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Book Reviews / Pneuma 34 (2012) 95-159
Kristen Dayle Welch, ‘Women with the Good News’: The Rhetorical Heritage of Pentecostal Holiness Women Preachers (Cleveland, TN: CPT Press, 2010). vii + 122 pp., paper.
‘Women with the Good News’ is a slim volume that sets out to answer one question: what role does ethos play in the autobiographical constructions of self for International Pentecostal Holiness Church (IPHC) women preachers? In order to do this the author focuses on a very specific time and place — modern day Oklahoma, her home state. In the beginning of her book Welch sets out the parameters of her study — she is a scholar of rhetoric, not a histo- rian of Pentecostalism, and she is decidedly an insider. She has chosen to study the religious tradition that she was raised in and in doing so, she takes a sympathetic look at the IPHC and the role of woman preachers both within the church and in Pentecostalism in general. Welch sets out to understand the role of ethos in female Pentecostal preachers by con- structing the book in a particular manner. First, she discusses different understandings of ethos and why they are important to her study, and how it is she chooses to use ethos. Next, she addresses the sense of place by engaging what it means that these women are from Oklahoma — what is Oklahoma’s particular heritage both within the American imagination and Pentecostalism? Although this chapter is brief it is important because so many scholars overlook the issue of place, instead choosing to focus on the universality of the religion that they are studying. Welch’s meditation on Oklahoma in this chapter addresses how place comes to distinctly shape both people and traditions and should not be ignored. She follows this with a section on the “spiritual inheritance,” that is, how Pentecostals claim and under- stand their own spiritual heritage. She then goes on to analyze the “spiritual ethos” and does that by exploring the role of the call, baptism, and anointing in female IPHC preachers and how those particular rhetorical idioms can be understood through ethos. The book con- cludes with an in-depth look at the testimonies of three IPHC female preachers and adds more analysis to their particular understandings of their roles as female preachers. An interesting feature of Welch’s book is that she starts out by stating “what’s missing” and gives her reasons for those particular scholarly decisions. She chooses not to include a history of Pentecostalism, and not to engage the issues of race or feminism in her work. The reasons for removing a linear history of Pentecostalism make sense — she is not a historian and to add it in would just add unnecessary bulk — but her decisions to not address the issues surrounding race and feminism are troubling and keep the book from exploring cer- tain details that would be provocative and important.
Welch leaves out the issue of race because she states that it has been explored in-depth by other scholars of Pentecostalism and argues that it would be beyond her book. This is true in the case of white/black racial relations, but Welch somehow misses that her book deals with another racial issue, chiefly, Native American/white racial relations, and Native understandings of self within Pentecostal traditions. Welch acknowledges that some of the preachers that she studied had mixed-blood Native backgrounds, and she acknowledges that in Oklahoma it is impossible to escape the reality of Native American influence within the greater culture, but she does not fully flesh this out, or see it as a distinct issue that needs to be unpacked. Instead, she falls into the old trap of assuming that race is simply a black/ white issue, when the issue of race is much more complicated than that — especially since Pentecostalism is spreading like wildfire across the globe, among all races.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/157007412X621969
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Book Reviews / Pneuma 34 (2012) 95-159
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I understand Welch’s reluctance to deal with feminism in her work, as she feels that mod- ern feminism has very little to offer in terms of understanding female preachers who are a part of a conservative religious movement. She is correct in her critique, but again like with race, I think Welch fails to nuance this argument and instead should have taken on more regarding the issue of gender instead of feminism. She does address gender in her first chap- ter and its role in constructing ethos, and as a scholarly tool it always remains in the back- ground — indeed, it is a major part of the book—but it could have been more developed in some aspects. I would be particularly interested in how male Pentecostals reacted to female preachers and the rhetoric that they used in their preaching/testimonials, and I wished she had fully explored the issue of why in the IPHC there are plenty of female preachers, but few women in church administration.
I applaud Welch for keeping her book carefully focused on the issue of ethos in women preachers’ construction of self, but in places it seemed too short. A larger pool of testimoni- als and an even more detailed analysis could have enriched her already interesting observa- tions (only three interviews are analyzed in chapter five). I do think that Welch could have done this without compromising the focus of her book. Nevertheless, she brings up impor- tant questions for scholars of Pentecostalism: how should we understand/analyze the lan- guage behind Pentecostal testimonials? What role does language play in understanding one’s religious tradition? How can we explore the nuances of language without discounting language as the work/word of God? I think this final question might be one of the key con- tributions of the book. Pentecostalism is a religion with its own holy language, and although the issue of tongues is not directly a part of Welch’s analysis (and indeed, much has already been written on it), she opens the door now for other insider scholars to begin to grapple with Pentecostal language and rhetoric beyond tongues, and to still understand language as inspired by God.
Reviewed by Angela Tarángo Assistant Professor of Religion Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas [email protected]
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