"Between the refrigerator and the wildfire": Aimee Semple McPherson, pentecostalism, and the fundamentalist-modernist controversy

Church History, March, 2003 by Matthew A. Sutton

Early one Canadian winter morning in 1908, a teenage girl knelt to pray, pleading with God to grant her the "baptism of the Holy Spirit." Soon her petition was answered. Her body began to tremble, she slipped to the ground, and out of her lips escaped murmurs in unknown tongues. The next day, during Sunday services at a little pentecostal mission, the teenager again quaked on the floor while jabbering strange syllables. A parishioner was so shocked that he telephoned the girl's parents and implored them to retrieve the wayward adolescent immediately. When the young woman learned that her mother was en route, panic engulfed her. How could she make her parents understand? Would they forbid her from worshipping with pentecostals?

As the girl waited, she crafted a defense calculated to appease her Methodist father and her Salvation Army mother. She remembered Brother Kitchen, one of her mother's old friends, who years ago had been "struck by the Spirit" at the Salvation Army. Was her experience really any different? Then her father's bedtime stories came to mind. With longing he often recalled how "Holy Ghost power" seemed to pervade his childhood Methodist church. The mystified parents, when confronted with their daughter's unwavering conviction, realized that their respective churches had in fact lost the "old-time religion" that their child had rediscovered. (2)

Or so Aimee Semple McPherson testified in the 1920s in an elaborately fashioned tale intended for a diverse audience. In earlier narratives, McPherson offered a simpler story of her Holy Spirit baptism without drawing parallels between pentecostal experience and the traditions of Methodism and the Salvation Army. The latter version is particularly noteworthy because it reveals McPherson's efforts to broaden her message. In reconstructing her experience, she consciously entwined at least three strands of North American Protestantism--Methodism, the Salvation Army, and pentecostalism. Convinced that such positioning was faithful to her own experience, to the message of the Scriptures, and to historic Christianity, McPherson paved the way for pentecostals to contribute to the fundamentalist movement and led pentecostals into the mainstream of American evangelicalism. (3)

As I use them in this paper, the terms evangelical, fundamentalist, and pentecostal are closely related. Evangelicals are Christians situated broadly in the Reformed and Wesleyan traditions that focus on conversion experiences, the individual's relationship with God, and missions. Fundamentalists are evangelicals who, during the progressive era, began militantly challenging new trends in American Protestantism. They fought evolution, higher criticism of the Scriptures, and changing standards of morality characteristic of the era. Pentecostals are one of the various groups that constituted fundamentalism. What distinguished pentecostals from their fundamentalist peers was their emphasis on the "baptism with the Holy Spirit," an emotional experience that occurred after conversion usually associated with speaking in tongues.

Historians have recognized the common nineteenth-century foundations that gave birth to different evangelical subgroups such as pentecostals, dispensationalists, and holiness groups. Many also acknowledge that following the formation of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942, pentecostals and other evangelicals often worked closely together. But regarding the critical period of fundamentalism's galvanization, the 1910s to the 1930s, historians for the most part have been myopic, ignoring or underplaying the partnerships between pentecostals and other fundamentalists. Scholars of fundamentalism relegate pentecostals to the fringes of their studies, treating them as marginal sectarians. Ernest Sandeen, a pioneering historian of early-twentieth-century fundamentalism emphasized pre-millennial dispensationalism as the essential doctrine that defined the movement, discounting pentecostals. (4) George Marsden expanded Sandeen's definition, arguing that fundamentalism was a broadly construed "phenomenon of the militantly anti-modernist evangelicalism of the 1920s" that "had wider roots" than earlier historians had acknowledged. His book is a masterful analysis, partly because of his ability to integrate the many streams that fed into a broad evangelical-fundamentalist coalition, but even Marsden largely overlooks pentecostals. (5) He treats pentecostalism as a principally separate phenomenon consisting of people who "were only tangentially part of the fundamentalism of the 1920s." (6) Rather than envisioning pentecostals as contributors to fundamentalism, much like dispensationalists, holiness partisans, and conservative Presbyterians, Marsden and others depict pentecostals as aloof from a clearly defined fundamentalist coalition and engaged in a different project. (7) "Pentecostalism," writes Marsden, "countered modern secularism with intense emphasis on the experiential side of spirituality" in contrast to fundamentalists who emphasized "the necessity of fighting secularizing forces at the level of ideology." Influence went "largely in one direction, from fundamentalism to pentecostalism." (8)