Pentecostalism first appeared as a global movement, built with both modern and antimodern materials provided by the American holiness missionary movement. On the anti-modern side, radical holiness spirituality and theology infused the worldviews of its advocates with supernaturalism, primitivism, and an apocalyptic eschatology. It resisted modern trends toward systematization, bureaucratization, and centralized control. Furthermore, radical holiness minimized the significance of modern categories of nation, ethnicity, race, and civilization. On the other side, radical holiness depended on the modern disintegration of traditional religious deference, used modern techniques for promoting audiencedriven or democratized patterns of authority, and effectively equipped its followers for the pragmatic methodologies of modernity by skillfully making use of transportation networks, fund-raising techniques, and mass media to reach large audiences.

American holiness missionaries carried these characteristics overseas, where non-American advocates adapted them to their particular circumstances. Both American and non-American adherents promoted radical holiness in ways that confounded reigning categories of identity, power relations, and conceptions of East and West. Radical holiness granted religious authority to Chinese men, Indian girls, spirit-filled Zulus, working-class Chileans, female evangelists, and African-American leaders, as well as white American males, without consciously mobilizing its followers along lines of national, ethnic, gendered, racial, or class identity. It demanded that its followers leave "heathenism," but it did so without utilizing the imperialist era discourse of civilization that upheld western cultural superiority and non-western cultural inferiority. In terms of its national or racial characteristics, then, early leaders from diverse backgrounds used tools from the American holiness movement to bring a non-American movement, world Pentecostalism, into existence.

It often comes as a surprise to learn that most contemporary Americans who think of themselves as “Irish” are, in fact, Protestant, not Catholic. While commentators generally agree that these Protestant Irish-Americans are descended mainly from the Irish who settled in the United States prior to the Famine, the story of how they became the Protestants they are is—this article argues—more complicated than first appears. To understand that story, however, one must correct for two historiographical biases. The first has to do with the presumed religiosity of the so-called “Scotch-Irish” in the pre-Famine period; the second involves taking “being Irish” into account in the post-Famine period only with dealing with Catholics, not Protestants. Once these biases are corrected, however, it becomes possible to develop an argument that simultaneously does two things: it provides a new perspective on the contribution made by the Irish (generally) to the rise of the Methodists and Baptists in the early nineteenth century, and it helps us to understand why so many American Protestants continue to retain an Irish identity despite the fact that their link to Ireland is now almost two centuries in the past.

This article examines the ways that ethnic pluralism and Jewish exceptionalism coexisted in philosopher Horace M. Kallen’s thought from the time that Jewish identity began to play a significant and positive role in his own self-conception, roughly in 1900, until his coining of “cultural pluralism” in 1924. Kallen conceived of pluralism, in large part, to address concerns about American Jewish identity, but its conception created a vexing problem for Jews. If Jews were the “chosen people,” then how could they fit into a model of the nation that emphasized equality, or at least harmony, between many different groups? Kallen would solve the dilemma of pluralism and chosenness by advocating that American Jews maintain their particularity on the basis of cultural distinctiveness rather than of superiority. Interrogating Kallen's thought on this question illuminates how his enduring theory of cultural pluralism owed its origins, in part, to specific Jewish concerns and how it developed in conjunction with a sustained struggle to articulate a meaningful Jewish identity that would prove continuous across generations. Kallen’s solution to the dilemma of pluralism and Jewish exceptionalism also demonstrates one instance of how debates about Jewish particularity profoundly influenced understandings of cultural, racial, and religious difference within American democracy during the early twentieth century.

The infamous conflict between Joseph Harrison Jackson, longtime president of the National Baptist Convention, Inc. (NBC), and Martin Luther King, Jr., has attracted considerable scholarly attention. For nearly a decade, the two Baptist clerics fought for control of the largest African American religious organization in the country as King sought to use it as the “institutional basis for the Civil Rights Movement.” Treated as a simple confrontation between the “radicalism” of King and the”conservatism” of Jackson, however, the conflict has been misinterpreted and, therefore, undervalued by scholars. It was not a struggle between conservative and progressive forces within the NBC, and Jackson and King were not ideological polar opposites. Their conflict was essentially religious in nature and was predicated on questions regarding what constituted church work among black Baptists. In retaining control of the NBC, Jackson wanted to make sure that the answers to those questions would reflect what he perceived to be the “vital center” of American culture. He was convinced that his commitment to “correct” the social ills of society through national and religious unity would achieve that which was right while conquering that which was wrong. Faced also with the challenges of an increasingly global context within which black religious leaders were compelled to operate, Jackson envisioned the NBC as an organization involved with efforts to bring peace and economic parity around the world. In Jackson's view, King's aim to use the NBC as the “institutional basis for the Civil Rights Movement” was both “anti-American” and limited in scope. Jackson's “gradual” stance on civil rights and his confidence in the democratic process to bring about social change reveal one of the many options employed in post -WWII African American religious and political culture.

Devotion to the Bible remains an underappreciated aspect of American religious life partly because it fails to generate controversy. This essay opens a window onto America's relationship with the Bible by exploring a controversial moment in the history of the Bible in America: the public reception of University of Chicago professor Edgar J. Goodspeed's American Translation (1923). Initially, at least, most Americans flatly rejected Goodspeed's impeccably credentialed attempt to cast the language of the Bible in contemporary “American” English. Accusations of the professor's irreligion, bad taste, vulgarity, and crass modernity emerged from nearly every quarter of the Protestant establishment (with the exception of some card-carrying theological modernists), testifying to a widespread but unexplored attachment to the notion of a traditional Bible in the early twentieth century. By examining this barrage of reaction, “Monkeying with the Bible” argues that Protestants, along with some others in 1920s America, believed that traditional biblical language was among the forces that helped stabilize the development of American civilization.

Between 1886 and 1931, Christian publishing houses in the United States offered an unprecedented biographical profile of the contemporary American evangelist as an unambiguously modern figure. Sold at tabernacle tents, Christian bookshops, and church fund-raisers, these texts simultaneously document concerns with the modern landscape as they regale readers with the styles and stories of headlining American Protestants, including Dwight Moody (1837–1899), Sam Jones (1847–1906), Reuben Archer Torrey (1856–1928), J. Wilbur Chapman (1859–1918), Rodney “Gipsy” Smith (1860–1947), Billy Sunday (1862–1935), and Baxter “Cyclone Mac” McClendon (1879–1935). Although it is not difficult to discern distinguishing marks and regional inflections within the anecdotal particularities of these men, the overarching structure and themes of their chronologies is consistent. The purpose of this essay is to produce the beginning of a collective biography of the turn-of-the-century preacher, highlighting the persistent paradigm represented in the promotional products of these preachers. Whereas previous historians have described these men as antiquated proponents of an “old time” religion, this article argues that their narratives reveal a strikingly modern man, poised in an engaged and contradictory conflict with his contemporary moment.

Starting in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a group of American Christians rejected their parents’ Calvinism and fashioned new views of sin, the self, and spiritual growth. These believers were aided in this process by new, psychological sciences such as phrenology, sciences that pointed to the existence of powerful spiritual faculties in the self and new ways of using and measuring them. Especially for those who felt paralyzed by sensibilities of sinfulness and moral impotence, phrenology was a liberation. But phrenology appealed to Americans for other reasons as well. By linking mental and spiritual states to physiological structures, phrenology brought the mysterious emotions and dispositions of faith to the surfaces of the self, where they could be more easily understood and reflected upon. Inner conditions could be discerned in bumps and contours of the head and body or even in one's characteristic postures and gestures. In short, the new science made confounding inner spaces visible again. This article explores the spiritual struggles of a wide range of believers who used phrenology to develop more sober and measured, and therefore more certain, forms of spiritual assurance. It argues that, beginning in the early nineteenth century, a broad coalition of religious liberals used these new, scientific psychologies such as phrenology to find in external, especially bodily, conditions signs of inner spiritual states.