Brad speaks with journalist Elle Hardy about her new book, Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity is Taking Over the World. How has a Christian movement, founded at the turn of the twentieth century by the son of freed slaves, become the fastest-growing religion on Earth? Pentecostalism has 600 million followers; by 2050, they’ll be one in ten people worldwide. This is the religion of the Holy Spirit, with believers directly experiencing God and His blessings: success for the mind, body, spirit and wallet.
Pentecostalism is a social movement. It serves impoverished people in Africa and Latin America, and inspires anti-establishment leaders from Trump to Bolsonaro. In Australia, Europe and Korea, it throws itself into culture wars and social media, offering meaning and community to the rootless and marginalized in a fragmenting world.
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Find Elle Hardy's book here: https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/beyond-belief/
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show starts in a partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
And today I'm joined by an amazing guest, someone who I had to stop for half an hour, 45 minutes in between world travels and just going from here and there to chase down stories.
And that is Elle Hardy.
So Elle, I'll just say first, thanks for joining me.
Thanks for having me.
It's a huge thrill to be here.
So we're going to talk about your book, which has been out just a little while here, but it's called Beyond Belief, How Pentecostal Christianity is Taking Over the World.
Let me tell people about you first.
You're an Australian-born journalist.
As I said, it seems as if your life is spent here and there and everywhere from the UK to Australia to the US, but Many other places in between, as we'll talk about today.
You've reported from the US, but also from the former Soviet Union, and written for the Times, GQ, Guardian, Outline, Monocle, and the list goes on and on and on.
So first, I do want to say that I do count myself lucky to be an academic because I get to read and write and think and do this podcast and I've kind of thought of myself as, you know, a cosmopolitan person who's done things.
But then I read your book and you are just, it's just like another dimension of the investigative journalist who is in Guatemala and then in Nigeria and then in New Orleans.
And when I contacted you to do the interview, you know, you had to fit me in between Dubai and Australia and London.
I just want to say props.
It's it's pretty incredible.
I hope your airline miles are all saved and you are like, you know, you got it all worked out.
So a little bit of jealousy is what I'm getting at here.
Yeah, it's a it's a stupid life, but it beats having a real job for sure.
Well, let's jump in.
So, one of the core theses of your book is that Pentecostalism is a growth industry, and it is.
We talk a lot on this show about how Christianity in the United States, especially Evangelicalism, is in decline.
But when we look at Pentecostalism in this country, and when we look at Pentecostalism worldwide, it is not.
It is a phenomenon that is growing for many reasons, and I want to jump into those.
You say early on in the book, and I'll just read, I'll embarrass you and just read a little bit, That there's a reason why Pentecostalism tends to be referred to as a movement more than simply a faith.
Long blessed with the ability to tell two stories at once, it appeals equally to people interested in feel-good spiritual experiences and to hardcore biblical fundamentalists, to cultural conservatives, and to societal media entrepreneurs.
But no matter what you call it, Pentecostalism remains focused on the Holy Spirit, on its believers' direct experience of and personal interaction with the presence of God, and all the miracles that come with it—success in matters of the mind, body, spirit, and wallet.
I really love what you do throughout the book, which is to say that Pentecostalism is, like many strands of Christianity, focused on the afterlife and the kingdom of God in the ever after.
But it sticks out in many ways because it is really good at direct experience and promising its followers something in the here and now.
It is not an otherworldly movement.
It's a worldly, earthly movement.
And I'm wondering if we can just do a little history here.
I think a lot of folks listening know this word, Pentecostalism.
Some folks will probably have had experiences with the Pentecostal movement.
But it starts back in the 19th century.
I have some personal history here.
I went to a zoo specific.
So, there was holiness folks involved in the creation of my alma mater, definitely some people tracing themselves back to Azusa Street, and the Wesleyans who were part of the 19th century kind of group that got all this kicked off.
So, would you mind giving us the very, very brief kind of 19th century history of Pentecostalism, and then we'll jump forward into the 20th.
Sure.
So most people would know Pentecostalism through the Azusa Street Revival, which happened in 1906 in Los Angeles.
It was a culmination of a few strains that were coming through America at the time.
19th century America was such a transformative period for people and for Christianity.
You know, prophets and priests were wandering in the countryside.
There were a lot of changes going on and Pentecostalism came out of Methodism.
Even though, I mean, today it just seems such a world away.
But it was really capturing that spiritual element of the faith, which is almost, in sort of modern parlance, it's almost like the Holy Spirit was ripe for disruption.
You know, it was sort of, there was one part of the Trinity that people weren't really getting into.
And that became quite a powerful thing after the Civil War and at such a time of transformative change.
But yeah, so, I tell the story of the early history through three really fascinating figures who to me just, you know, just those grand historical people who are, you know, fascinating and flawed in equal measure.
But Charles Fox Parham was someone who was really tapping into this moment.
He was an itinerant Methodist preacher in Kansas, and he was especially interested in healing.
He and his young son had had a lot of sickness, and so they started a thing called the Bethel Healing Home, and they were There was this idea going through some parts of America at the time, almost in hushed circles in a way, of speaking in tongues.
And they wanted to bring this on.
And New Year's Eve 1901, they had a prayer group.
And suddenly the Holy Spirit came onto the congregation.
A woman called Agnes Osmond began speaking in a foreign language.
They thought it was Chinese.
And, you know, as we see, a lot of the early Pentecostals really did think that they had been given the gifts of tongues to go and convert people in foreign lands.
And a lot of them, you know, set sail for China and places like that, woefully unprepared and, you know, died of dysentery and things like that once they got there.
So, a little bit of an early clue as well, just into how, you know, Pentecostals have always really been true believers and have really acted on their faith.
But Charles Fox Parham became a mentor to a young African American man called William James Seymour.
He was the son of freed slaves from Louisiana.
And again, he'd sort of moved around the country.
It was pretty awful place at the 1890s in the South.
You know, people were, you know, there were lynchings and all sorts of things.
So he moved up north and So he converted to Methodism.
And then he lost his eye in a smallpox outbreak.
And he felt that this was a sign from God that he'd been too slow to act for the call to minister.
So he went to Houston and went to the school of Charles Fox Pyram.
And as a black man, he had to take his instruction out in the hallway.
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