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This chapter highlights the dramatic changes at work in pentecostal healing by the mid-twentieth century. Due in large part to the growing prestige of orthodox medicine, as well as the improved economic and educational standing of the average pentecostal, numerous pentecostals openly affirmed the validity of the medical profession. Others demonstrated an awareness of psychologists' and psychiatrists' emphasis on mental illness and the psychosomatic origins of sickness. While tension persisted between pentecostals and the medical profession, especially in the ministries of high-profile deliverance evangelists associated with the midcentury healing revival such as William Branham and A. A. Allen, even here respect for the accomplishments of medical science was evident. The chapter concludes with discussion of pentecostal figures such as Franklin Hall, who imported emphases derived from naturopathy into the pentecostal movement, as well as other healing evangelists influenced by E. W. Kenyon, who increasingly prioritized the mind's role in healing.

This chapter examines Pentecostal or charismatic Christianity, which constituted the most vibrant features of the Christian landscape in Latin America and Africa, as well as in many parts of Asia, Oceania, and eastern Europe. The global Pentecostal movement throughout the twentieth century drew its most numerous adherents from the ranks of the poor, in a variety of urban and rural contexts. But as the century proceeded, it became apparent that this was not a faith for the poor alone, but rather a religious chameleon that had an extraordinary capacity to adapt itself to a wide range of social and economic contexts and ecclesiastical traditions. Pentecostalism has found a home amidst prosperous business families in Seoul or Singapore as well as among the favela dwellers of São Paulo or the Dalits of South India. The respective histories of Pentecostal culture in Ghana and Brazil both reveal a gradual but incomplete shift in style from the modest aspirations to social respectability and economic improvement characteristic of the Apostolic churches in Ghana or the Assembléia de Deus in Brazil to the sophisticated middle-class materiality and exhibitionist style typical of modern Ghanaian neo-Pentecostal churches or of the third-wave metropolitan churches in Brazil.

This chapter proposes three major revisions in the narratives that both practitioners and scholars have told about the origins of Black Jews and Judaism. First, rather than narratives of the Israelites being transmitted with enslaved Africans, who were themselves descendants of the ancient Hebrews, it demonstrates that Crowdy's church introduced Black Israelite theologies to Africa at the start of the twentieth century. Second, Holiness churches of every racial group adopted Hebraic rituals such as the Passover seder, foot washing, and the seventh day Sabbath, not to recreate Judaism but rather to emulate the early Christian church—that is, to be more like Jesus and his Apostles. Third, whereas various scholars and practitioners have explained the rise of the Pentecostal movement as an American interpretation of essentially African patterns of spirit possession, it is argued that the Pentecostal movement itself was inspired by an Anglo-Israelite attempt to recreate the early Christian church on the part of such figures as Frank Sandford in Shiloh, Maine, and Charles Parham in Topeka, Kansas.

The goal of this chapter is to comment on the scholarship on gender in the Pentecostal movement and to provide some case contextualization from ethnographic field research with Pentecostals in Colombia. In the religious landscape of Colombia, the term Pentecostal evokes a single denomination, the “Jésus Sólo” Iglesia Pentecostal Unida (IPU). The IPU's rejection of the Trinity isolates them from fellowship with the rest of the evangelical movement in Colombia. Despite their custody of the descriptor Pentecostal, they are by no means the only emergent religious group in Colombia. This spiritual focus is of greater importance for some evangélicos in Colombia than others, and there are a number of unifying factors among evangélicos specific to the Colombian context. In most significant study and analysis of evangélicos in Colombia there is an aggressive focus on the family, on marital and parental roles and responsibilities, that results in a discernible shift in the domestic life of converts.

This chapter highlights the implications of pentecostals' and charismatics' adoption of healing practices closely tied to the metaphysical tradition in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. The pushes to merge divine healing and medicine, to find parallels between biblical dietary guidelines and modern research in nutrition, and to spiritualize psychology—each brought believers into a close relationship with mainstream trends in the U.S. healing marketplace and purchased wide influence not only among individuals associated with evangelicalism but also in the broader U.S. culture. While important tensions continued to separate individuals in the pentecostal-charismatic movement from practitioners of metaphysical religion, by the turn of the twenty-first century a shared “off-modern” sensibility played a pivotal role in both groups' growing appeal throughout U.S. culture as they combined enthusiasm for modern science with a nostalgic longing for a lost Edenic past.

This introductory chapter begins with discussion of the emergence of the pentecostal movement. It then describes the Assemblies of God (AG), arguably the best-known of the Pentecostal denominations. The remainder of the chapter explains the research methodology used in this study and then sets out the book's purpose, i.e. to present a broad narrative, complete with statistical findings, of a prototype of Pentecostalism and the issues facing this American-born and -bred approach to Christianity that has become a global force. At its core the AG is a historic Pentecostal denomination, but one that has been influenced by subsequent pentecostal renewals and revivals as well as by the countervailing force of evangelical Protestantism. The book focuses on the effects of these two seemingly countervailing forces on the AG in the United States.

The epilogue situates the changes in pentecostal and charismatic healing in the United States in the broader context of global pentecostalism. While the twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century changes in adherents' healing practices in the United States mirrored the type of contextualization that occurred around the globe, they also introduced a significant deference to the authority of medical science and alternative medicine that was quite foreign both to early pentecostalism and to manifestations of the pentecostal-charismatic movement worldwide (and especially in the global South). In the end, the changing healing practices of believers and the turn to metaphysical healing paradigms involved much more than just healing the body; they also pointed to a very deliberate effort to heal the rifts between adherents' faith and the expectations of the surrounding culture, and to mitigate apparent conflicts between religion and science.

In Chapter 6, we take brief notice of other anti-Calvinist (and distinctly Protestant) movements that emerged after the sixteenth century, including some groups that did not always self-designate as Arminian, such as the English Baptists, nonsubscribing Presbyterians, and the American (Stone-Campbell) Restoration Movement. We then take stock of the breadth of Arminian views in the twentieth and early part of the twenty-first centuries, with a special emphasis on movements arising from Methodist and Wesleyan influences. We conclude with a summary of Arminianism, its historical development, and the major themes that are common to the various expressions of Arminian theology.

Opponents of secularization theory often emphasize that what can be said about religion in Europe cannot be applied to other regions of the world. They regularly refer to non-European countries where processes of modernization and religious revitalization have gone hand in hand. Therefore, to determine the role of religion in the modern world and the reasons for its changes means dealing with non-European societies. This short introductory chapter to Part IV explains the selection of the three case studies to be discussed in more detail in the chapters that follow: the US, South Korea, and the Pentecostal movement.

This chapter presents the author's account of his visit to the Capstone Cathedral in Phoenix, Arizona. He describes the congregation, the worship and healing services, and Evangelist Neal Frisby and his alleged healing prowess. The pentecostal or sanctified movement is grounded in the belief that the Holy Spirit anoints true Christians with special spiritual gifts. When the movement began to gather steam in American evangelicalism early in the twentieth century, healing became one of the spiritual gifts that pentecostals claimed as evidence of sanctification. Frisby believes he is a prophet sent from God, the final prophet before the end of time.