Age of the Spirit: Charismatic Renewal, the Anglo-World, and Global Christianity, 1945–1980, makes a welcome addition to the renewalist studies bookshelf. A work of broad scope, it remains nonetheless a targeted monograph largely restricted to the chronological parameters stated in the title and the “zone of charismatic exchange” (8) comprising seven English-speaking states: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Republic of Ireland, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. While providing a topically oriented historical narrative of the early Charismatic movement within this zone—a narrative that relates it to such themes as secularization, authenticity, and cosmopolitanism—the book's signal achievement is to flesh out the tone and texture of this “distinctive religious subculture” (3) more richly than any other volume to date.
After a frame-setting introduction, Maiden traces the movement's lineage through various Catholic, mainline Protestant, and Evangelical antecedents and precursors—alongside the usual Pentecostal suspects. Yet, Maiden understands the importance of narrative too well to simply dismiss the movement's myths of origin, with their fixation on events in Van Nuys, California, in 1960. Something decisive did happen at the dawn of the 1960s: a sudden rise to self-consciousness, the dynamic whereby a movement defines itself in the process of becoming aware of its own separate existence. Maiden, then, offers neither myth nor demythologization, but rather “the complex and decentred nature of charismatic origins” (51).
The central chapters of the book do the heavy work of revivifying what Maiden, working from Benedict Anderson's “imagined communities” through Arjun Appadurai's cultural “landscapes,” styles the Charismatic “Spiritscape” (5). Covered here are embodied practices (for example, praise, singing, hand-raising, and testimony); shared identity markers (such as narratives of Spirit baptism, glossolalia, and frequently a sense of persecution); and a nascent Charismatic mentalité that embraced stark supernaturalism, a near-millenarian eschatology, and a vivid sense among adherents of the epochal nature of their own movement. Furthermore, Maiden situates his subject in relation to its social location and demographic space (establishing its largely white, middle-class, suburban provenance) and provides a fine account of its quintessential organizational form, the cell group—a structure of “indeterminate ecclesiological status” (123) perfectly suited to suburbia. In the liminal euphoria of the movement's early years, that small-group intimacy sometimes blossomed into expressions of communitas, such as the “household” system affiliated with Graham Pulkingham's Church of the Redeemer (Houston, Texas) or intentional communities like The Word of God (Ann Arbor, Michigan) and Post Green (Dorset, England).
Maiden also treats the world charismatics made, including its “media ecosystem” (94), which ranged from lending libraries and service agency newsletters to publishing houses, bookstores, high-circulation magazines like New Wine and New Covenant, film, radio, television, a burgeoning music industry, and the dissemination of cassette tapes (perfectly suited to small-group use). Circulating within this ecosystem were a set of shared texts or “scripts,” such as David Wilkerson's The Cross and the Switchblade, the testimony of Dennis Bennett, and the writings of Basilea Schlink, that formed something near a literary canon for the early movement (75–81).
As a movement emerging from an inchoate state, authority was an urgent matter, and Maiden nicely attends to the leading currents and dilemmas circulating around this question. Particularly within more restorationist circles, the early Christian roles cited in Ephesians 4 were extrapolated into authority hierarchies framed within concepts of mutual submission, shepherding, and “covering” (132–134). These notions merged with cognate texts, such as the New Testament haustaufeln and Romans 1, to underwrite strains of patriarchy and traditionalist sexuality with much potential for abuse (147–150).
In Maiden's telling, the early movement peaked in the 1970s, a decade of notable achievements, particularly in media and popular culture. The leading religious broadcasters—the Christian Broadcasting Network, Trinity Broadcasting network, Praise the Lord (PTL), and David Mainse's 100 Huntley Street—and the movement's music and publishing industries all ascended to yet greater heights. At the same time, certain leading trends—a fixation on spiritual warfare, heightened eschatological expectancy, the continuing spread of “shepherding” hierarchies, and deepening alliances with the political Right—sowed controversy and division. Meanwhile, Catholic and mainline Protestant Charismatics grew more integrated into their denominational structures, which only widened the divide separating them from independent charismatics. The end of the decade brought both heyday and twilight. The climactic 1977 Conference on Charismatic Renewal in the Churches in Kansas City, for example, stands as a historic triumph but also as the movement's last meeting “of such ecumenical scale and ambition” (185).
Age of the Spirit merits a prominent place on the renewalist bookshelf, but it does have weaknesses. For one thing, the narrative seems overweighted toward Anglican-Episcopal, Roman Catholic, and a few select independent circles. For the full picture, readers will need to keep the standard reference works near at hand. The categorization schema is also unsatisfying. Maiden divides the movement into three main streams: (1) mainline charismatics (combining Roman Catholics and Protestant mainliners); (2) independent charismatics; and (3) “charismaticised” Pentecostals. The first and third streams are problematic. Notable ecumenical overtures notwithstanding, the Catholic Charismatic Movement, with its many doctrinal, ecclesiological, and cultural distinctives, begs for its own category. The third stream, for its part, is never actually defined, and just as well. Pentecostal-Charismatic influence ran both ways, true, but throughout the period in question, classical Pentecostal bodies underwent profound sociocultural transformations driven by the same factors shaping the Charismatic Movement. It is hard to imagine how the Charismatic influence on a subset of Pentecostals could be isolated with anything like the precision needed to delineate a coequal category within a three-part schema of this kind. Last, the book suffers from an excess of errors in formatting, grammar, and punctuation, the last including frequent use of the semicolon to set off dependent clauses; one hopes Oxford's New York office, at least, better manages to bar such peccadilloes from print.
