Pentecostalism

Pentecostalism, an early twentieth‐century religious movement among American evangelicals that connected the baptism of the Holy Spirit with speaking in tongues (the Pentecost experience described in the New Testament). Pentecostals believe that all Christians may receive spiritual gifts and that those anointed by the Holy Spirit can work mighty signs and miracles. Though the rise of Pentecostalism cannot be traced to a single event, important dates in the movement's early history include an outbreak of speaking in tongues (glossolalia), considered evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, on New Year's Day 1901 in a Topeka, Kansas, Bible school operated by the itinerant evangelist Charles F. Parham (1873–1929), and a three‐year‐long revival at the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles (1906–1909) that precipitated worldwide interest.

In the succeeding years, scores of small Pentecostal sects sprang up; the most successful were the Assemblies of God church and the Church of God. Growing slowly at first, the Pentecostal churches expanded rapidly after 1950, both in the United States and abroad. Early Pentecostal churches flourished among the poor; they often challenged accepted practices by ordaining women and forming racially integrated churches. Segregation appeared by the 1920s, however, and one of the largest late twentieth‐century Pentecostal denominations was the predominantly African American Church of God in Christ.

After World War II a pan‐Pentecostal revival erupted, spawning a generation of independent evangelists, including Oral Roberts (1918– ) and Jimmy Swaggart (1935– ). These preachers, along with ecumenically minded Pentecostal leaders such as David Du Plessis (1905–1987), encouraged the spread of the charismatic movement to mainstream Protestant churches and the Roman Catholic church.

In all of its modern variations—Pentecostal denominations, independent ministries and churches, and charismatic movements within Protestantism and Roman Catholicism—Pentecostal religion strongly influenced twentieth‐century American Christianity and transformed the religious demography of much of the developing world.
See also African American Religion; McPherson, Aimee Semple; Religion; Televangelism.

Bibliography

David Edwin Harrell Jr. , All Things Are Possible, 1975.
Robert Mapes Anderson , Vision of the Disinherited, 1979.
Edith L. Blumhofer, Russell P. Spittler, and Grant A. Wacker, eds., Pentecostal Currents in American Protestantism, 1999.
Grant Wacker , Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture, 2001.

David Edwin Harrell Jr.