A Crack in the Edge of the World (43 page)

          
And there were voices, and thunders, and lightning;
          
and there was a great earthquake, such as was not
          
since men were upon the earth, so mighty an
          
earthquake, and so great.
          
And the great city was divided.…

Revelation 16:18

S
OMETHING SO BIG, MAJESTIC, POWERFUL, AND INEXPLICABLE
as this great shaking of the earth could only have been brought about by the hand of God. For years afterward hundreds of thousands of sensible people across America believed this simple explanation, and a considerable number in all likelihood still do today. In churches across the country, from Oregon to Florida, from Maine to Arizona, American citizens who went to worship the following Sunday prayed energetically for the souls of the San Francisco dead, for the relief of the wounded, and for the revival of the city—while at the same time stoically accepting, by and large, the cruel mysteries of the ways of the Creator.

The depth to which this belief was held varied from place to place. A clever and a skeptical few looked for a natural cause, while the faithful and the pious accepted without question that this was divine fate, nothing more or less. A pamphlet distributed from the then-village of Mountain View told its readers that without doubt the event had been retribution for “the sin of man.” This view was firmly held around the planet, too: The great British expository preacher George Campbell Morgan, who could draw crowds of almost 2,000 at Westminster Chapel in London, had no hesitation in ascribing blame and cause. The earthquake and the fire that followed it, he told his enraptured congregation soon after the dust had settled, was the judgment of God, visited on a wicked city.

But few believed more dutifully that all was the mysterious workings of the Divine than a small gathering of faithful who had met in Los Angeles for the first time just a few days before the earthquake. They were in the main black men and women, and they had gathered to profess their faith—in a very new and somewhat surprising way—in a disreputable-looking two-story mud-colored clapboard building, a former church that had fallen on hard times and was being used as a boarding stable.

The building was huddled into a short and otherwise forgettable alley in an industrial quarter of the city, an alley that is as famous to many ardent believers around the world as Golgotha, Medina, or the Hagia Sophia are to those of other creeds. It was called Azusa Street—and the beliefs that sustained the small congregation that met in what had once been the Azusa Street Methodist Church were to have consequences that would bring about a profound alteration of American society, one that has continued right up to the present day.

They called themselves Pentecostalists, in remembrance of an ancient Jewish feast day and in honor of the Holy Spirit, whom they worshiped with unalloyed enthusiasm. They clapped and cheered and waved their hands and they spoke in tongues; they interpreted the words of the Bible strictly, as fundamental laws; and they claimed they were guided by unmistakable signs from heaven to perform the Lord's work on earth. The San Francisco Earthquake was the first sign this congregation had ever seen, and coming so early in the movement's history it was universally interpreted as a message of divine approval, a spur that would henceforward send out the Pentecostalists fearlessly on their way.

The intellectual roots of Pentecostalism can probably be traced to John Wesley and to the Methodism that he founded in the middle of the eighteenth century—a church for ordinary people, a profession of Christian faith that had been stripped of its deadening burdens of propriety and pomp. Although Wesley's thinking had been well regarded in America for some time, as a movement it took off rather later, flourishing essentially after the Civil War; it has been viewed as a reaction among the less well off to the cold formalism of most Christian church services of the times. Moreover, the poor and the dispossessed and the neglected of America were eager to take matters rather further than their British counterparts: They wanted to participate in what was called “heart religion,” to profess their faith with uninhibited enthusiasm and drama, and to do so in “Holiness” churches that recognized miracles and otherwise inexplicable happenings that could only be the work of the Almighty.

They finally got what was needed when, in 1900, a preacher named Charles Parham, teaching at a seminary in Topeka, Kansas, triggered an extraordinary reaction in a young female student—soon to be as famous among charismatic Christians as Bernadette was to Catholics—named Agnes Ozman. During the school's New Year's Eve service, Miss Ozman asked Parham to baptize her. As he did so, he later wrote, so “a glory fell on her, a halo seemed to surround her head and face, and she began speaking the Chinese language and was unable to speak English for three days. When she tried to write in English to tell us of her experience she wrote the Chinese.”

Agnes Ozman had demonstrated the miracle of xenolalia—a sudden ability to speak a foreign tongue of which she had no prior knowledge.
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Parham and his followers promptly saw this as an unambiguous revelation, a sign from the Holy Spirit that he had visited and baptized the young woman. The Holy Spirit had done so, moreover, in precisely the same manner as he had done—according to the Bible, in Acts 2:1-4—for the twelve disciples on the Day of Pentecost, fifty days after the second day of Passover. That being so, the followers of the new religion that the Reverend Parham now saw revealed to him would call themselves Pentecostalists.

Within days other students, too, began speaking in languages unfamiliar to them—Swedish, Russian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Italian—and in ways that independent experts confirmed as accurate and authentic. Parham now had no doubt: The Holy Spirit was being revealed in these miracles, an age-old prophecy was being fulfilled, the new church must be founded, spirited missionary work must begin. And so, religious fervor being what it is, within months thousands of adherents were swarming to Parham and his charismatic church—so much so that he and his acolytes quickly established themselves in Texas and Missouri, two of the states that bordered Kansas, as well as in Florida and Alabama.

And there matters might have rested—with these new Pentecostalists no more than another small group of flamboyant Christian charismatics and evangelists tucked safely away among the cornfields of America's southern plains and the bayous of the Gulf Coast. But in fact matters unrolled quite otherwise.

A one-eyed black preacher named William Seymour, who had listened, enthralled, as Charles Parham spoke at one of his outreach missions in Houston, decided late in 1905 to take the Pentecostal Word to California—and, specifically, to bring it to the poor quarters of the fast-growing city of Los Angeles. Seymour, a short and stocky son of slaves, and who was by no means an arm-waving orator—some described him as meek and having “no more emotion than a post” when he gave his sermons—at first had a difficult time: The pastors of one church padlocked the doors to prevent him from spreading his exotic message there, and he had to resort to asking believers to join him for worship in the living room of his lodging house.

But slowly, steadily, a congregation formed—made up at first mostly of black men and women, and then with a small number of white adherents, too. Everything changed when, on April 9, 1906, Seymour baptized a man named Owen Lee, who promptly began to speak in tongues, prompting the pastor's supporters to declare a miracle. Seven others in the audience, duly amazed by Lee's linguistic performance and gripped by religious ecstasy, started to speak and howl in tongues as well. A woman named Jennie Moore promptly began to play the piano and sing sweetly in Hebrew—even though she had never played a piano before, and knew not a single word of the language.
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And then so many curious people thronged from the slums to the lodging house, and danced and shouted and sang on the porch, that the foundations gave way, the porch collapsed, and everyone was tipped out into the streets. No one was hurt—which was taken as a sign as well—and William Seymour (or Elder Seymour, as he now was known) had to go and find himself another church.

Which is how he came to Azusa Street. In April 1906, number 312 was no more than a partially burned-out clapboard stable, marked for sale and half filled with debris (it had once been a church and a remaining window in the Perpendicular Style reflected this use). Seymour made a deal with the owner, moved in nail kegs for chairs and redwood planks for tables, and spread straw and sawdust on the floor. He then announced he would hold services there every following day from 10:00
A.M.
until midnight. As word got around, the place became gripped by fervor, as the
Los Angeles Times
remarked in an article on the front page of Wednesday, April 18, 1906:

The devotees of the weird doctrine practice the most fanatical rites, preach the wildest theories and work themselves into a state of mad excitement in their peculiar zeal. Colored people and a sprinkling of whites compose the congregation, and night is made hideous in the neighborhood by the howling of the worshipers, who spend hours swaying back and forth in a nerve-racking attitude of prayer and supplication. They claim to have the “gift of tongues,” and to be able to understand the babel.

The city officially frowned on the group, which grew steadily and frighteningly larger and larger. The police had to be called to break up the crowds that gathered outside the church. The Child Welfare Agency, such as it was, tried to close it down because unsupervised youngsters were attending meetings at all hours. The Fire Department had to be called because of unexplained red glows seen inside the building and the sounds of explosions disturbing the neighborhood. The City Health Department decided that too many were crammed into the building, that it was insanitary, and that it ought to be shut down.

And then, on the very same day that the readers of the
Times
first read of these strange goings-on at 312 Azusa Street, San Francisco was hit by the earthquake. Frank Bartleman, a wandering preacher who had come to at Azusa Street and was helping Seymour deal with the throngs, knew immediately what the onset of seismic mayhem truly meant. The Book of Isaiah, chapter 26, verse 9, he declared, offered the reason: “When thy judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness.” The earthquake convinced him of the wisdom and truth of the Pentecostal approach. “I seemed to feel the wrath of God against the people and to withstand it in prayer,” he wrote.

He showed me he was terribly grieved at their obstinacy in the face of His judgment on sin. San Francisco was a terribly wicked city. He showed me all hell was being moved to drown out His voice in the earthquake. The message he had given me was to counteract this influence. Men had been denying His presence in the earthquake. Now He would speak. It was a terrific message He had given me. I was to argue the question with no man, but simply give them the message. They would answer to Him. I felt all hell against me in this, and so its proved. I went to bed at 4 o'clock, arose at 7, and hurried with the message to the printer.

Thousands of copies of Frank Bartleman's hastily written tract, in which he claimed excitedly but with impressive sincerity, that the earthquake was “the voice of God,” gave Seymour's group an aura of respectability and of divine imprimatur. He was able to cite no fewer than eight earthquake-related passages in the Bible,
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together with a seismically relevant jeremiad from John Wesley. All of a sudden this strange gathering of the gibbering and gesticulating faithful could not be so easily dismissed as merely a mob of hysterical fanatics. The new adherents who flocked to Azusa Street and to the dozens of sister churches set up to accommodate them became part of a true revival of sincere charismatic worship—and the Pentecostalists of America and the World Pentecostal Movement have never really looked back from that moment on.

With Azusa Street as its first spiritual headquarters, the church then spread like a forest fire in summer. Branches were opened in Tennessee, North Carolina, Norway, Oregon, South Africa, Brazil, Chicago, the Ukraine, Korea, Colorado … such that by the middle of the century there were branches and followers by the tens of millions almost everywhere. The names of the leading practitioners of this peculiar kind of Christian worship become ever more familiar—Aimee Semple McPherson in the early days, and more recently colorful figures like Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, Dennis Bennett, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Pat Robertson, Steve Hill. This exuberant evangelism became so powerful that politicians, particularly in America, and particularly conservatives, looked to this faith above all for support. The Pentecostal Movement is these days a thing of formidable power and wealth and influence and spiritual importance—a galvanizing force for America's underprivileged like few other movements in the country's history.

It is risky to attempt to forge a direct link between any natural occurrence and the growth of any subsequent religious or political movement—the fundamentalist Islamic movement that some will argue was spawned by the eruption of the volcano Krakatoa in 1883, for example, probably came about for a host of other reasons, too. Much the same can be said about the Pentecostal Movement in America, and the possible triggering effect that the San Francisco Earthquake had upon it, in its early days. The roots of the movement had, after all, already long been sown—by John Wesley in Britain, by Charles Parham in America, and by hundreds of other adherents who wished to break loose from the rigid practices of settled Episcopalianism. All these people needed was a sign, a catalyst that bore the signature of the Divine: What they got, in 1906, was the San Francisco Earthquake.