If the Spirit Moves You

ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts.

BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh, and I’m here with Peter Onuf.

PETER: Hey Brian.

BRIAN: Ed Ayers is away this week.

We’re going to start off today in Los Angeles in 1906. Here’s the scene, an African American preacher named William Seymour stood before a crowd of worshippers in an empty warehouse. The dilapidated buildings sat on a rundown strip called Azusa Street, and had recently housed livestock.

ESTRELDA ALEXANDER: So there was sawdust on the floor, there were no seats, the altar was makeshift orange crates—two or three of them sat on top of each other.

BRIAN: This is author Estrelda Alexander. She says no congregation in America resembled Seymour’s. First off, the soft-spoken preacher wasn’t in charge. Instead, the congregants directed the action in a raucous cacophony of song and dance. They beat washboards and tambourines. They even became possessed by the Holy Spirit.

ESTRELDA ALEXANDER: There was a lot of loud praising—hallelujah, thank you Jesus, whatever came to people’s minds. There was also outbursts of speaking in tongues—that happened regularly—and there was also outbursts of prophetic messages. So it was loud, it was so loud that often the neighbors called the police.

BRIAN: This was a new form of Christian worship, now known as Pentecostalism. Seymour’s church was also unique because of who came to worship. African Americans, white Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, and immigrants from China, Japan, and Europe—they all flocked to the storefront church.

ESTRELDA ALEXANDER: People of different races actually embracing, and touching, and singing and dancing with each other.

BRIAN: Between 1906 and 1909, tens of thousands of people joined the Azusa Street Revival. At its peak, services were held around the clock, seven days a week. Los Angeles even earned the nickname the American Jerusalem.

But many Americans looked at this new form of worship with contempt. A 1906 LA Times article described the congregation as a quasi-cult, warning its readers of a new sect of fanatics breaking loose.

MALE SPEAKER: Night is made hideous in the neighborhood by the howlings of the worshippers, who spend hours swaying forth and back in a nerve-wracking attitude of prayer and supplication. They claim to have the gift of tongues, and be able to understand the babble.

BRIAN: Other Americans were offended by Azusa Street’s embrace of integration. At the time, racial segregation was the custom, if not the law of the land. But Alexander says that racial inclusiveness is exactly what attracted all kinds of people to Azusa Street, and they found empowerment in the church’s message that everyone—no matter how humble or broken—has direct access to the Holy Spirit. The prophecies, the miracles, the speaking in tongues—well, that was the proof.

ESTRELDA ALEXANDER: You’re a lowly farmer, you’re a lowly drug story clerk, but you come into a movement where you are able to invoke the name of God to bring about divine healing. Or somebody comes into the meeting and they are an alcoholic, and they come to the altar and they are prayed for, and they get up and they walk away from alcoholism. And this sense of empowerment is not just an emotional high, but it’s life changing.

BRIAN: By the 1920s, the Azusa Street revival largely fizzled, but the raucous spirit of the Pentecostal movement quickly spread through the South, Midwest, and eventually worldwide. Missionaries from Azusa Street tried to maintain racially-mixed services, but once they moved outside LA, that was dangerous. So the movement split into mostly separate black and white denominations.

PETER: Nevertheless, Pentecostalism is the fastest growing branch of Christianity today, with nearly 300 million followers worldwide. And Estrelda Alexander says that there’s a reason that this religious movement first took off in the American West, a land where people were searching for a fresh start.

ESTRELDA ALEXANDER: What made the difference in America, I think, is the openness. This was a pioneer country. Even in 1900, we were still pioneers, we were still open to testing and trying new things.

PETER: Those are just a few of the factors that have made the United States such fertile soil for new religions and expressions of faith.

BRIAN: Today, we’ll be exploring some of those American religions, and the charismatic figures who built them, from Mary Baker Eddy and the origins of Christian Science, to Brigham Young and the Mormon settlement of Utah. We’ll also look at way the Church of Scientology was shaped by the hunt for Cold War communists.

PETER: But first, let’s back up and look at the birth of a new religion before the American Revolution.