flair.”

EVERYDAY LIFE

Muscular Christianity

With the increase of women’s public ministry, there was a corresponding backlash that only got louder at the turn of the twentieth century as well-known evangelists and church leaders like Evangeline Booth and Aimee Semple McPherson gained prominence. “Muscular Christianity” was a British reaction to the perceived feminine spirituality of the Victorian Age. D. L. Moody preached a masculine Christianity that appealed to Cambridge athletes.

Masculine organizations sprang up in Victorian times to challenge the spirituality of the day—spirituality that saw women as keepers of the home in charge of moral values, that is, keeping their husbands and children from falling into sin. Strong men were needed to reverse the domestication of religion and emphasize the “manliness of Christ.” Overseas mission ventures, whether to “savages” or to ancient civilizations, also corresponded with manly Christianity.

Muscular Christianity was also a reaction to what was perceived to be women’s dominance in the Sunday school movement and various other humanitarian endeavors. Male-oriented organizations included the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), Boy Scouts, and the Boys’ Brigade. Building athletic, muscular bodies was an important theme in the Christian novels of the day by Charles Kingsley, Thomas Hughes, and others. Indeed, a focus on sports was seen as a way to bring men into the church—a “net” to catch young men and bring them to Christ. One female critic of the YMCA accused the organization of hiding religion in sports “like a pill in strawberry jam.”

MEN AND RELIGION FORWARD MOVEMENT

With speeches by Bishop David H. Greer, John D. Rockefeller Jr., James G. Cannon, and many of this country’s most prominent clergymen and laymen, the Christian Conservation Congress of the Men and Religion Forward Movement held its final session yesterday at Carnegie Hall…. [D]uring the past two years [the movement] has held 7,062 meetings, with a total attendance of 1,500,000. It has led 7,580 men who were not church members to pledge themselves to personal allegiance to churches, and has inspired 26,000 men already church members to pledge themselves to active personal service…. “The National Committee of Ninety-seven has completed its labors, and now hands over the work of winning men to Christ’s service to the local organizations in the 1,000 towns and the seventy-five large cities in which the movement has been organized,” said Mr. Smith … while preparing to return to his place in the International Y.M.C.A. office here which he has held for twenty-four years.

The New York Times, April 25, 1912

This macho Christianity was not just for weightlifters and jocks, however. The Prayer Revival (1857–1858) that began in New York City was also referred to as the “businessmen’s revival.” That fact was not lost on those who had railed against the emotionalism of typical revivals that called forth weeping and falling down in trance-like states.

The term “muscular Christianity” had been used as early as the 1860s and was becoming a recognized theme in both Christian and secular periodicals. The height of the movement was seen in one of the most pointed efforts to set forth a masculine spirituality. An interdenominational, lay-led organization, the Men and Religion Forward Movement was launched in 1911. It was a not-so-subtle effort to replace feminized religion with a manly faith that was integrated with capitalism and rugged individualism—a precursor to Promise Keepers. Efforts to take the movement to China, Japan, the Philippines, and South Africa fizzled.

The more wide-ranging modernist-fundamentalist controversy pitted those emphasizing the social gospel against those stressing historic orthodoxy. It was an unfortunate dichotomy. Humanitarian outreach was certainly not confined to the “modernist” church. Robert Speer, long-time secretary for the Board of Presbyterian Foreign Missions, sought to walk the tightrope between the two sides, particularly regretting the unfortunate effect the fighting was having on mission outreach worldwide. He spoke for many evangelicals caught in the middle of the infighting. “I wish we could get up such a glow and fervor and onrush of evangelical and evangelistic conviction and action,” he wrote to a missionary in China, “that we would be swept clear past issues like the present ones so that men who want to dispute over these things could stay behind and do so, while the rest of us could march ahead, more than making up by new conquests for all the defections and losses of those who stay behind.”

The Salvation Army was determined to march ahead and remain above the fights and fragmentation. But even that movement was wracked by dissention.

Evangeline Booth: Salvation Army General

From 1904 to 1934, Evangeline Booth (1865–1950) served as Commander of the Salvation Army in the United States. That role ended when she was promoted to General of the Army. The Booth dynasty incorporated all the sons and daughters of William and Catherine Booth as high-ranking officers in this quasi-military movement, but Evangeline out-ranked them all in style and celebrity. Youth was not a deterrent to assuming key roles in the Salvation Army. In fact, when she was only fifteen she served as a sergeant in the dangerous streets of London. At twenty-one she was a corps officer and was known as the Army’s most effective trouble-shooter, with her father’s full support and confidence. Her three sisters would marry with their parents’ blessings, but Evangeline was her father’s favorite, and he was determined that no man would ever get between her and the singular demands of the Army.

Hardship, unbelief, suffering and poverty have not stopped our soldiery from rendering their service to God and man. The Salvation Army is a great empire, an empire without a frontier, made up of a tangle of races, tongues and colors such as never before in all history gathered together under one flag.

Evangeline Booth

But if Evangeline was denied a wedding for herself, she conducted many wedding ceremonies for others during her long ministerial career. Indeed, a true daughter of her mother, she was a remarkable feminist of her day. Like other women evangelists before and after her, she would conduct revival meetings. But she would be the first to wield authority as a female executive of a vast Christian corporation—coming to power in America long before the “Roaring Twenties” and the Nineteenth Amendment (1920) that gave women the right to vote.

Before she headed the Salvation Army in America, Evangeline served for ten years as Commander in Canada. During that time she held revivals in the mining boomtowns of the Yukon—towns rife with every sin and vice imaginable. She entered the region with a flourish, setting up medical centers and soup kitchens. “Vain in her appearance” and speaking with grand gestures, she captured the attention of the miners, bringing some twenty-five thousand together for a revival meeting. Among them was Soapy Smith, the most notorious outlaw of the region. He reportedly promised her that he would mend his ways, but vigilantes found him first.

She was a show-stopper, whether in small groups or mass meetings. On one occasion she was lowered into a mineshaft in an ore bucket, singing “Nearer, My God, to Thee” to the astonished miners. After becoming the American General, she continued to make headlines. Her “lassies” were among the first at the scene of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, and during World War I she sent them to the front lines to care for wounded soldiers, for which she was later honored by General Pershing. When she was appointed General of the Salvation Army in 1934, she was escorted by New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in a ticker-tape parade.

SALVATION ARMY “HALLELUJAH LASSIES”

Handbills with this message were distributed in Philadelphia in 1879:

Blood and fire! The Salvation Army

Two Hallelujah females

will speak and sing for Jesus

in the old chair factory

at Sixth and Oxford Streets

Oct. 5th at 11 a.m. 3m. 8m.

All are invited to attend.

Attendance on the first night was only twelve, but within weeks, the factory building was filled to capacity. The “Hallelujah Lassies” played a key roll in the early outreach ministry of the Salvation Army, though they were often the object of ridicule and the target of assault by street rowdies.

The seventh of eight children born to William and Catherine Booth, founders of the Salvation Army, Evangeline exhibited the best qualities of both. From her father she inherited a natural predisposition to lead a large organization with troops marching in lockstep behind her, and from her mother, an ability to capture the rapt attention of an audience and a strong sense of egalitarian ideals. From both she inherited a profound empathy for the poor.

Evangeline’s father, London pawnbroker William Booth (1829–1912), had been converted at a Methodist class meeting. Impressed by the “scientific” methods of Charles Finney, he vowed to be a different kind of evangelist. Instead of long sermons and conventional hymns, he attracted crowds with lively tunes that critics charged “belong to the devil.” Following the musical performance he would give a short pitch for salvation and issue calls for decisions while collecting names and inviting those interested to meet him for further instruction. Though poorly educated, he went on to serve as a minister of a small church. In this capacity he met his future wife, Catherine.

Catherine Mumford (1829–1890) was raised largely by her mother; her father was a lay Methodist minister brought down by alcoholism. Home-schooled, she was an eager student who loved reading the Bible and reveled in theological and historical studies. In 1851 she met William Booth and married him after a three-year engagement—waiting to make sure he was committed to an egalitarian marriage. Influenced by the ministry of Phoebe Palmer, she was convinced that God was calling her to preach. “Oh, that the ministers of religion would search the original record of God’s word,” she pleaded, “in order to discover … whether God really intended woman to bury her gifts and talents, as she now does.” Her ministry as a preacher began inauspiciously in her husband’s congregation, but soon she was preaching regularly to a more sophisticated congregation on London’s West End.

“GENERAL WILLIAM BOOTH ENTERS HEAVEN”

Booth led boldly with his big bass drum—

(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)

The Saints smiled gravely and they said:

“He’s come.” (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)

Walking lepers followed, rank on rank, Lurching bravoes from the ditches dank, Drabs from the alleyways and drug fiends pale—Minds still passion-ridden, soul-powers frail:–

Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath Unwashed legions with the ways of Death—(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?) …

Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931)

While Catherine was preaching in the West End of London, William raised support to operate a mission in East London in the midst of a filthy slum crowded with dilapidated tenement buildings and gin houses. There, in 1878, the Salvation Army is born. In the ensuing years Catherine and William work side by side while raising their eight children and preaching regularly on Sundays. Her ministry paves the way for young women to serve with men on equal terms. From the beginning the movement had welcomed women into its ranks. But in 1875, when Evangeline is ten, Clause 14 of the Foundation Deed specifies that women can hold “any office” and are permitted “to speak and vote” at official Army meetings.

BALLINGTON BOOTH

The Booth Children inherit their parents’ domineering personalities, all resenting their father’s authoritarian ways. Evangeline is the apple of his eye, but she locks horns with eldest son Bramwell; and second son Ballington locks horns with both Bramwell and his father—to the point of leaving the movement and starting his own similar organization, Volunteers of America, of which he becomes General.

The American secession was the most dramatic of the rebellions because Ballington, the proudest and the most impetuous of William Booth’s children, reacted to Bramwell’s instructions with a public show of defiance, which his brothers and sisters understood but deplored. Their discipline held.

Roy Hattersley, Blood and Fire

Pandita Ramabai: Founder of Mukti Mission

In the early twentieth century, as Evangeline Booth was assuming the role of American commander of the Salvation Army, a series of Pentecostal revivals broke out in southern Appalachia and around the world, none of them stirred up by well-known evangelists like Finney or Moody. One such “outpouring of the Spirit” occurred in the Welsh Revival of 1904, where it is estimated that some one hundred thousand were converted and experienced charismatic signs and miracles, with the expectation of the imminent return of Christ. The following year revival broke out at the Mukti Mission in India under the ministry of Pandita Ramabai. She had received word of the Welsh revival and was convinced that the same signs and wonders could occur at Mukti, where hundreds of young women and girls made their home. Frank Bartleman, an early Pentecostal leader, reflected on how worldwide revival was “rocked in the cradle of little Wales,” after which it was “brought up” in India, and finally became “full grown” at Azusa Street.

Pandita Ramabai

Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922) was born into a high-caste Hindu Brahmin family. Her father was a Sanskrit scholar always in search of religious truth. Convinced that girls should have the same educational opportunities as boys, he taught her to have an open and questioning mind. She learned Sanskrit as a young child and memorized thousands of Hindu stories and sayings. Then suddenly her life is turned upside-down. Amid economic hard times her father lost his wealth, circumstances that spurred him to take his family on a religious pilgrimage. Later, after her parents fell ill and died, she continued to travel with her brother in the search for truth, ever grateful for her father’s legacy and influence: “I am a child of a man who had to suffer a great deal on account of advocating Female Education,” she wrote. “I consider it my duty, to the very end of my life, to maintain this cause and to advocate the proper position of women in this land.”

Critical of her own culture’s perspective on women, she points out that Hindu belief is varied and inconsistent—except on the topic of a woman’s place. There is general agreement, she insists, “that women of high and low caste, as a class, [are] bad, very bad, worse than demons, as unholy as untruth” and that their only hope of being liberated from karma is “the worship of their husband”—the “woman’s god.” With the hope of reforming Hinduism, she travels, delivering lectures on women’s education. She gains recognition and is soon celebrated as a scholarly and sophisticated Indian reformer.

Alone after the death of her brother, she marries a lawyer. But his lower-caste status creates a stir. Indeed, in the eyes of many Indians she has disgraced herself—a disgrace that is not mitigated by her husband’s death. Now a widow, her options are severely limited, apart from her steadfast determination. Driven by her belief in gender equality, she establishes a women’s society with the aim of promoting female education and banning child marriages. During this time she develops a friendship with Sister Geraldine, an Anglican nun who invites her to visit England. Encouraged by Geraldine, she studies the Bible, makes profession of faith, and is soon thereafter baptized.

But she is not a compliant convert. Indeed, she challenges the creeds of the Christian faith even as she had challenged the beliefs of Hinduism. “I am, it is true, a member of the Church of Christ,” she writes to Geraldine, “but I am not bound to accept every word that falls down from the lips of priests or bishops.” She reminds Geraldine of her former faith: “I have just with great efforts freed myself from the yoke of the Indian priestly tribe, so I am not at present willing to place myself under another similar yoke by accepting everything which comes from the priests as authorized command of the Most High.” Geraldine reacts with dismay and expresses disappointment for her own role in Ramabai’s conversion.

BIOGRAPHIES INSPIRE THE FOUNDING OF THE MUKTI MISSION

About twelve years ago, I read the inspiring books, [Hudson Taylor’s] “The Story of the China Inland Mission,” “The Lord’s Dealings with George Muller,” and the “Life of John G. Paton,” founder of the New Hebrides Mission. I was greatly impressed with the experiences of these three great men…. I wondered after reading their lives, if it were not possible to trust the Lord in India as in other countries. I wished very much that there were some missions founded in this country that would be a testimony to the Lord’s faithfulness to His people, and the truthfulness of what the Bible says, in a practical way…. Then the Lord said to me, “Why don’t you begin to do this yourself, instead of wishing for others to do it?.”

Pandita Ramabai, “Telling Others.”

“I regret that I have been the cause of making you feel yourself wrong for the part you acted in my baptism,” Ramabai responds. “I wish I knew that your Church required a person to be quite perfect in faith, doubting nothing in the Athanasian Creed, so that he had left nothing to be learnt and inquired into the Bible after his baptism.”

Suspicious that the problem lies in Ramabai’s refusal to make a complete separation from Hinduism, Sister Geraldine is convinced that her unwillingness to eat egg-based puddings indicates she is “clinging to caste prejudice which ought to have been thrown to the winds.”

“You may, if you like, trace my pride in pies and puddings,” Ramabai fires back, “I confess I am not free from all my caste prejudices, as you are pleased to call them.” Then she turns the tables on Sister Geraldine: “How would an Englishwoman like being called proud and prejudiced if she were to go and live among the Hindus for a time but did not think it necessary to alter her customs when they were not hurtful or necessary to her neighbors?” She is determined to go her own way despite the criticism of Geraldine and other Western Christians. Hindu culture is Indian culture, she argues, and she is unapologetically a Hindu Christian. She refuses to break ties with Hindus, maintaining friendships and professional relationships. She also continues to read from Hindu scriptures, making them available to the girls at the Mukti mission as well. Her independence creates controversy among both Christians and Hindus, but she is undeterred. She reflects on her struggles with no regrets: “I am having a right good time in the storm of public indignation that is raging over my head.”

The Mukti Mission had been founded by Ramabai in 1889 as a place of refuge for young women, many of them widows who as little girls had been married to old men and then abandoned by their families. Mukti means ‘liberation’ in the Marathi tongue. Here the girls found love and liberation from a culture of rejection. Here they found not only a home but also health care, education, vocational training, and freedom to choose their own religious preference. Freedom was the operative philosophy. Ramabai was essentially a reformer who sought to emancipate Indian women from the tight restrictions that limited their options whether they were high or low caste.

She encouraged the girls to consider the tenets of Christianity, and many of them did so even before the outbreak of the “Pentecost” revival in 1905. Preceded by months of prayer, the “outpouring” resulted in thousands of conversions, often marked by weeping and tongues-speaking and miracles. The most spectacular miracle Ramabai reported was the provision of water during a drought so severe that the wells at the Mukti mission had gone dry. “Each of the two wells had all its contents used up every day,” she recalled. “But there came a fresh supply in the morning to each well, and it lasted all day.”

Many young women committed their lives to ministry, and in the ensuing years dozens of bands of female evangelists spread out through the region. A role model through her various ministries as a reformer, writer, poet, and Bible translator, Ramabai challenged the girls to find their own gifts and calling. She was recognized in India and England with prestigious awards both before and after her death, and she still stands today as a monument to freedom for women worldwide.

William Seymour: Azusa Street Revivalist

The Azusa Street Revival of 1906 in Los Angeles is widely regarded as the key event that launched the twentieth-century Pentecostal and charismatic movements. In itself, however, it was just another in a series of revivals and “outpourings” that had begun in the late nineteenth century. What is profoundly different in the case of Azusa Street is publicity. Indeed, it could be argued that this is a revival spurred largely by religious journalism—most notably the widely distributed stories of journalist Frank Bartleman. His accounts of miracles and transformed lives distributed to religious magazines throughout the country and around the world prompted pilgrims to visit and seek the same experiences. Ministers among the crowds returned home with Pentecostal enthusiasm and ignited revivals in their own congregations. But Azusa Street remained the “mother” of all Pentecostal revivals, thanks to Bartleman.

A skillful journalist, Bartleman zeroes in on a key personality. The man of the hour is William Seymour (1870–1922), a little-known African American evangelist. That his ministry, despite his low-key style, could gain such a wide following prompts Bartleman to conclude that “the color line was washed away in the Blood.” But others pounce on this “race mixing” perpetrated by the “dirty, collarless and uneducated” Seymour. From the Los Angeles Times comes the report that “colored people and a sprinkling of whites compose the congregation, and night is made hideous in the neighborhood by the howlings of the worshippers who spend hours swaying forth and back in a nerve-racking attitude of prayer and supplication.”

AGNES OZMAN AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY PENTECOSTALISM

On December 31, 1900, at a “watch-night” service at Bethel Bible School in Topeka, Kansas, student Agnes Ozman ushered in the twentieth-century Pentecostal movement. She was “the first person since biblical times to speak in tongues,” according to one report. Actually, countless Christians had spoken in tongues through the centuries, but without the publicity. The report that she had spoken in Chinese with a halo surrounding her head was heralded in apocalyptic terms as the key to worldwide evangelism that would hasten the return of Christ. The founder of Bethel Bible School, Charles Fox Parham, was a leading proponent of glossolalia (tongues-speaking) and a one-time follower of Benjamin Irwin and his “fire-baptized” gospel.

ALMA WHITE AND THE KKK

The first American woman to hold the office of bishop was Alma White (1862–1946), presiding over the denomination she founded in 1901, the Methodist Pentecostal Union Church in Denver, also known as the Pillar of Fire. White was a strong supporter of women’s equality, while at the same time arguing for white supremacy and collaborating with the Ku Klux Klan in an effort to deny African Americans basic rights. She was also anti-Semitic and stirred up opposition to immigrants, particularly Catholics. But her support of the Klan more than anything else brought her notoriety—support that included cross burning and the publication of three books that she wrote: The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy (1925), Klansmen: Guardians of Liberty (1926), and Heroes of the Fiery Cross (1928).

Born in Louisiana to parents who had spent their early years in slavery, Seymour had moved to Indiana and later Ohio, where he abandons his Baptist background for holiness teachings of sanctification and divine healing. Employment as a railway porter and a restaurant waiter offers him opportunities to develop his interpersonal skills. From Ohio he moves in 1903 to Houston to study at Charles Fox Parham’s Bible Training School. He is permitted to take courses, but only if he is properly segregated and listens from outside the classroom. Offended by such racism, he leaves, convinced that integration will hasten the return of Christ. But through Parham’s influence, tongues-speaking becomes a key aspect of his ministry as a lay preacher in Houston.

From Houston he accepts a call from a church in Los Angeles, only to be released soon after his arrival because of his Pentecostal leanings. Without a pulpit, he sets up shop in a run-down, abandoned building on Azusa Street. What is perhaps most unusual about the revival that follows is the personality of the preacher. “Meek and plain-spoken and no orator,” observes a contemporary, “he spoke the common language of the uneducated class. He might preach for three-quarters of an hour with no more emotionalism than that there post. He was no arm-waving thunderer by any stretch of the imagination.” While others are responding with great emotion, Seymour is typically kneeling in prayer with his head under a pulpit fashioned from shoebox crates.

Women played a major role in the ministry of the Azusa Street Revival. Among them is Florence Crawford, who angrily separated from Seymour in 1909, taking the ministry’s critical mailing list with her to Portland, Oregon, where she established her own Apostolic Faith Mission. Rumors spread that she was jealous of Jennie Evans Moore, who had become Seymour’s wife in 1908. Moore frequently preached while Seymour was traveling, and after his death in 1922, she carried on the ministry for nearly a decade.

Billy Sunday: Showman Evangelist

Among the successors of D. L. Moody, who had turned revival campaigns into big business, is Billy Sunday (1862–1935), who would turn preaching into a stage performance. Like Moody, Sunday was profoundly influenced by the poverty of his widowed mother who reluetantly relinquished him to an orphanage. Both evangelists appealed to the common man. But Sunday, more than any revivalist before him, preached a manly gospel—”muscular Christianity.”

A lover of sports, Sunday rises through the ranks in baseball to play for eight years with the Chicago Whitestockings (now White Sox). He entertains the crowds with his lightening speed, running the bases in a record fourteen seconds. But stealing bases is his specialty, with ninety-four steals in one season. He also enjoys a good time—anything that involves drinking. One Sunday in 1886, while loitering on a street corner in Chicago, a rescue mission band marches by, playing hymns his mother had sung to him when he was a child. He follows the band back to the Pacific Garden Mission, where he is converted.

Billy Sunday

Leaving baseball behind, he works with the YMCA and later joins evangelist J. Wilbur Chapman on the revival circuit. As the advance man, he learns the revival business from the ground up. When Chapman takes a settled ministry in Philadelphia in 1895, Sunday is asked to fill his schedule. His initial success spurs him to launch into full-time evangelism. In 1901 he hires a singer and directs revival organizers to erect wooden tabernacles for his meetings. By 1904 he has his own advance man as well as an architect to design the tabernacles and supervise their inexpensive construction. Sawdust on the dirt floor minimizes dust, and thus the phrase “hitting the sawdust trail” emerges as a synonym for conversion. In 1909 he hires Homer Rodeheaver as songleader, a twosome that lasts for more than two decades.

Referring to himself as the “rube of rubes” because of his rural background, he gestures wildly, and every sermon becomes a dramatic show. He waves his arms and shakes his fists; he runs and jumps and gyrates, sometimes smashing chairs in a “rage against Satan.” He mocks and chides everything from saloons to “dandy” preachers: “I want to preach the gospel so plainly that men can come from the factories and not have to bring a dictionary.” But his plain speaking often draws criticism. “I don’t believe your own bastard theory of evolution,” he howls to his opponents. “I believe it’s pure jackass nonsense.” Evolution is not his only enemy. He rails against the fashion of the Roaring Twenties. “It’s a damnable insult some of the rigs a lot of fool women are wearing up and down our streets,” he fumes. But his harshest attacks are against alcohol—its invention causing a “jubilee in hell.” Indeed, his sermons are so effective that people are said to abandon alcohol in droves. After a campaign in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, bars reportedly close for lack of business.

Billy Sunday preaching

Such skillful boob-bumpers as the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday know what that culture is; they know what the crowd wants. Thus they convert the preaching of the alleged Word of God into a rough-and-tumble pursuit of definite sinners—saloon-keepers, prostitutes, Sabbath-breakers, believers in the Darwinian hypothesis, German exegetes, [bookies], poker-players, adulterers, cigarette-smokers, users of profanity. It is the chase that heats up the great mob of Methodists, not the Word.

H. L. Mencken

Sunday also links his message to patriotism. In one sermon during World War I, he calls on God, in no uncertain terms, to damn the Germans. When the government announces registration for the draft, Sunday purchases $25,000 worth of liberty bonds. In another sermon he announces that if hell could be turned over, it would be stamped “Made in Germany.” But by the 1930s, Sunday’s influence is waning as cultural values change and other evangelists come to the fore.

Aimee Semple McPherson: Founder of Foursquare Gospel

Coming to the revival stage on the heels of Sunday is Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944). A Canadian with Salvation Army and Methodist roots, she is converted to Pentecostalism through Robert Semple, soon to become her husband and a missionary to China. His death two years later in 1910 leaves her alone with a baby daughter. In 1912 she marries Harold McPherson and soon after gives birth to a boy. In the years following, while her marriage unravels, she travels as an evangelist across the United States and Canada with her mother, Minnie Kennedy.

MEL TROTTER

Like Billy Sunday, Mel Trotter was awakened spiritually through the ministry of the Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago. The son of an alcoholic, Trotter developed the same patterns as his father, losing one job after another. Blaming himself for the death of his small son, he vowed never to drink again. Two hours later he was stone cold drunk. Making his way to Chicago from his home in lowa, he was converted through the ministry of Harry Monroe, director of the mission. He worked as an assistant for Monroe until a group of businessmen from Grand Rapids, Michigan, contacted him to start mission work there.

Beginning in 1900, Trotter’s ministry blossomed. He organized a mission Sunday school, attracting hundreds of children, and soon he was presiding over the largest rescue mission in the country. His wife, Martha, joined in the work, reaching out to homeless women and prostitutes. But there were difficult times as well. During World War I, he had gone on the road to minister to troops. “After twenty months of work in the Army,” he wrote, “I returned home to find everything gone that is dear to the heart.” His wife had left him and later brought him to court “on the most horrible charge.” News of the scandal quickly spread. “While I was thoroughly vindicated [in 1922] by the decree, I became a marked man literally around the world.” He was soon back on the speaking circuit, however, conducting revivals and preaching at conferences through the 1930s.

THE RISE OF WOMEN PREACHERS

So it is with women preachers. They do good, but how much harm they do! First, the rise of women preachers has meant the rise of multiplied sects of people with false doctrines of every kind…. [For example,] Mrs. Aimee Semple McPherson and the so-called “Foursquare Gospel,” Pentecostalism and its vast majority of women preachers with the blight of sinless perfection doctrine, radical emotionalism, “speaking in tongues” and trances, its overemphasis on healing…. Women preachers have given the world an impression that Christians are emotionally unstable, that preaching is a racket.

John R. Rice, Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers

Launching her coast-to-coast revival ministry in Los Angeles in 1919, she soon becomes a household name and an evangelical star. Clad in fashionable flowing white gowns and wearing makeup and jewelry, the glamorous “Sister Aimee” brings sex appeal to the stage. Adding props to the platform, she makes Billy Sunday’s performances seem stale. On one occasion, she arrives on stage aboard a motorcycle and dressed as a traffic officer—one of her many dramatic openings. Unlike Sunday, she settles down in ministry. In 1922 she founds the Foursquare Gospel, and the following year she builds her own megachurch in Los Angeles. Angelus Temple has a seating capacity of more than five thousand and is a Southern California tourist attraction. In 1924 she goes on the air with her own radio station. Pentecostalism has come a long way in the less than two decades since the Azusa Street Revival.

The scandal of Pentecostalism in the first two decades of the century had been its “racemixing” and the low social status of its adherents, both black and white. McPherson changes that, not only through outward appearances of success but also through her close connections to Hollywood and key local political leaders. Media consultants manage publicity as money pours in. But beneath the surface there is loneliness and depression.

Aimee Semple McPherson

The Angelus Temple, started by McPherson

The disappearance of Sister Aimee, reportedly while swimming at the beach on May 18, 1926, quickly captures the nation’s attention. Teams in airplanes and watercraft search the waters along the coast, while thousands of her followers keep vigil on the shore. No trace of her can be found. Finally, after weeks of accusations and rumors, she appears from out of the desert near Douglas, Arizona. She tells reporters and law enforcement officers that she has been kidnapped, tortured, and held hostage in Mexico. Was she really the victim of shadowy criminals who inadvertently allowed her to escape by walking thirteen hours and made no attempt to recapture her? Her detractors argue that she showed no signs of having undergone a month of torture, nor is there any other evidence to support the kidnapping claim apart from her own testimony. Theories and rumors abound—most specifically that she had spent the time with a married man, Kenneth Ormiston, her radio operations manager.

Aimee McPherson with her “gospel car.”

Charged with perjury by the Los Angeles district attorney, “Sister Aimee” weathers the storm, especially after the court case is dropped in 1927. In 1931 she marries again, only to divorce three years later. Public feuds with her mother also bring scandal, and when she dies in 1944, rumors surface that the overdose of barbiturates might not have been accidental. But through it all Sister Aimee is what might be described as the “Teflon evangelist.” Scandal does not stick long enough to smear her success as a Pentecostal leader and as founder of the Church of the Foursquare Gospel that grows to more than two million in the decades after her death.

Some church leaders judged McPherson’s ministry to be nothing more than a show and a sham. But the records show Angelus Temple as a haven for the poor and disadvantaged, especially during the Great Depression. Actor Anthony Quinn later spoke of the fear that immigrants had of coming forward requesting aid. “During the Depression,” he related, “the one human being that never asked you what your nationality was, what you believed in and so forth, was Aimee Semple McPherson. All you had to do was pick up the phone and say, ‘I’m hungry,’ and within an hour there’d be a food basket there for you.”

J. FRANK NORRIS: A TWO-GUN PARSON

During most of the first half of the twentieth century, John Franklyn Norris (1877–1952) was the minister of the Fort Worth, Texas, First Baptist Church, known as the “home of the cattle kings.” The richest church in Texas, it had a sister church in Detroit and a total membership of some twenty-five thousand. When Norris’s efforts to shut down a house of prostitution failed, he began advertising his Sunday evening sermons as forums for exposing the names of clients. Crowds overflowed the auditorium, and a tent was erected. The mayor ordered the tent removed, leading to a prolonged conflict between mayor and preacher and their supporters. In February of 1912, the church was burned to the ground, and a month later the Norris home was burned. The mayor was blamed, but Norris (rumored to have planned the arson in order to blame others) was the primary suspect though never charged. Another conflict erupted in 1925 when Norris sought to avert a land purchase by local Catholics. A city hall official came to Norris’s office, and, according to Norris, threatened him. Norris pulled out his gun, fired four shots, and killed the man—muscular Christianity at work. He claimed self-defense, the jury agreed, and he was found “not guilty.” Other Baptists were embarrassed by his behavior and parted company with him, but his radio audience grew as he increased his attacks against Catholics, communists, and organized labor. His influence impressed politicians, including Herbert Hoover, who invited him to his inauguration in 1929. Norris stands out as the premier “fighting fundamentalist” of the 1920s.

John Sung: Asian Intellectual and Evangelist

In 1944, the same year that McPherson died in California, another church leader on the other side of the world died. One of the most extraordinary evangelists of the twentieth century, John Sung (1901–1944) has been all but forgotten in the Western world today. Born in Southeast China, he was the sixth child of an impoverished Chinese Methodist preacher. His mother, the wife in an arranged marriage, was a fervent Buddhist until she converted to Christianity the year before John was born.

Following in his father’s footsteps, young Sung becomes recognized throughout the region as a celebrated boy preacher. He accompanies his father on preaching missions, and when his father is ill or engaged in other activities, he preaches his father’s sermons that he has memorized. After completing secondary school in 1919 he is contacted by an American woman offering to fund his education at Ohio Wesleyan University. A brilliant student, he graduates in 1923 with highest honors; he is elected to Phi Beta Kappa and awarded the gold medal and the cash prize for physics and chemistry. So remarkable are his academic achievements that newspapers around the country publish his story. The following year he completes a master’s degree at Ohio State University, and in 1926 he is awarded a Ph.D. in chemistry.

Despite invitations to join faculties at various American universities, Sung is having second thoughts about pursuing an academic career. Unable to set aside the sense of calling to the ministry he felt years earlier, he takes the advice of a friend and enrolls at Union Theological Seminary. Here he is introduced to a liberal theology that is difficult to refute. Facing doubts and depression, he turns to the religion of his ancestors and begins to chant Buddhist scriptures. He also studies Taoism, hoping to find peace. But the more he searches, the more confused and distressed he becomes. “My soul wandered in a wilderness,” he later confessed. “I could neither sleep nor eat. My faith was like a leaking, storm-driven ship without captain or compass. My heart was filled with the deepest unhappiness.”

In the midst of his struggles he is invited to attend nightly meetings at New York City’s Calvary Baptist Church, where the celebrated fundamentalist preacher John Roach Straton is minister. He had been told that the speaker would be Dr. Haldeman, a brilliant Bible scholar—a man whose message would address his doubts. Instead, the speaker is Uldine Utley, a fifteen-year-old evangelist whose simple message has no correlation with his intellectual struggles. But as he listens to her, he is reminded of his own childhood preaching. He returns the following nights to hear her preach, and as a result his life is transformed.

Back at the seminary he spends his nights praying and his days reciting Scripture and singing—and evangelizing Union seminary students. Convinced that he is mentally unstable, administrators admit him to a psychiatric hospital, where he is confined for more than six months against his will. During this time he reads through the Bible some forty times and shares his faith with other patients. Released in August of 1927 through the intervention of the Chinese Department of State, he returns to China to follow his call to ministry. Working under the auspices of the Bethel Mission, he is on a nonstop preaching circuit, traveling to more than thirty cities and speaking at nearly nine hundred meetings in a six-month period. Thousands join the Bethel Bands as full-time evangelists.

In 1934 Sung launches out on his own, and in the following years he travels throughout China, often speaking to crowds of thousands. He also travels to the Philippines, Formosa (Taiwan), Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand, where thousands more are converted and enrolled in his locally organized Bible training centers. Here his ministry is multiplied as students spend half their days evangelizing neighboring communities.

Despite his success, many missionaries view him as a sensationalist performer and resent his criticism of them. Yet most concede that he has a connection with the Asian people that has eluded them, burdened as they are with their Western cultural baggage. In 1942, after fifteen years of exhausting ministry, health problems force his retirement at age forty. He dies two years later, leaving a ministry that lives on into the next generations.

This was an era of transformation. The revivalism featuring Salvation Army bands and a down-trodden Azusa Street Mission had come of age in the “Roaring Twenties” with theatrical performances and Hollywood connections. Wrapping itself in popular culture and patriotism, it positioned itself against the high-profile sins of the day. Conversion consisted of receiving Jesus and renouncing booze.

What if …

What if William Booth had gone through life as an obscure pawnbroker? What if Catherine Mumford had decided he was simply not the right one for her? What if Evangeline had not expanded the ministry in America and worldwide? What is the significance today of the Salvation Army?

What if Pandita Ramabai had not had the opportunity to read biographies of great ministers and mission leaders? Would she have launched out on her own as a faith mission leader without the examples of others to follow? What if the early decades of revivalism had been initiated by individuals like William Seymour rather than stars like Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson? How might evangelicalism look today if it had grown to maturity with a humble spirit?

22. Fragmentation and Revival: Salvation Army to Foursquare Gospel

22. Fragmentation and Revival: Salvation Army to Foursquare Gospel

CHAPTER 22

Fragmentation and Revival

Salvation Army to Foursquare Gospel

PARADE OF HISTORY

FIRE-BAPTIZED RELIGION

CARL McINTIRE: “P. T. BARNUM OF FUNDAMENTALISM”

EVERYDAY LIFE

MEN AND RELIGION FORWARD MOVEMENT

Evangeline Booth: Salvation Army General

SALVATION ARMY “HALLELUJAH LASSIES”

“GENERAL WILLIAM BOOTH ENTERS HEAVEN”

BALLINGTON BOOTH

Pandita Ramabai: Founder of Mukti Mission

BIOGRAPHIES INSPIRE THE FOUNDING OF THE MUKTI MISSION

William Seymour: Azusa Street Revivalist

AGNES OZMAN AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY PENTECOSTALISM

ALMA WHITE AND THE KKK

Billy Sunday: Showman Evangelist

Aimee Semple McPherson: Founder of Foursquare Gospel

MEL TROTTER

THE RISE OF WOMEN PREACHERS

J. FRANK NORRIS: A TWO-GUN PARSON

John Sung: Asian Intellectual and Evangelist

What if …

Further Reading