The Problem With “Waves”

The Problem With “Waves”

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PNEUMA 39 (2017) 34–54

The Problem with “Waves”

Mapping Charismatic Potential in Italian Protestantism, 1890–1929*

Mark Hutchinson

Alphacrucis College and Western Sydney University, New South Wales

m.hutchinson@uws.edu.au

Abstract

This article explores the problem of using a heuristic such as “waves” to organize historical accounts of pentecostal and charismatic movements. By looking closely at theriseof ItalianPentecostalismanditsco-locationwithmultiplesourcesof revivalism and denominational formation, it seeks to demonstrate that “network” approaches to modelling pentecostal emergence are a more accurate form of heuristic. In the case study, much material not previously made available in English is used, demonstrating the linguistic, cultural, and temporal/ geographic limitations of “wave” theory.

Keywords

Italy – Pentecostalism – Waldensianism – globalization – historiography

Defining Pentecostalism has become something of a growth industry in recent years, particularly as its institutions have matured and begun to seek ways of locating themselves with regard to the “mainstream.” This reflexive approach to self-definition—in part a search for acceptance, in part a way of “writing oneself into the story”—has its problems, particularly when one moves beyond standard Anglosphere accounts of pentecostal and charismatic emergence. The standard metaphor has been, and remains in many places, that of “waves”: First wave Pentecostalism links to Azusa Street, the second wave emerges as “classical” Pentecostalism interacts with the mainstream in the 1950s and 1960s,

* First delivered at the conference Charismatic Renewal: Historical Perspectives 1950–2000,

Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford, September 13–14, 2016.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/15700747-03901003

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followed in the 1970s with the self-identified “Third Wave” churches associated with the Vineyard and other churches emerging from the youth revivals of the 1960s and 1970s. Most people acknowledge the fact that the categories are hazy at the edges: What do we call the Latter Rain movement of the 1940s and 1950s, for example? Is it first wave or protocharismatic? It certainly identifies itself with both, or either, depending on which generational personality one is speaking about. Ed Stetzer runs into this problem with regard to the Third Wave in his series on “continualist” (rather than “cessationist”) churches in the twentieth century. “Third Wave continualists,” he notes, “are the hardest to define”:

The category would still include the Vineyard and many other churches that would call themselves Spirit-filled. Some would call themselves Empowered Evangelicals. But, they would also include many Christians who would believe in such gifts, but would not be identifiable in the same way as the more expressive continualists.1

It doesn’t seem to occur to him that the reason that the Third Wave is hard to define is that he is not really looking at the historical data of people’s experience. Rather, Stetzer—as with most of us who have used this sort of categorization—is defining a set of external observations and oppositions against a received metaphor. It is a comfortable metaphor that hearkens back to the tropes of Kenneth Scott Latourette (with his “incoming tide” analogy for longitudinal church history)2 and Edwin Orr (who proposed “six waves of revival”).3 It provides scholars in the area with a common language. It has, however, a number of real problems with it.

The first is that it is a mechanism for organizing historical data around various hierarchies of theological preference. Stetzer, for instance, is “thank- ful” for his faithful charismatic and pentecostal brothers and sisters (by which he means that they are an undeniable problem for his missiology) despite their enormous excesses (always the second point in an American evangeli-

1 Ed Stetzer, “The Third Wave: The Continualist Movement Continues,”Christianity Today: The

Exchange, October 23, 2013 (http://christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2013/october/third

-wave.html, accessed April 20, 2015).

2 W.R. Hogg, “The Legacy of Kenneth Scott Latourette,” International Bulletin of Mission Re-

search2, no. 3 (July 1978): 6.

3 See, e.g., J. Edwin Orr, The Light of the Nations: Evangelical Renewal and Advance in the

Nineteenth Century(Exeter: Paternoster, 1966), 119ff.

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cal account of modern pneumatological movements).4 This is the evangelical version of “Some of my best friends are charismatics.” He refers to them as “continualists,” because he roots his definitions in the fin-de-siecle reformed evangelical rejection of the spiritual gifts (by people such as B.B. Warfield).5 Given however, that the emerging scholarship is demonstrating a global move- ment that operates in the vernacular,6 has a dazzling variety of contributory streams, and often emerges from isolated or autochthonous sources, the stan- dard metaphor does not stand up well. One wonders how many Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking favelistas thought, “Well, before I jump on board with Tommy Hicks or Juan Ortiz, I had better read Warfield first.” Or how many Chi- nese house group members, for whom charismatic experiences were an intrin- sic part of what they considered to be “true” or “primitive” Christianity, devel- oped their praxis as a reflection on international “waves” of charismaticization. Indeed, the story recorded by Robert Menzies of the house churches in China is, in the light of the emerging literature, more the norm than the exception:

In 2002 I spoke with Zhang Rongliang and Sister Ding Hei, the key leaders of what was then probably the largest house church network in China. They both affirmed that the Fang Cheng (or China for Christ) Church was thoroughly Pentecostal. Sister Ding emphatically stated that their church came to these Pentecostal convictions, not on the basis of receiving this tradition from others; but rather, as a result of their own experience and study of the Book of Acts. She indicated that in the 1970s and 1980s they were quite isolated and experienced significant persecution. In this cru- cible of persecution they developed their classical Pentecostal orienta- tion. At this time their church began to grow rapidly.7

The difference between the standard missiological account—often assembled by Westerners out of denominational archives and “official” records—and that

4 Ed Stetzer, “Continualist Christians: An Overview,” Christianity Today: The Exchange, Octo-

ber 17, 2013 (http://christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2013/october/continualists

-overview.html, accessed April 20, 2015).

5 J.M. Ruthven, On the Cessation of the Charismata: The Protestant Polemic on Post-biblical

Miracles(Tulsa,ok: Word & Spirit Press, 2011).

6 Joe Creech, “Visions of Glory: The Place of the Azusa Street Revival in Pentecostal History,”

Church History65, no. 3 (September 1996): 405–424.

7 Robert Menzies, “Pentecostal Theology and the Chinese Church,” ChinaSource, January 21,

2015 (http://chinasource.org/blog/posts/pentecostal-theology-and-the-chinese

-church, accessed April 20, 2016).

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which is emerging is that the latter features the voices of scholars and practi- tioners from the “majority world” and is history recorded or written from “the bottom up.” The shift, by Walls and others,8to a description of world Christian- ity as “multicentric” goes some way toward resolving the problem but does not really deal with what Roland Bainton noted was Latourette’s presumption of “the interplay of Christianity with successive cultures”9 (so embedding a hier- archy of earlier and later “children of the Gospel”), or Edwin Orr’s waves (the number of which was fixed to the transatlantic evangelical experience,10 and which kept shifting as new accounts became available). All these models, as Castells11 and Lima12 have variously noted, appeal to the structured, expan- sive paradigms of the nineteenth century, in which “trees” of classification or “waves” (whether Orr’s “patterns of revivalism” or even the fear of civilizational declension associated with Arnold’s Dover Beach) organized the way in which social and cultural knowledge was perceived and is related to the quantity of knowledge available in a given subject area. The dominant metaphors of past accounts are now strained by increasing numbers of “bottom-up” accounts from previously marginalized sources.

Divergent practices are generally acceptable to first-world scholars when they are “out there” (for example, among African Independent Churches or Chinese syncretistic movements). Such movements are objects of “religious liberty” or indigenous agency. The same scholars are less comfortable when non-linear developments get out of the presumptive “box” closer to home. The treatment of prosperity doctrine in, say, the usa, or Dominion theology in the Hillsong network, attracts a much more dismissive treatment by both scholars

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Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History (Maryknoll, ny: Orbis Books, 2006); idem, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History: Studies in the Trans- mission and Appropriation of Faith(Maryknoll,ny: Orbis Books, 2002). During his time at Edinburgh and Princeton, Walls has produced many protégés over his long career, among whom scholars such as Afe Adogame (The African Christian Diaspora: New Currents and Emerging Trends in World Christianity [London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013]) have contributed significantly to the evidence base for seeing world Christianity as a more complex emergence than is permitted by the standard, linear growth account. Roland Bainton, “In Memoriam: Kenneth Scott Latourette, 1884–1968,”Church History38, no. 1 (March 1969): 121.

See n. 4 for the reference to Edwin Orr; KathrynT. Long,The Revival of 1857–58: Interpreting an American Religious Awakening(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 155. Bob Hodge, “Nonlinear Causality in Castell’s Network Society: Disorder as Problem and Opportunity under Globalization,”Global Networks13, no. 3 (July 2013): 330–331. Viz., Manuel Lima,Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information(New York: Prince- ton Architectural Press, 2011).

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and the press.13 In places such as Italy it is summarily dismissed, as if to be written out of public memory. The former are first-worlders who should know better; the latter are absorbed into the Catholic corpus or categorized among the religious “other.”14 As a test case, therefore, I will spend the bulk of this article exploring the connections between a traditional form of Protestantism in Italy and the emergence of some early twentieth-century charismatic forms.

Italians appear early in the literature of twentieth-century pentecostal revivals. Alexander Boddy’s Confidence magazine, for instance, refers to a “Signora Malan,” of Via Arnaud 31, Torre Pellice, travelling to Alexander Boddy’s Whit- suntide Conference in 1908, where she was healed and baptized in the Spirit. She was, as Boddy notes, among the “120” visitors from abroad who were at the conference. Writing about her experience in a letter dated June 21, 1908, she said that she “could not keep it to herself.”15 She noted that she had been con- verted at the age of twenty—possibly in the Wesleyan or Keswick context, as she refers to desiring “a complete deliverance from sin and self”—and had an intense expectation as to the return of Christ. As Via Arnaud 31 is only a few paces from the historic Waldensian Church in Torre Pellice,16it is entirely pos-

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See M. Hutchinson, “‘Just up the Windsor Road’: Social Context and the Rise of Hillsong,” in T. Wagner and T. Riches, eds.,“You Call Me Out upon the Waters”:The Hillsong Movement (Basingstoke,uk: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).

M. Hutchinson, “Fai-da-te! Doing-It-Yourself through Religion in Italy,” review of F. Garelli, Religion Italian Style: Continuities and Changes in a Catholic Country (Farnham, uk: Ash- gate, 2014), in Books & Culture, November–December 2016 (forthcoming).

Confidence, no. 4 (July 15, 1908), 8.

The Waldensians were a pre-Reformation evangelical reform movement that originated in the preaching of the “poor men of Lyons” under Peter Waldo in the twelfth century. They survived periodic Catholic attempts to exterminate and convert them by retreating to the alpine valleys around Pinerolo. From 1532 onward they attached themselves to the magisterial Reformation and largely reflected its theological shifts through their depen- dence on training and connections through the francophone churches in Geneva (among whom there were many families who had fled from Italy, such as the Turretini and the Diodati families; see Emidio Campi and Carla Sodini, Gli Oriundi lucchesi di Ginevra e il cardinale Spinola (Chicago: Newberry Library, 1988), and Giorgio Tourn, I valdesi: la sin- golare vicenda di un popolo-chiesa (1170–1976) (Turin: Claudiana, 1981).) From 1840, under the influence of the Reveil in France and broader Anglophone revivalism, they turned to Italian-language evangelism, and, as Giorgio Spini has noted, spread rapidly (along with later revivalist incursions) throughout the peninsula, hand in hand with the rise of Mazzinism and Garibaldianism (Italia liberale e protestanti: gli invisibili[Turin: Claudiana, 2002]).

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sible that she was part of a pastoral family. Malan is indeed a name famous in the revivalist Italianization of the Waldensian church; the noted theologian Bartolomeo Malan taught in Torre Pellice, where his son Teofilo became a pas- tor. (Another son, Carlo, was a doctor). As D.A. Delafield notes, among the first converts to M.B. Czechowski’s Seventh Day Adventist work in Torre Pellice was Giovanni Pietro Malan, editor of the secular l’Avvisatore Alpino, teacher at the Scuola Normale, and one of the founders of the Société d’Histoire Vaudoise. In 1896 he married Maria Guglielmina, who is possibly the “Mrs. Malan” who attended Boddy’s conference. G.P. Malan certainly later became disillusioned with Adventism and quite opposed to it: he would die of pneumonia in 1906.17 His wide travels to Holland and back would explain Guglielmina’s multilingual- ism, and the nature of his fatal illness in part explains her personal concerns with healing.

Possibly Guglielmina also had long-running health issues, as she reports sev- eral times being brought “to the point of death” and being “ill with bronchitis.” When she arrived in England, she was so weak that friends reportedly tried to stop her from going into the industrial north, where her bronchitis would be agitated. She had heard of, if not actually travelled to, Wales during the revival there, and when the pentecostal movement had emerged in England, she was quick to travel to Sunderland in order to experience it firsthand. First, however, wary of counterfeit spirituality, she wrote to Boddy and enquired as to whether he had actually known and seen people speaking in tongues, or whether this was “from the Devil.” Boddy’s reply was clearly important to her, suggesting her Waldensian background with its emphasis on the importance of ministers. At the conference, she had successive experiences of cleansing, healing, and breaking out into English and French, before a prophetic word was wrung from her in tongues.

There is no further news about Guglielmina in Confidence, though Boddy noted that there was an Italian visitor to the 1909 Whitsuntide conference. There is every reason to think that she spread Boddy’s influence, perhaps by circulating copies of Confidence. It may well have been that she was of some influence. Later that year Boddy notes the case of a “brother from Italy” who “praised God with full heart for meeting him at Sunderland.” His request for a “special prayer for dark Italy” demonstrated the heightened level of fear as to social contagion and decay that underpinned early Italian Pentecostalism.

17

“Bartolomeo (Barthélemy) Malan (27 Aug 1810–15 Nov 1873), and Giovanni Pietro (Jean Pierre Barthélemy) Malan (7 Dec. 1846–17 Nov 1906),”Dizionario Biografico dei Protestanti in Italia(http://studivaldesi.org/dizionario/evan_det.php?evan_id=52).

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The “brother” was motivated, he said, by his experience of men parading “the streets with banners inscribed ‘No God and no Master,’” the motto of the Italian anarchist movement.18 “He had received his Pentecost with the blessed signs and would be able to return in hope to work where it had been hopeless before.” This was the sort of banner more common in the intellectual and industrial north, where Italy (particularly the factories in Turin) was contested between growing materialist groups, syndicalists such as the rising Fascist movement, and the church.

“Dark Italy” was something of a congregating point for millennial expec- tations during this period. It was, after all, home to the papacy, commonly identified by contemporary millennialists as the “Whore of Babylon” featured in the Book of the Revelation. The papacy featured strongly in Anglophone politics as the cathode to which expansionary democratic liberalism of the Gladstonian type was the anode, and had a long reputation (reinforced during World Wariin many British imperial possessions) as the source of anti-British disloyalty and internationalism. It was a position used by and accentuated in the writings of Europeans who, following the great migrations, had facili- tated their self-reinvention with religious conversion. Notable among these was Philip Mauro, the noted American lawyer and millennialist writer with whom the Dowieite pentecostal pioneer Arthur Booth Clibborn stayed (at his home in Rapallo, near Genoa) when he visited Italy in 1910. Like many early Pente- costals a follower of A.B. Simpson, founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, Mauro’s views on Mussolini and the League of Nations as signs of the forthcoming end of days were widely syndicated in the pentecostal press. Not surprisingly, then, the most reported Italian phenomena in early pentecostal literature are earthquakes, of which volcanic Italy was plentiful, and which featured plentifully in the mainstream press. Major events in 1901, 1905, 1907, 1908, and 1915 (the last two of which caused mass casualties) were ready signs of the end times. “Surely the old earth is ‘groaning for its latter day.’”19From the Anglosphere, Italy seemed poor, dark, priest-ridden, and under the judgment of God.

By way of contrast, the Waldensians had traditionally been pictured (from Milton’s times and in Bible Society and Protestant literature) as the little Israel

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See Salvatore Salerno, “No God, No Master: Italian Anarchists and the Industrial Workers of the World,” in Philip Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer, eds., The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism: Politics, Labor, and Culture (Westport, ct: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003).

E.g.,Confidence(March 1915), 54.

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of the Alps,20 the bright light against which papal Italy was all the darker.21 Connected with Switzerland to the north and with France to the west through family links and culture and through clerical training, they were a natural receptacle—and point of division—for the renewal impulses coming out of the British, German, French, and American worlds. As Giorgio Tourn notes, the defeat of the French Revolution and the attempted return of theancien regime intheformof theHouseof Savoysparkedadualcrisis/opportunityinapostolic- ity. On the one hand, the newly restored Catholic power set about restoring the penalties and restraints of the old order, actively seeking Waldensian cultural erasure by denying its apostolic self-narrative.22On the other hand, Europe was now more open than ever to the victorious Protestant powers to the north, and to the influences that they brought. Among these were British Quakers and Anglicans (such as William Allen and W. Stephen Gilly),23 who connected the rising romantic reappropriation of apostolic roots in Britain24(here one thinks of the Tractarian movement, evangelical romanticism, revisionist groups such as the Catholic Apostolic Church, the faith missions movement, and the like) to their encounter with what they saw as this little pocket of primitive Christian- ity. Visiting the region in 1859, William Arthur, the Methodist mission secretary and author of the famedTongue of Fire, was struck by the telegraph wires that hummed “like fairy bees, haunting the dells of snow”:

It is the song of the wire, murmuring the music of nature’s joy at the union of long sundered peoples. It is the voice of Him who delights in the habitable parts of the earth, and who has made of one blood all nations of men. Here, over the everlasting hills, Italy and England are mingling thought and impulse; so that while the lamp kindled atTurin for a triumph of Italy is yet burning, eyes beam at the news around London firesides.25

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John Milton, Sonnet 18 On the Late Massacre in Piedmont, which begins: “Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter’d saints, whose bones / Lie scatter’d on the Alpine mountains cold …” William B. Hunter, “Milton and the Waldensians,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 11, no. 1 (January 1971): 153–164.

Giorgio Tourn, I valdesi. La singolare vicenda di un popolo-chiesa(Turin: Claudiana, 1999), 212.

Ibid., 213.

Here one thinks of the Tractarian movement, evangelical romanticism, revisionist groups such as the Catholic Apostolic Church, the faith missions movement, and the like. William Arthur, Italy in Transition: Public Scenes and Private Opinions in the Spring of 1860 (London: Hamilton, Adams and Co., 1860), 24.

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Such British Evangelicals saw the Garibaldian and Republican revolts, Cavourian constitutionalism, and the extension of revived Christianity to Italy as all of a piece in the work of God and civilization. The Waldensian Church, in their romantic imagination, was “an aboriginal Christian Church,” “that old Church, true from the beginning, true through the darkest ages, true against all Kings, true against the people of her own language, true against the pow- ers that Rome could bring against her …”26 Their work latched onto the work of apostolic figures such as Felix Neff, who in the 1820s had come over the Alps bringing with him the pietism of English independency and of the French Reveil. His sort of activism promoted an alternative form of apostolicity, that of an experientially confirmed copartnership with God in the present work- ing of the kingdom. It resonated strongly among what Neff himself saw as “the lineal, unadulterated descendants of the Vaudois [Waldensians who] never bowed their knees to Baal [i.e., the Roman Catholic Church].”27 Neff’s story was even more effective in drawing—through Gilly’s account—the attention of British pietists, in particular the long-running and transformative encounter with “the general,” Charles Beckwith.28 It is this persistent search for a purer, experiential primitivist/apostolic Christianity—fuelled at first by evangelical romanticism, and then by romantic nationalism—that one hears in the letters of Guglielmina Malan, someone who clearly moved from one revival move- ment to another as these touched down in Italy across the latter half of the nineteenth century. For students of charismatic movements, these will be rec- ognizableasthecommonforerunnersof thecharismaticmovementelsewhere. After all, as soon as apostolicity becomes a key identity issue, the issue of the signsof the apostolic is (historically) not often long out of question.

This immediately poses the question: Why, in the literature about Italian Pentecostalism, does theWaldensian/Revivalist connection seem barely to rate a mention?29 It is not as if, even given the theological antagonisms between

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Ibid., 33.

F. Neff, Journal, February 10, 1823, quoted in M. Bost, ed., Letters and Biography of Felix Neff: Protestant Missionary in Switzerland, the Department of Isère, and the High Alps, trans. M.A. Wyatt (London: Seeley and Burnside, 1863), 142.

William Stephen Gilly, A Memoir of Felix Neff, Pastor of the High Alps; and of His Labours among the French Protestants of Dauphiné, a Remnant of the Primitive Christians of Gaul (London: Printed for J. & J. Rivington, 1832); and his important Narrative of an Excursion to the Mountains of Piemont, and Researches among the Vaudois, or Waldenses, Protestant Inhabitants of the Cottian Alps(London: C. and J. Rivington, 1824).

Among the key “standard” interpretations of Italian Pentecostalism one would include Walter Hollenweger,The Pentecostals(Peabody,ma: Hendrickson, 1988), 85ff., 253; Giorgio

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Waldensians and Pentecostals, it is not apparent. First, then, for the evidence, and then to return to the question. Waldensians are to be found everywhere in early Italian Pentecostalism. The deliberate association between church and the economic life of its people meant that artisanal training often first took Waldensians out of their valleys to other places. This was the case in Turin, where many who ended up back in the valleys trained while they went to school, but also in the south, where the churches established by the disciples of Paolo Geymonat linked education, arts, and crafts to the life of their com- munities. Someone like Vito Melodia, for example, became an artist and left a mark on both the spiritual life of his home town of Vittoria in Provincia Ragusa, Sicily, and on its artistic life, the former as a colporteur and evan- gelist for the local Waldensian Church, and the latter as one of the leading practitioners of what became known as the Liberty Style of decorative paint- ing.30Artisanal training and a Waldensian identity (at least after the Albertine

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Peyrot,La circolare Buffarini-Guidi e i pentecostali(Rome: Associazione Italiana per la Lib- ertà di Coscienza, 1955); and Eugenio Stretti,Movimentopentecostale:leassembleediDio in Italia (Turin: Claudiana, 1998), but more particularly the chief narrator of the Assemblee di Dio self-conception, Francesco Toppi, in a long career in which he produced multiple hagiographies and accounts, such as E mi sarete testimoni (Rome: adi-Media, 1999). His work was mainly brought to the Anglosphere in cooperative works, such as with David Womack’sThe Wellsprings of the Pentecostal Movement (Springfield, mo: Gospel Publish- ing House, 1968). Younger scholars, such as Salvatore Esposito (Un secolo di pentecostal- ismo italiano Milan: The Writer, 2013) and Paolo Zanini (“Twenty Years of Persecution of Pentecostalism in Italy: 1935–1955,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies20, no. 5 (2015): 686– 707) are now questioning the standard narrative through close work on a wider range of archives. For a longer discussion of this see Mark P. Hutchinson, “‘La Farina del Diavolo’: Transnational Migration and the Politics of Religious Liberty in Post-War Italy,” in Adam Possamai, B. Turner, and P. Michel, eds., Religions, Nations and Transnationalism in Multi- ple Modernities (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). With the elevation of a charismatic South American pope, there is also emerging in Italian scholarship a broader interest in Pentecostalism—though largely of that originating in the majority world. Leaders in this new literature are Enzo Pace and Annalisa Butticci (Le religioni pentecostali [Rome: Carocci, 2010]), but they have been followed by Paolo Naso (Il Cristianesimo: Pentecostali [Bologna, Italy: emi, 2013]), Raffaele Nogaro and Sergio Tanzarella (Francesco e i pente- costali. L’ecumenismo del poliedro [Trapani: Pozzo di Giacobbe, 2016]), and others. All of these follow the “wave” patterns laid down by Toppi and by the long-running and semi- nal project to catalogue Italian religious movements (mainly from a sociological point of view) by Massimo Introvigne and PierLuigi Zoccatelli atcesnur(http://cesnur.org/ ).

Filippo Meli, La Regia accademia di belle arti di Palermo (1941); Chiese Evangelica Con- gregazione Cristiana Pentecostale di Vittoria (http://campobethel.it/); Commune di

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Constitution in 1848) both brought mobility, an increased likelihood of liter- acy (essential to the reading of the Bible), and a social position that was nei- ther part of the elite nor strictly working class. Those with some reading of the North American literature on Italian Pentecostalism might remember that artists—sculptors, mosaicists, painters—were strongly represented among the Presbyterian-linked Chiesa dei Toscani out of which the first Italian Assembly emerged in 1907.31Melodia’s activities as both colporteur and painter took him all over the Mediterranean and as far afield as Argentina, before his charismatic experience in 1923 led him to found the first pentecostal church in Vittoria in the following year.

The reference to the Chiesa dei Toscani in Chicago is not accidental. The reformed connection made the Presbyterians and Waldensians natural part- ners when the former sought to deal with mass Italian migration to the usa in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The Presbyterians responded to the Chicago migration by requesting a Waldensian pastor; what they got out of A.B. Simpson’s revivalist evangelistic networks was a bilingual Garibaldino who was “finely educated and an artist of note,” Michele Nardi.32His first church was built of boards in Hell’s Half-Acre, but his second was built in the north of the city around a number of Waldensian families. It was this work that drew the attention of Teofilo Gay, theOratoire-trained evangelist who had spent years in the Methodist church in Florence before returning to Torre Pellice, and who in 1892 was travelling in theusato raise funds. Gay’s father, Bartolomeo, was one of the four missioners sent out by the Tavola in 1848 to learn Italian in Florence, and whose work in spreading a particularly Italian, revivalist form of Walden- sianism gathered around Paolo Geymonat. As a melting pot of British, Danish, Prussian, and other reform movements—including Freemasonry, revivalism, and (through mobile, multilingual revivalists such as Anton B. Reuss) charis- maticism,33 Florence, along with Genoa and Livorno, was an important ecu- menical space for opening up traditional Waldensianism in its evangelistic

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Vittoria, Architetture e Decorazioni Liberty (http://comunevittoria.gov.it/index.php ?content=luogo&id=49).

These included three of its key evangelists, Pietro Ottolini, Luigi Francescon, and the talented painter and musician Massimiliano Tosetto.

A.B. Simpson, Michele Nardi, the Italian Evangelist: His Life and Work (New York: for Blanche Nardi, 1916), 32.

“Italy, Florence,” Confidence no. 9 (December 15, 1908), 18; Stanley M. Burgess and Eduard M. van der Maas, eds., The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (Grand Rapids, mi: Zondervan, 2010). Many sources refer to Reuss as “Anton D. Reuss,” though his middle birth name was “Bolongaro.”

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moment. Nardi’s request that Gay “send him a young man filled with the Holy Ghost who would come” resulted in the sending of the Geymonat-trained Fil- ippo Grill.34Grill was pastor of the church out of which the Chiesa dei Toscani was formed over the issue of rebaptism, which in turn produced the Assem- blea Cristiana when the effects of Azusa Street began to be felt among Italians in 1907. Almost all of the people in this story were Waldensians touched by the evangelical revivals of the nineteenth century, some—such as Tosetto, Nardi, and Grill—very directly so.

Countertotheusualstory,thatPentecostalismintheItaliancontextemerges as a “revival wave” from resistant, traditional churches, it may be more useful to look closely at early Pentecostalism as continuous with interactive forms of revivalism and revitalization occurring in the Italian context over a longer period of time. After all, interactions with the Waldensians did not just occur once and sporadically. Rather, though most are undocumented, we have to assume that they formed a continuing “background noise” to pentecostal emer- gence and development, particularly in those towns and areas touched by Waldensian and Methodist Episcopal revivalism in the half century prior to Fascist establishment and the Concordat in 1929. We do have glimpses of these, however, in oral histories. For some, such as Francesca LoSurdo, an encounter with a Waldensian doctor in hospital resulted in conversion and energetic pen- tecostal evangelism in Provincia Messina, Italy.35 For Susanna Colantonio, it was a two-phase process—first, family conversion under Waldensian/ Presby- terian revivalism in mountainous central Italy, and then pentecostal conver- sion through the North Avenue Mission in Chicago, after migration.36 For yet others, such as Agide Pirazzini and Alfredo Del Rosso, it was a combination of the work of the British and Foreign Bible Society,Waldensian local schools, and a Waldensian church. Del Rosso had attended a local Waldensian school and, after a stint in the Italian Army in Libya, spent two years at the Waldensian the- ological school in Florence under (among others) Giovanni Luzzi. “But books did not give me what I sought,” he wrote. “My heart desired something more

34

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36

Nardi repeated this pattern a number of times in places such as the Spring Valley mining community, St. Louis, and California.

In M. Hutchinson, Pellegrini: An Italian Protestant Community in Sydney, 1958–1998 (Syd- ney:apss), 1999.

M. Hutchinson, “La farina del diavolo: Transnational Migration and the Politics of Reli- gious Liberty in Post-War Italy,” in Bryan S. Turner, Adam Possamai, and Patrick Michel, eds.,Religions, Nations andTransnationalism in Multiple Modernities(Houndmills,ukand New York: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).

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…”37Later, after he landed among the Nazarenes, he would describe his search as one for “complete sanctification.”38 This, however, was a redacted reflec- tion; in 1919, when he wrote to Confidence, he referred to his spiritual search as one for a “Latter Rain Outpouring of the Holy Ghost,”39 and the descrip- tion of the experience he gained under the Swiss pentecostal missionaries the Coppinis was typically pentecostal. Agide Pirazzini, by way of contrast, was per- fectly satisfied with his books: indeed, it was in a Waldensian church that he “found brethren who had the same book and the same faith” that he had cob- bledtogetherfromhispreviouspersonalexperienceswiththeBible.40Pirazzini went on to support Italian Protestantism as Secretary of theymcain Rome and became professor of Hebrew and the head of the Italian Department at the Bible Teachers Training School, New York. An often overlooked contribution to Pentecostalism, however, was through his son-in-law, the Italo-American Pres- byterian minister Frank Gigliotti, who not only trained at theFacoltàValdesein Rome but also went on to act as a very effective champion of the rights of Pen- tecostals after the fall of the Fascist regime.41During the course of that regime and afterwards, suchWaldensians played a key role in both arguing for religious freedom for Pentecostals and, when this failed, in protecting some (where they could, as was the case with F. Giovanni Sola in Palermo) from persecution.

These many associations between revivalist Waldensianism and the birth pangs of the evangelical/pentecostal movements that came to dominate Italian Protestantism in the latter half of the twentieth century concur with Giorgio Spini’s conclusion about the impact of the Chiesa Valdese: “This explains how a tiny population of little more than 20,000 people came to have a decisive function as the shaper of the outlines for all Italian Protestantism.”42

The problem is, however, that few historians actuallywritethe history of Ital- ian Pentecostalism in this way.This brings us back to our earlier question: “Why, in the literature about Italian Pentecostalism, does the Waldensian/Revivalist connection seem not to rate a mention?” A number of reasons occur that also tell us something about the “problem with waves” issue raised at the opening of this article.

37 38

39 40

41 42

Howard Culbertson, “Alfredo Del Rosso” (http://home.snu.edu/~hculbert/rosso2.htm). Culbertson, “Alfredo Del Rosso” (http://home.snu.edu/~hculbert/rosso7.htm); (hculbert@ snu.edu).

Confidence8, no. 1 (January–March 1919);Confidence7, no. 9 (September 1914), 176. Enrico C. Sartorio, Social and Religious Life of Italians in America (Boston: Christopher Publishing House, ca. 1918), 91–92.

Hutchinson, “La farina del diavolo,” forthcoming.

Giorgio Spini, Italia Liberale e Protestanti (Turin: Claudiana, 2002), 92.

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The first and perhaps major reason why the continuities between the tra- ditions have been overlooked is because Pentecostalism fails the test of being within the “main stream” of the national story. The concern of academic his- torians such as Spini is to write a history that includes the Waldensians in the history of the nation.This has meant that Cavour and d’Azeglio and the rise and decline of Italian liberalism and of matters of conscience and religious freedom are more important in the Waldensian story than Waldensian connections to globalizing Protestant revivalism. Spini has, in fact, traced the latter, but makes almost no connection to the subsequent rise of pentecostal forms, despite the fact that the center of his historical interest, Florence, is also the center for revivalist subcultures in the period he calls “Italia Liberale.” This is not Spini’s fault; the sources do not suit either the sort of intellectual history he is attempt- ing or the narrative that emerges from tying Waldensian survival to the survival of the Italian state in the face of many enemies between 1848 and 1945. He is the master of the international intellectual connection. He is also, however, deeply influenced by his Reformed intellectual restraint. He tends to be dismissive not so much of the impact of Revivalism as of its durability. The risvegliati, after all, failed to generate the sort of political support for Italian liberalism that would enable them to effectively oppose the rise of Fascism. It was, in his view, the tough, biblicist traditions (the Reformed churches, the Brethren, and the like) that lasted long enough to contribute to a vibrant Italian democracy and to the fight against Fascism.43 An intellectual himself, he lacks an apparatus for assessing the impact of movements that are not fundamentally movements of ideas.

The pentecostal self-narrative also does not help in tracking such continu- ities and influences. Pentecostals were not themselves generally engaged with the literary elites or with the alternative circles dominated by the liberals. As a consequence, apart from a few writing practitioners such as Roberto Bracco, those who drifted out of Waldensian circles into the pentecostal churches did not directly record their experiences. When they told their story, it was gener- ally shorn of the sort of historical approach that someone likeTeofilo Gay could bring to their activism, creating a disconnection between the mainstream and pentecostal narratives that flowed over into later historical accounts. Pente- costalism, in this view, was the result of the great migration, imported by a reticulating subclass untouched by foreigners: having said that they were “all sons of rural Italy, poor, inured to manual labour, constrained by poverty to confront the hard life of the emigrant” and having connected them to the

43

Giorgio Spini and Valdo Spini, eds., La strada della Liberazione. Dalla riscoperta di Calvino al fronte dellaviiiArmata(Turin: Claudiana, 2002).

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Wesleyan revival, Spini notes, “But all of this developed in silence. Evangeli- cal Italy itself didn’t seem to be aware of any of it.”44 If that was a form of ignorance, then it was a deliberate form of ignorance. As noted in the case of Howard Culbertson’s account of Alfredo Del Rosso, the accounts given by foreign denominations of their Italian pioneers accentuated this “silence.” The circulation of Pentecostals, or personal experiences of pentecostal-like phe- nomena, were squeezed out and rescripted into other, British, French, and American stories. There was good reason for this: the relationships were sel- dom smooth or unproblematic. The church founded by Vito Melodia at Vit- toria, Sicily, for example, describes his conversion as “a veritable earthquake within the Waldensian community,” sparking the intervention of the Coun- cil of the Church. “Due to Pentecostal fanaticism that the Church suffered in the hour of its suffering (1924), even a member of the Council was carried away, creating a disastrous impression on the adherents.”45Relationships were also strained in places such as Ginosa and Gissi, where pentecostal growth effectively squeezed out post-migration recovery by the Waldensians and the Brethren.46 In Riesi (Caltanisetta), where Waldensianism was the religion of protest and claimed up to half the population in 1912, migration, fierce repres- sion of popular uprisings, and a targeted counter-evangelization by the Sale- sians of Don Bosco saw transplanted Pentecostalism replace the previously flourishing Waldensian presence.47 In Matera, Waldensians gave way to the populist Baptist activism of the “White Monk,” the sculptor Luigi Loperfido. These are foundations on which Pentecostals built only five years later.48This was quite different from the (relatively) gentlemanly attempts at ecumenism taking place among the mainline churches in the north at the same time. As in other fields, the histories of the north and that of the south were quite different, and the historiography of the movement conspires to maintain that separation. Latter-day Waldensian theological pietism and liberalism are indicative of this sense of disruption—few Waldensians want to tell the story of its key practi- tioners in conservative, populist pentecostal terms, and few Pentecostals would want to own the connection even if they did.

It is here that we return to the “problem of waves.” The first thing to note is that “context matters.” In Italy, there is evidence for autochthonous revital-

44 45 46 47

48

Spini, Italia Liberale e Protestanti, 252.

“Campo Bethel” (http://campobethel.it/la-storia/).

Spini, Italia Liberale e Protestanti, 240, 250.

Francesco Toppi, Vincenzo Federico: Propugnatore della collaborazione tra le chiese evan- geliche pentecostali (Rome:adi-Media, 2006), 22ff.

Viz., Gianni Maragno, L’anarchia estetica(Potenza: EditricErmes, 2011).

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ization movements and for reticulating migration effects and for formal inter- national revivalist contacts. The second observation is that the way in which various authorsreadthat context depends on their predilections and projected audiences. When we look at Frank Gigliotti’s 1946 account to Ambassador Alberto Tarchiani of the origins of Italian Pentecostalism, for instance, we find a distributed, grass-roots movement that began in Italy and theusaataboutthe same time, in which “[p]eople in small congregations in the mountains of the Abbruzzi’s [sic] were having the same experiences as people in small congrega- tions in Sicily. They did not know of each other’s existence. They had no corre- spondence or physical contact.”49Gigliotti knew this from his war and postwar work for religious liberty, his Waldensian (and potentially cia) connections, and the tour of rural Sicily he took shortly after the war concluded, which put him in touch with oral accounts of the origins of the movement. His account is confirmed by other oral accounts: for instance, that of Giuseppe Beretta,50 who, though converted among the Baptists, was baptized in the Spirit in 1898 without any connection to other movements or even knowledge of what was happening to him.51Gigliotti’s account is connected to his intent, which was to associate Pentecostalism with the “soil” of Italy rather than (as was argued by the Catholic and Fascist authorities often still in place in Italy at the time) as a foreign import. Spini’s account, which is based in part on his reading of the written sources (particularly Francesco Toppi, the Waldensian accounts, and those encountered during his personal experience of the South both during the war and afterward on the staff of the Università degli Studi di Messina), emphasizes the migrant pathways across the Atlantic and back. It is a story that reflects his reading of nineteenth-century revivalism and its connection to his main theme (Italian nation-building) and of course to the Waldensian sources (which tend to emphasize the foreignness of Pentecostalism, in con- trast to their own rootedness in the soil). This is—largely again due to Toppi, for whom the internationalist connections to the birth of the Assemblee di Dio is his chief concern—essentially the orthodox account of pentecostal found- ings in Italy.52 In this literature, as I have shown in this article, the tendency

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50

51 52

F.B.Gigliotti,“ReligiousLibertyinItaly,”August27,1946,Folio,FlowerPentecostalHeritage Centre.

M. Hutchinson, “Italy,” in Hans J. Hillerbrand, ed., Encyclopedia of Protestantism (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 864.

Also see the story of Salvatore Spinella in Hutchinson, Pellegrini, 37.

See Salvatore Esposito, Un secolo di Pentecostalismo Italiano: Cenni suite origine, le dis- cussion parlementari, I’assetto contemporaneo delle Assemblee di Dio in Italia (Milan: The Writer, 2013), and my review in PentecoStudies14, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 140–141.

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has been for authors to “talk past” or ignore the third explanation, which is that there was an existing substratum of Protestant revivalism in Italy that in many ways was critical to the emergence of charismatic Christianity in a significant way, both before, and much more impressively after, the Fascist period.

The point about these three levels of explanation is that none of them works without the others. All three can be seen in action in some places: at Torre Pellice, with the Adventist Waldensian Guglielmina Malan, for instance, or at Luserna San Giovanni, where Teofilo Gay was pastor, but where thepescagliése Pietro Ottolini, the pentecostal evangelist from Chicago, also worked in 1910. Elsewhere, two (rather than three) of the accounts are seen to be working together: such as at Ginosa, where a pre-existing Brethren work was essentially absorbed into pentecostal circles through the return of Giuseppina Zollo from the usa in 1913. Finally, there are isolated accounts (Beretta, Spinelli) that lack any real explanation for the leap from one contributing stream to another. In his account, even a historian as good as Spini is left reaching for Jungian prototypes to explain the upsurge of Charismaticism in the south. It was, he notes in Italia Liberale e Protestanti:

asif—fromAmerica,with its clamourousmodernity—therereturnedtoa humbler Italy something from times long ago: the times of the Fraticelli, such as those in Abbruzzi of Pietro da Morrone—, of Joachim of Fiore, son of servants of the southern glebe and prophet of the age of the Spirit, of mystical men and of mystical women saints, who received direct words from God. Perhaps something in those times, of those anxieties of mystical encounters with God, of superhuman gifts of the Spirit survived in the depths of humblest Italy and in her countryside, in particular in the South.53

While poetic and fulfilling in an emotional sense, this is more the historian admitting that the subject is beyond his scope than a real explanation for the connection between context and spiritual phenomena. He is probably su una buona pista (“onto something important”), as they say in Italy, but like much of the literature in this field—Toppi’s extension of Womack, for example, or Stretti’s summarizing work54—Spini’s appeal to historical resonances replaces, rather than facilitates, detailed historical explanations.55

53 54

55

Spini, Italia Liberale e Protestanti, 252.

Eugenio Stretti, Il Movimento pentecostale. Le assemblee di Dio in Italia (Turin: Claudiana, 1998).

The work of Miriam Castiglione suggests continuing prophetic and charismatic streams in

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This, as noted, is also the problem of using metaphors such as “waves” to explain the development of Pentecostalism. When one drills down into any specific case, the “wave” disappears as an organizing form, giving way to cross- currents and local eddies. In the Italian case, as I have argued elsewhere, the idea of a single “revival” in Italy to which the name “pentecostal” can be given (and that can be coopted by a particular tradition, such as theadi) is something of a retrospective illusion, neither necessary in its foundations nor accurate in its outcomes.56However useful to historians and to denominational officials, a more accurate view is possibly obtained by adopting more theoretically rigor- ous approaches. One such approach, as I have discussed elsewhere,57appeals to Arjun Appadurai’s concepts of “flows” and “scapes.” Changes in ideas, whether by physical movement (through migration, or increased professional mobility) or by a reframing of the local in relationship to the regional or global, are funda- mentally changes in perspective.58The breaking in of revivalism to theWalden- sian ghetto in the 1820s and 1830s was attended by new international links to both revivalism and to the liberal nationalist agenda. In Appadurai’s terms this “flow” created a new “sacriscape,” a new way of seeing the world informed by religious conversionism and activism, which flowed over into their political alternatives. The results of 1848 meant, therefore, that religious activism and political activism went hand in hand, with Waldensian and Free Church forms breaking out of the ghetto into the north. These “flows” were heavily political and intellectual, attended by the establishment of tertiary institutions, news- papers, debating groups, and the like; as Spini notes, there was a janus-facing alliance between the evangelicalized Waldensians, socialists, and Freemasons that aligns very closely with the transatlantic orthodoxies of the time.59 This, Appadurai would tell us, created a sacriscape that made sense of moderniza- tion and democratization in the north, which might not have extended further in the country had it not been for the mass migration from the impoverished

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popular culture but does not connect these to the Joachimite tradition; e.g., her “Aspetti della diffusione del movimento pentecostale in Puglia,” Uomo e Cultura: Rivista di studi etnologici5, no. 9 (1972): 102–114.

Hutchinson, “La farina del diavolo,” forthcoming.

M. Hutchinson, “Investigating the ‘Global Turn’ in American Evangelicalism,” in Heath Carter and Laura Rominger Porter, eds., A Straight but Thorny Road: Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism(Grand Rapids,mi: Eerdmans, 2017).

M.B. Steger and A. Appadurai, “Interview with Arjun Appadurai,” Globalizations 11, no. 4 (2014): 483.

Viz., Laura Pang, Confluence of Transatlantic Networks: Elites, Capitalism, and Confederate Migration to Brazil (University of Alabama Press, 2008).

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Italian rural south that broke out almost immediately afterward. This created different flows—southerners moving back and forth between their jobs and points of origin created new identities that can be grouped under the curious ascription of “the Americans,” a name given by these newly mobilized southern populations to those who had gone abroad. Some of these returned in the first conversion, establishing a demand for Protestant institutions in towns such as Ginosa (Puglia) and Castellone al Volturno (Molise) into which revitalized Waldensians (such as Teofilo Gay and Filippo Grill) flowed, building churches and schools. As we have seen, some of those who ended up in or supported pentecostal works came out of those churches, but the more important con- tribution was in creating a new sacriscape in the south, one that was neither socialist/political nor reliant on educated ministers from the north, but was fundamentally about self-respect, self-determination, and authentic action in a globalizing world.60

Spini, in passing, provides a vignette of some value as an illustration. Refer- ring to Ginosa in Puglia, which from 1913 became something of a seed plot for the growth of Pentecostalism through the region, he notes:

From Ginosa a petition was sent in 1903 to the Waldensians requesting that they send a preacher. A church and a school arose, particularly around the work of Pasquale Lo Re, between 1907 and 1911, amid the usual brawls with the [Roman Catholic] clergy. But it was above all the pervasive famine which gave rise to a widespread popular uprising, on 29 March 1915. Public security forces intervened quite heavily, leading to the arrest and trial of 150 poor devils, among whom were some evangelicals, after which, whoever could emigrated. The Waldensian nucleus was rendered moribund, also because, as we shall see, at the same time the Pentecostals were expanding in Ginosa.61

In the same snapshot, we have the international winds of war, of southern marginalization, and of mass migration fleeingla miseria, interacting with the dynamics of re-migrating Pentecostalism that was being established over the foundations of older revivalistWaldensianism.This is not a “wave,” but an inter- secting (even concatenating) confluence of flows that progressively builds sac- riscapes that consolidate and expand in contextually catalytic circumstances.

60

61

Viz., George R. Saunders, “The Crisis of Presence in Italian Pentecostal Conversion,”Amer- ican Ethnologist22, no. 2 (May 1995): 324–340.

Spini, Italia Liberale e Protestanti, 240.

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The consequences for the study of the global charismatic movement of this exploration of the interaction between Waldensian Protestantism and emergingItalian Pentecostalismare,one hopes,sufficientlyobvious.Notunlike Habermas or Moltmann, Appadurai is a seminal thinker not because he always gets it right, but because he is remarkable for the startling sudden insight distilled into a few compelling words. Speaking of the work of Pico Iyer, for example, he warns against confusing “some ineffable McDonaldization of the World” with “the much subtler play of indigenous traditions of desire and fear with global flows of people and things.”62 Here he is pointing to the impacts of category mistakes, such as the theory of “waves,” where scholars conflate a mass of very complex, local-global interactions into simplistic categories. As noted above, there are marked effects from the adoption of such underlying paradigms: it silences and glosses over bodies of experience and data, it legit- imizes the imposition of particular theologies and politics, and it “organizes” the poor and marginalized in ways that disrespect their agency and authentic- ity. Fundamentally, it misrepresents the nature of the charismatic experience by facilitating its cooption into reified categories.

As suggested in the brief application of Appadurai’s work herein, there are alternatives. For those intending to wade into the complex flows of global charismatic movements, it is important—as noted by Simon Coleman with regard to Livets Ord,63 David Martin with regard to Latin America,64 or Grace Davie with regard to some of the waifs and strays in Europe65—to base theo- rizing on attention to specific cases and particular contexts. In adopting theory thereafter, it is equally important to use thelimitsof these experiences to limit our use of descriptive (and prescriptive) theories and categories. Here we have applied a particular case to the orthodoxy of “waves” and found it wanting. In other settings, it is clear that the data used to justify the use of theories about hyper-real religion, or world systems theory, or some of the more ideological approaches to globalization theory, are just as selective and politicized. The “charismatic movements” they describe often wander off into fantasy, driven

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64

65

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization(Minneapolis, mn: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 29.

Simon Coleman, “The Charismatic Gift,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10, no. 2 (June 2004): 421–442.

David Martin, Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1993); idem,Pentecostalism:TheWorldTheir Parish(Oxford: Wiley-Black- well, 2001).

Grace Davie, “Religion in 21st-Century Europe: Framing the Debate,” Irish Theological Quarterly78, no. 3 (2013): 279–293.

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by an a priori disconnection from real people and cases so as to facilitate their incorporation into procrustean theoretical frameworks or policy positions.The fact that charismatic movements are a major phenomenon in globalizing soci- eties is unarguable; untangling what that means in this or that case probably requires a little more self-reflection and humility before the limits of our disci- plines and “points of view” than is sometimes observed in practice.

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