Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostalism, Spirituality, and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century.

ALAS FOR THE brevity of human fame. In the Sixties the Harvard theologian Harvey Cox was famous for a book called Religion in the Secular City. That book welcomed the modern world as a Christian epiphany and was designed to address the needs of a religionless society, such as some academic sages of that time confidently predicted. Indeed, some thought Mr. Cox himself one of those sages, and he was generally said to have provided a sociological extension of the writings of the "Death of God" set.

These days, however, he has read Gilles Kepel's The Revenge of God and is hot-footing it in the reverse direction. As for his youthful indiscretion in the Sixties, he blames that on taking professional sociologists too seriously. It appears that had he followed his deeper instincts he might even then have seen that the experts had got it all wrong. Happily the deeper instincts have now fully recovered their proper sway. A liberated Mr. Cox emerges as propagandist for a worldwide religious renaissance, and one best illustrated by the rise of Pentecostalism.

As a sociologist who criticized the "secularization thesis" way back in the Sixties and who has spent some eight years closeted with the implications of Pentecostalism, I am as intrigued now by his reconversion as I once was by his secular enthusiasm. Perhaps something quite touching is going on here. Maybe Pentecostalism has stirred up memories of a Baptist childhood, enabling him to give a lively account of the feel of the movement, as well as to grasp the central issues. Unfortunately, there is in Harvey Cox a hint of Jimmy Swaggart. Both of them are endowed with thespian and rhetorical gifts which would have carried them far in the arts but can be a nuisance when it comes to religion. What we have here is a semi-autobiographical travelogue spiced with talk-show interviews, after-dinner hearsay, and halfdigested gobbets of half-remembered conferences.

The book will sell. No doubt most members of the general public picking it up in the stores will accept the extraordinary claim, on page 1 of my review copy, that before Mr. Cox, Pentecostalism was "largely unexamined." With no fussy old footnotes to suggest otherwise, only very assiduous readers will glean the contrary from the generalized bibliography tucked away at the back. For that matter, there are probably plenty of readers ready to swallow statistics that even Mr. Cox cites with an air of breathless amazement. Take these seriously and you will soon be committed to the proposition that the total number of Pentecostals exceeds the total number of Protestants.

Perhaps Mr. Cox's conversion should be treated as a portent, because this kind of labile mentality acts as a radar screen, picking up whatever is on the way. Let Pentecostals note with modest alarm that their progress has won them so doubtful a piece of promotion.

I will take two examples of Mr. Cox's style, one from the chapter on Latin America and one from the chapter on Europe. In the former he suggests that he, as a "critical participant," is especially well placed to interpret "multifaceted" Pentecostalism. One prepares for a novel analysis.

Yet, with proper caution, Mr. Cox sets aside such a demanding enterprise and directs our attention instead to, for instance, confused chats he had over a codfish lunch in Rio. We are told that at this lunch the invitees became remarkably stimulated and eventually waxed contentious about the social sources of Pentecostalism. An amused and emboldened Mr. Cox now dares to enquire in high rhetorical tones just what the muddled commentators have to propose about the paradoxes of Pentecostalism, which he proceeds to list. How is it that the Pentecostals combine authority and spontaneity, their special appeal to women and their restoration of respect for men, their other-worldliness and their interest in material betterment in this world? You might almost suppose these paradoxes had been evaded by social scientists when, in fact, researchers have spent a great deal of time on their elucidation. Spontaneity, for example, relies on the boundaries set by authority. Could it be that it is the voluminous literature on the subject that has gone "largely unexamined"? If so, that would go a long way toward explaining why Mr. Cox concludes that Pentecostalism has the social scientists "baffled" and confounded.

Precisely the same insouciance turns up in the chapter on Europe. Here Mr. Cox again endeavors to show how the "experts," gathered at a Harvard conference in 1993, got it all wrong in suggesting that Europe is exceptionally resistant to the worldwide religious renaissance. As in the case of Latin America, you expect a review of literature and empirical data to sustain his contrary hypothesis. What we actually get is some brief references to the light dusting of Pentecostalism from Palermo to Kiev, alongside some racy anecdotes about personal encounters with Anglo-Caribbean Pentecostals. The Pentecostal presence in Europe is certainly of considerable interest, but it hardly refutes the argument about Europe being exceptionally secular. But then, curiously, Mr. Cox turns aside to offer a prolonged discussion of Pentecostalism in Sicily.

Mr. Cox introduces this topic with some low humor about anthropology being usually about chipped pottery or shrunken heads. He then makes an exception for some articles he has come across by Salvatore Cucchiari on Sicilian Pentecostalism. I have read these articles and greatly admire them, especially since they solve a particular puzzle about how Catholics cope with the loss of the consolations of the Virgin. What, however, does Mr. Cox do with them? After courteously introducing Mr. Cucchiari on page 192, he goes on to say that though he has himself not been to Sicily, what Mr. Cucchiari says of Pentecostals there "turned out to be true for the churches I attended on the mainland." This rather ignores the fact that Mr. Cucchiari's work is only marginally based on visits to churches. But in any case, after the introduction, Mr. Cucchiari's voice rapidly melts into Mr. Cox's own so as to make it quite unclear whose analysis this is. At no point is it stated that the substance of pages 192-203 is Salvatore Cucchiari's (or, alternatively, that Mr. Cox has independently devised an argument along amazingly similar lines). Surely when the argument of a junior scholar is deployed in extenso, every effort should be made to ensure unequivocal attribution throughout. It is just one further illustration of how a potentially valuable and insightful book has been ruined by carelessness.

So much for Harvey Cox. If readers desire to consult genuinely authoritative work on Pentecostalism and charismatic movements generally, then they should read a new volume edited by Karla Poewe, Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture (University of South Carolina). This is of particular value for presenting field work but also for broader reflections by such major scholars as Walter Hollenweger, the dean of Pentecostal studies. Professor Poewe herself offers a rich and wideranging introduction. Another important volume is Le Protestantisme en Amerique Latine, by Jean-Pierre Bastian (published by Labor et Fides, in France). Mr. Bastian is the doyen of socio-historical studies of the long-term infiltration of Latin America by Protestantism. He speaks with a special authority, even though I disagree with his characterization of Pentecostalism as not really novel but an indigenous re-animation of the spirit of popular Catholicism, minus priests. These are simply the legitimate disagreements thrown up by the field--not due to the bafflement of a well-known scholar.