I am reading Harvey Cox, Fire From Heaven (1995), an account and explanation of the Pentecostal movement that began in the Azusa Street church revival of Black preacher, William Seymour, in 1906, in Los Angeles. Pentecostalism is considered today (Cox reports in 1995) the fastest growing religious affiliation around the world, numbering between 500 million and one billion members. Harvey Cox is Professor of Religion at the Harvard Divinity School. He is an esteemed member of the Judeo-Christian-Northeastern interfaith elite that the acts as the intelligentsia for the Blue States. He is the author of several influential studies of the place of religion in contemporary society. He considers himself a student of the great existentialist Lutheran theologian, Paul Tillich (a man whose ideas I also greatly respect). I think that Cox fits into the category of a postmodern religious thinker.
Cox did not study Pentecostalism from the inside or as a believer. He developed out of a Quaker family background, with apostasy on one side--an uncle slipped into the Baptist Church and occasionally brought young Harvey Cox along with him. From the quietist perspective of the Quakers, reinforced by the solitary intellectual life of the academic scholar, Cox was unsympathetic to the vivid expressionism and primitive qualities of Pentecostal worship and prayer. His study of the movement did not convince him of Pentecostalism, but it begrudgingly earned his judgment that something was going on in Pentecostalism.
The question is, what was (is) going on in Pentecostalism? I knew, after reading the first few chapters, that Cox was going to have a hard time understanding what was going on because of the approaches he takes to the phenomenon. First, Cox is intrigued by the sociological characteristics of the early members of the Pentecostal movement. Men and women, Black and white, Pentecostals are from the lowest rungs of American society. They are, to use a word that Cox does not use, members of the proletariat. From the start, Cox explains the Pentecostals, as much as he describes them. Explanation is a distancing maneuver typical of social science. It turns the subjects into objects, though it does not dehumanize them. So Cox sees membership in Pentecostalism as a product of working class alienation from the insecurities of modern capitalist society. Capitalism has alienated the workers from society; it has alienated them from themselves. To overcome this alienation, workers join the Pentecostal movement, because Pentecostalism is a religion of experience (rather than creed or doctrine). It is primitive. It emphasizes wholeness of emotion.
This kind of explanation of social commitment was developed by the Frankfurt School, an influential band of German scholars in the 1920s and 1930s, who fused Marxism and Freudian analysis in an effort to understand the rise of the Nazi movement. Cox is intimating that Pentecostalism is a kind of fascism.
Second, Cox uses a Marxist scheme of categories to describe the Pentecostals. Not only are the members proletarians; proletarianism is a fundamental unitary category. It is more basic, as a unit of society and as a category of sociological analysis, than race or gender. Indeed, race and gender would be (from a Marxist/postmodern perspective) socially constructed categories imposed onto proletarianism. Cox sees something admirable in this characteristic of Pentecostalism. Pentecostalism has been an inter-racial movement with integrated congregations. Pentecostalism had the potential to overcome the division (and opposition) between Black and white that capitalism has created.
This sociological analysis is a kind of naturalism; it is a naturalistic description and explains Pentecostalism in debunking way. For Harvey, Pentecostalism is not necessarily false religion. He sees it as "primal" or "primitive" religious expression. This description of "primal" in connection with Pentecostalism's African American origin is, unintentionally perhaps, an embarrassing racialism. Whatever it is, Pentecostalism is not "true". Whatever the writhings, weeping, singing, ecstatic emotionalism of a Pentecostal prayer might be, it is not genuinely the result of God's spirit pouring into the congregation. Indeed, given the naturalist approach Harvey uses, he could arrive at no other conclusion. Conveniently, to discover that Pentecostalism is not true protects as true Cox's elite brand of Christianity.
There are different approaches to understanding Pentecostalism that Cox might have taken, but did not. He might have taken a phenomenological approach. I think that phenomenology can be a dangerous technique, especially as, for instance, Heidegger used it; but it is useful for recovering the reality of religious experience.
A phenomenological approach would have given Cox the means to appreciate what was genuine and real in the Pentecostal experience. We might say, for instance, that the working class origins of Pentecostals did not alienate them or push them, in the sense of cause them, to become members of Pentecostalism, where they had their interesting primal experiences. Rather, being of the working class created an opening in their lives in which genuinely novel experience could happen (the Pentecostal person is authentic, to use the existential language). As working class persons, they were not encumbered with the learned naturalistic ideology that prohibits Cox, for instance, from experiencing God's Holy Spirit. Within this opening, they are receptive to the Holy Spirit. I suppose this way of expressing the Pentecostal situation might be parallel to the doctrine of Grace. The sinner cannot receive God's Grace until she has situated herself and disowned the pride that blocks Grace.
What Cox's approach prevents him from seeing and from saying is, the Pentecostals really are experiencing God. God is not what they think they are experiencing. God is actually what, in the Pentecostals' experiences, the Pentecostals are experiencing. It is Cox, not the Pentecostal, who is alienated.
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