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Book Reviews / Pneuma 33 (2011) 427-466
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Richard J. Callahan, Jr. Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields: Subject to Dust (Bloom- ington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009). xv + 259 pp. $34.95 hardback.
Richard J. Callahan, Jr. believes that religion “ties the extraordinary to the ordinary” (6). Tis predisposition drives his important new book on Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields. Callahan, who teaches Religious Studies at the University of Missouri — Columbia, has mined oral history collections, county newspapers, folk music recordings, travel accounts, and local histories to give us a fresh perspective on the emergence of pentecostal- ism as the faith of choice in the early twentieth century coal fields of central Appalachia. In the late nineteenth century, the easternmost counties of Kentucky were populated by cash-poor, subsistence farmers who (when they attended church) were attracted to autono- mous Baptist congregations where a “modified Calvinist doctrine” was preached and the “presence of the Holy Spirit . . . through subjective felt experience” was welcomed (25). No person could save herself and only a sovereign God could initiate the call to salvation, but these Baptists believed that anyone, once called, could choose to cooperate or resist salva- tion. Such callings and conversions often occurred within a highly emotional or miraculous context. Tis sovereign God also chose at times to single out some for direct divine guid- ance (often through dreams or omens) or to receive miraculous physical healings. Tis faith, according to Callahan, suited the hardscrabble lives of the mountain farm families. But by the end of the century many of these families had grown to the point that they could no longer subdivide their land into tenable farms for all their offspring. Tis demographic crisis coincided with the arrival of the railroad. Between the 1890s and the 1920s most of the residents of these coal-saturated counties sold their mineral rights and turned to timbering and mining to earn a living.
Most coal camps were “company towns,” where miners had to live in company-owned houses and shop in the company-owned store (sometimes with the company-issued script they were issued instead of money). Town life brought both positive and negative changes. Work paid more but was more dangerous. A higher material standard of living was avail- able, but everything in town was covered in coal dust. Life in town was more exciting but more crowded than on a farm. Tere were more churches but less certainty. Outsiders arrived bringing with them new religious ideas that would appeal to some and repulse others. Te “hardshell” Baptist faith that so many of the native miners had brought with them now had competition.
Mine owners and managers favored the importation of Methodism and other main- stream Protestant churches as a civilizing influence. According to Callahan, most natives rejected these as “railroad religion.” Some miners turned instead to Freewill Baptist churches, which maintained the local church autonomy and emotional emphasis of the older Baptist churches while adding a more overtly Arminian message of choosing salvation and righteous living. It was holiness-pentecostalism, however, that attracted the majority of miners and their families who attended church and revival meetings.
Te holiness movement entered the region as soon as railroads connected the area to surrounding cities like Cincinnati and Louisville beginning in the 1890s. By 1910 the new pentecostal revival traveled the same rails into the mountains. While the countryside resisted the message of the holiness and pentecostal evangelists, the mining towns proved
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/157007411X603582
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Book Reviews / Pneuma 33 (2011) 427-466
far more receptive. Callahan contends that by the 1920s pentecostalism had become the “emergent style” of Christianity in the mining communities (129).
Religion, “as it appears in the lives of real people,” Callahan argues, always exists “at the intersection of tradition and innovation” (9). Te miners who accepted the holiness- pentecostal message of seeking pardon, purity, and power from a willing God did so because they could maintain certain beliefs from their independent Baptist heritage while incorporating new ideas that spoke to their transformed work environment. According to Callahan, the new pentecostal churches continued the mountain people’s preference for congregational autonomy and crisis conversion experiences, intensified their encounters with the felt presence of the Spirit and with God’s healing power, and added a new com- mitment to perfectionism and premillenialism that resonated more with miners than with subsistence farmers.
Chapter Five, titled “Power in the Blood,” will be of special interest to readers of this journal. In it Callahan uses the compelling first-person accounts of men and women to present the independent pentecostalism that emerged in the coal towns as a “strategic inter- vention by native residents into a rapidly transforming religious landscape”; they negotiated “a space between ‘railroad religions’ and Old-Time Baptists” that addressed the needs of coal-mining families from the inside, creating “something new-yet-traditional” (138). Tey spoke with new tongues but never forgot their surroundings. Tey borrowed from new musical styles they heard on the radio yet rejected the “worldly” consumer temptations it advertized. Tey preached a new message of an imminent second coming but proved more than willing to unionize for a better life once the Great Depression set in. Rather than tak- ing refuge from a cruel world in an emotional, escapist religion, Callahan’s pentecostals created a spiritual worldview that “confronted industrial capitalism’s power with Holy Ghost power” (151).
Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields certainly advances the study of Appalachian pentecostalism; it also provides an excellent framework for further exploration. Indepen- dent pentecostal churches in other coal areas in Kentucky and surrounding states deserve close attention, as do the large number of mountain pentecostals who chose to join denom- inations like the Church of God or the Pentecostal Holiness Church. Studies of black pentecostal congregations in the coal fields and of immigrant converts to the movement would further enrich our understanding. Also, there is room for further study of the mes- sengers who brought the revival into the mountains. For all its resonance with traditional mountain religion, the pentecostal movement was also, at least technically, a “railroad reli- gion.” How satisfied were the preachers who evangelized the mountains with what the mountaineers made of their faith?
If it is the nature of good history to answer important questions while raising even more, by this standard Richard Callahan has delivered good history.
Reviewed by Daniel Woods Professor of History
Ferrum College, Ferrum, Virginia [email protected]
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