An extraordinary degree of exaltation: Durkheim,effervescence and Pentecostalism’s defeat of secularisation

Abstract

Pentecostalism has ‘bucked the trend’ predicted by Émile Durkheim and others that religion would decline and disappear in a secular modern age. In searching for the clues as to why this happened, this paper outlines Durkheim’s thought on the phenomenon that sparks religious life – effervescence – and his belief that in the secular future societies would make use of this phenomenon to create instances of ‘secular sacralisation’. Following these ideas, the author traces the development of Pentecostalism, a religious phenomenon that has harnessed the power of effervescence and grown explosively in the ‘secular’ age. Thus, Pentecostalism has appropriated (in part) the role that Durkheim believed society itself would have to fill in a future, secular age, and has reinforced the link between effervescent experience and a transcendent divine entity.

Introduction

As early as 1912, it was apparent to Émile Durkheim that religion was in its last days. He wrote: ‘The old gods are growing old or are dying and others are not yet born’ (1976 [1912]: 427). History has proven him both wrong and right. Reports of the death of religion have been, to paraphrase Mark Twain, greatly exaggerated. Religion is still very much with us. Commenting on the proliferation of mistaken predictions made by sociologists, political scientists and other thinkers regarding the demise of religion, Peter Berger, who himself once boldly predicted religion’s demise (1968: 3), has since suggested that perhaps the best thing a prophet can do is ‘write his book quickly, and then go into hiding’ (1974: 9).

In this paper, it will be argued that some of the clues to understanding the endurance of religion are to be found in Durkheim’s own system. It was Durkheim who outlined the phenomenon that he believed was the spark which ignited the religious consciousness – effervescence. One particular religious movement – Pentecostalism – has most effectively harnessed effervescence in the modern period, reversing the decline Durkheim and others predicted. It was effervescence that sparked Pentecostalism, beginning one of the fastest growing religious phenomena in recorded history.

Pentecostalism itself constitutes Christianity’s most compelling response to secularisation theory. Here we have, beginning in the 20th century, a religious movement that grew from zero to half a billion – all in the midst of an era when religion was supposed to be in decline. Pentecostalism acts as a case study in this paper, allowing us to see the clues latent within Durkheim’s own system that help us understand why this religious movement has flourished, despite predictions to the contrary. We begin with a brief articulation of Durkheim’s ideas on effervescence, and its connection to the origins of the religious consciousness.

Effervescence: the Promethean spark of religion

As one who was committed to understanding phenomena socially, and firmly opposed to psychological interpretations, Durkheim was interested in collective rather than individual meanings. Pickering (1984) has outlined Durkheim’s approach to religion as a ‘social fact’. For Durkheim, religion begins with a phenomenon he called ‘effervescence’, a form of collective experience that is larger than the sum of its individual parts.

We can do no better in describing effervescence than to quote Durkheim himself.

We indeed know from experience that when men are all gathered together, when they live a communal life, the very fact of their coming together causes exceptionally intense forces to arise which dominate them, exalt them, give them a quality of life to a degree unknown to them as individuals. Under the influence of collective enthusiasm they are sometimes seized by a positive delirium which compels them to actions in which even they do not recognize themselves. (Durkheim, 1975 [1919]: 183)

Durkheim returned to the importance of this phenomenon in the birth and development of religion in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.

But when a corrobbori [sic] takes place, everything changes … There are at once transports of enthusiasm … crying shrieking, rolling in the dust … When they come together, a sort of electricity is formed by their collecting which quickly transports them to an extraordinary degree of exaltation … and since a collective sentiment cannot express itself collectively except on the condition of observing a certain order permitting co-operation and movements in unison, these gestures and cries naturally tend to become rhythmic and regular; hence come songs and dances … This effervescence often reaches such a point that it causes unheard-of actions … They [those who experience this exaltation] are so far removed from their ordinary conditions of life and they are so thoroughly conscious of [the fact], that they feel that they must set themselves outside of and above their ordinary morals. (Durkheim, 1976 [1912]: 215–216)

In the experience of effervescence, the belief is formed in the ecstatic community that something larger than themselves exists, something with a sui generis reality that is greater than and transcends them. Durkheim referred to this as ‘la conscience collective’, conscience having the meanings of both consciousness and conscience (Lawson, 1999: 342). Hence, this is also the source of the ethical life for Durkheim, located deeply within and connected to the experience of religion. Once this association has been made, and this connection forged, it becomes firmly entrenched in the minds of individuals within a society, who are for Durkheim really worshipping the representation of their own society.

Therefore, for Durkheim, society had a sui generis reality, which transcended the individuals in their collective union and was distinct from them – almost like a mystical presence. This presence was perceived and mediated to those within society through représentations – a word which has no English equivalent – ‘it can imply sentiment, volition, ideal, idea, category, symbol and myth’ (Pickering, 1984: 279). It is through these représentations that human beings grasp reality, and it is thus collective représentations which are the proper subject of sociology. For Durkheim, religious représentations were the earliest social systems. Durkheim goes back to the totem in Elementary Forms as the earliest form of représentation. The totem does not produce religious ‘force’ or devotion because of the direct impression the object has on an individual. Rather, this religious force comes from the collective sentiment of the group, or clan, on its own members, which is then projected outside the group onto an object which is endowed with sacred status (Durkheim, 1976 [1912]: 229).

In other words, the totem is a symbol of the group, by which the group can be represented, which becomes the focus of the group’s own sentiment toward its own collective union. In this collective représentation the group acknowledges the social as an entity that is greater than any individual member, and in fact greater than the sum of its parts. It is in the experience of effervescence that a community of people perceives a higher order of existence, and forms divisions between the everyday and the extraordinary. It is the former which Durkheim labels the ‘profane’, while the latter constitutes the better-defined category he nominated the ‘sacred’. Through effervescence, the clan totem becomes regarded collectively as special or extraordinary – the sacred. Thus, in Pickering’s words, the sacred is the clan ‘hypostasized’ (1984: 231, 249).

Durkheim’s work has been criticized as much as it has been lauded, and his attempt to locate in effervescence the originating cause of religion is at best conjectural. It is not my thesis here that Durkheim correctly identifies effervescence as the source of all religions, but rather that this phenomenon is helpful in explaining the apparent success of one form of religion – Pentecostalism. There are, however, some more important critiques of Durkheim’s thought in relation to this thesis that must be taken into account.

In response to Durkheim’s claim that the strengthening and renewing force of effervescence is an essential and regular part of the functioning of society, Gaston Richard (1975 [1923]: 247) makes the following point: ‘Agreed, but this is no less true of a group of drinkers, gastronomes, race-goers, sportsmen, enthusiasts and gamblers, of an association of patriots or a community of believers. Everywhere, the act of gathering reinforces collective states without drawing a distinction between them.’

Richard also notes that effervescence in these settings may not have positive effects, but may lead to violence and cruelty (Richard, 1975 [1923]: 248). Once again, this is a problematic critique in terms of Durkheim’s understanding that religion is the source of moral life, and the safeguard against society slipping into anomie. It also leads inevitably to the question of why effervescence should lead specifically to the phenomena we today understand as ‘religion’, rather than giving birth to different collective phenomena.

Richard’s critique highlights one of the problems with Durkheim’s conception of effervescence – namely, that the concept needs to be extended beyond mere description. The alternative is that collective effervescence becomes a catch-all for every emotional experience encountered in a group (Pickering, 2008: 449). Durkheim, too, was aware of the need to nuance the use of the concept carefully, suggesting that the collective experience of effervescence ‘must possess a sense of unity, of intimacy, and the forces it releases must be sufficiently intense to take the individual outside himself and to raise him to a superior life’ (cited in Pickering, 2008: 450). Thus, authentic effervescence leads to positive and life-affirming energy, rather than toward evil. This is important for understanding Durkheim’s proposed alternatives to the traditional religions in what he perceived to be an inevitably ‘secular’ future, which will be explored in the next section.

One more proviso must be offered in order to properly understand the role Durkheim understood effervescence to play in advanced societies. Effervescence not only begins or changes phenomena, but can also have the role of affirming existing social structures and institutions. This is rooted in Durkheim’s distinction between belief and ritual in developed religions. He was ambivalent about which of these two elements is primary, but insisted that they are dependent on each other. Myth provides the raison d’être for ritual, and ritual is the acting-out of myth (Pickering, 2008: 449). Effervescence that is the result of belief can produce tremendously energised and transforming forces.

Arguably, effervescence connected to ritual also results in tremendous energy release, but no change. This is the direction Pickering, basing his thought on Durkheim’s work, takes when he describes effervescence that is linked to ritual. Such effervescence affirms the ritual, rather than creating a new one (Pickering, 2008: 448). If this is so, not only will effervescence have the function of sparking religion itself, but it will also have the role of revitalising traditions. This will be significant when we consider the concepts latent in Durkheim’s own system, which explain why a religious tradition has been able to harness the power of effervescence in order to grow and thrive in the midst of secular modernity.

This is not the future Durkheim anticipated for religion in the modern world. He did not restrict collective effervescence to religious settings or rituals – effervescence could also be secular, and indeed would have to be in modernity. He pointed to events in his own nation’s history, such as the ascendance of Joan of Arc and the French Revolution, as examples of collective effervescence (1976 [1912]: 210–211).

If Durkheim was correct, some examples of ‘secular sacralisation’ should be evident in modern society. Edward Tiryakian attempts to make this connection, linking effervescence, together with Max Weber’s thought on charisma, to the massive social change that occurred during the 1989 revolution that brought about the end of the Soviet regime. In making these connections, Tiryakian (1995) takes the concept of effervescence out of the religious context that Durkheim had first identified and applies it to social and political change. Arguably, however, in linking effervescence to the enigmatic and unstable charisma, Tiryakian’s secular effervescence is a transforming energy that flares and disappears quickly. It remains for an existing institution to harness the power of effervescence for long-term revitalisation.

Before coming to that, it is time to examine the secularisation thesis itself, particularly as Durkheim understood and articulated it. It is to the French thinker’s work on the future of religion that we now turn.

The secularisation thesis: Durkheim and beyond

While Durkheim held, as did several of his contemporaries, that religion would eventually decline and disappear in modern societies, he did not believe that this decline was caused by modernism itself. Rather, for Durkheim, societies begin to move away from their religious base as they develop (Pickering, 1984: 445). At first, all of the social is religious, but eventually other spheres are distinguished as separate from religion – spheres like the political, for example. Thus, it is in keeping with Durkheim’s system that eventually religion will decline to the point where it has either no place in society, or a very small space, away from the rest of the public sphere.

If there is one truth that history teaches us beyond doubt, it is that religion tends to embrace a smaller and smaller portion of social life. Originally, it pervades everything; everything social is religious; the two words are synchronous. Then little by little, political, economic, scientific functions free themselves from the religious function, constitute themselves apart and take on a more and more acknowledged temporal character. God, who was at first present in all human relations, progressively withdraws from them; he abandons the world to men and their disputes. At least, if he continues to dominate it, it is from on high and at a distance, and the force which he exercises, becoming more and more general and more indeterminate, leaves more [room for] the free play of human forces. (Durkheim, 1933 [1893]: 169)

When asking why this happens in terms of the day-to-day lives of people, Durkheim is on much shakier ground. Arguably, this is because he never did the necessary research (as he had in putting together Suicide) to establish any kind of causation. The most he could really say was that in modern life, religion is squeezed out because people are too busy.

A more significant challenge to the continued existence of religion was that presented by science (in which Durkheim included sociology) and rationalism. As we have seen, for Durkheim, in the beginning all of the social is religious but, as society develops, areas distinct from religion appear. Thus, science not only develops from religion, but also provides another system of représentations. For Durkheim, science does not provide direct knowledge of things (which would be impossible), but rather provides a more ‘perfect’ form of thought (Durkheim, 1976 [1912]: 429). If understood in this way, it is inevitable that scientific représentations will eventually replace religious représentations. This is why Durkheim believed that the process of secularisation would inevitably mean that science would bring about the end of religious devotion and religion itself in the modern world (Pickering, 1984: 450).

As we have seen, although Durkheim predicted the decline of religion, he also believed that both the possibility of social change and a continuing source of moral renewal could be rekindled by the Promethean spark of effervescence. Out of effervescent experience, humankind would find ‘new ideas’ and ‘new formulae’ that would act as a guide for a time, and when that time was past they would be celebrated in remembrance, and their benefits relived through these celebrations. Not surprisingly, Durkheim’s vision of creative effervescence in the future was largely secular. When he attempted to illustrate this process with an example, he turned to the French Revolution as an ideal that miscarried, but whose positive vision would no doubt ‘be taken up again sooner or later’ (1976 [1912]: 427–428).

Clearly, the continuing existence of religion in the 21st century world has demonstrated Durkheim’s predictions to be wanting. Before we race to dismiss the French sociologist’s prognostications, it is worth noting that his position on the decline and fall of religion is not quite as mistaken as it first appears. For example, Durkheim predicted with some prescience that religion would exercise influence primarily over the private lives of individuals (Pickering, 1984: 447). He also suggested that religion would no longer exercise the power it once had on the minds or consciences of individuals (Durkheim, 1966 [1897]: 375). This was an inescapable consequence of the emergence of humankind from ‘primitiveness’ (Pickering, 1984: 443) – a word which will have important implications later in this paper.

Confronted by the endurance of religion, the secularisation thesis itself was in need of updating. Charles Taylor has drawn together much of the significant thinking and writing on this phenomenon in his magisterial tome A Secular Age. Tracing the history of thought from the Middle Ages onward, Taylor notes that at least three ideas are incorporated in the term ‘secularisation’. First is the disappearance of religion altogether, which plainly has not happened and does not look like happening any time soon. Second, the term is used to refer to a decline in church attendance or religious affiliation (Taylor, 2007: 1–2). This is perhaps the popular, or most common, understanding of the term, and usually what is understood when people read or interact with Durkheim and Weber on secularisation (among others).

The third meaning that Taylor identifies is a more sophisticated understanding, in which the belief or position of materiality – purely human life with no transcendent entity beyond or in the afterlife – becomes a possibility. In other words, what Taylor is interested in finding out is how we move from a society or set of societies in which belief in God is axiomatic, to a society in which it is possible, and maybe even preferable, not to hold to belief in a divine entity at all (Taylor, 2007: 3, 11–14). Taylor’s revised secularisation already fits with some of Durkheim’s more nuanced ideas on the future of religion. This means that, rather than religion holding the central place in society and life that it did previously, it becomes one option among many in the marketplace of ideas and ways of life. This is a far cry from an understanding of secularisation in which religion ceases to exist at all.

In a slightly different approach, Micklethwait and Wooldridge (2009) posit two major secularisation narratives. One has taken place in Europe, the other in America. The European narrative evokes a need for religion to be stamped out in order for rationalism and science to liberate humankind. This is the course pursued by the French Revolution (much lauded by Durkheim), in which both kings and clerics were bloodily executed wholesale. More recently and characteristically in Europe, the religious are more likely to be ridiculed and lampooned by secularists and atheists. According to the narrative of European secularisation, religion is very much a private matter, not to be brought into the public sphere (2009: 31–54).

However, Micklethwait and Woodridge argue that it is American secularisation that has been the path followed by most of the world (2009: 25). This squares with the observation of some scholars that Europe may in fact be the exception in regard to secularisation, with the US and other nations representing the norm (Willaime, 2006: 755). In the United States, secularisation has followed a different course, one largely of tolerance of religious expression and worship in the public sphere (2009: 58). The first amendment to the US constitution guarantees freedom of religious expression for all Americans. While the principle of the separation of church and state is a well known pillar of American nationhood, this has resulted in religious pluralism, a very different prospect from the demise and fall of religion altogether (2009: 62–63). As Micklethwait and Wooldridge state, it has proved relatively straightforward for nations to be religious and modern, but it is very hard to be modern without being plural (2009: 356).

The term ‘modern’ requires further explanation and definition. Perhaps one of the most useful sets of definitions is outlined by sociologist Ulrich Beck (1992: 9–11), who nominates three broad epochs leading up to the present – ‘pre-modernity’, ‘classical modernity’ and ‘reflexive modernity’. The first of these is characterised by the centrality of institutions (such as religion or the kingdom) and well established social structures (such as the village or the extended family) in the lives of people. As Taylor (2007: 35–36) points out, pre-modern societies are also characterised by the ‘porous’ self, as the essentially modern idea of the discrete and autonomous individual was still to come.

The epochal shift Beck nominates ‘classical modernity’ began in Europe and the global West in the 18th century. This shift was marked by the beginnings of industrialisation, the erosion of traditional institutions – to be replaced by new ones (e.g. the nation state replaced the kingdom, the nuclear family replaced the extended family) – and the nascent concept of the individual. Arguably, this epoch is still being experienced, even in the Western world, where the next stage is taking place ‘against the still dominant past’ (Beck, 1992: 9). Some of the rapidly modernizing nations where Pentecostalism has grown most substantially in the late 20th and early 21st century – such as Brazil and Mexico – arguably fall into the category of classical-modern nations.

The next stage, which Beck identifies as ‘reflexive modernity’ – reflexive in the sense of self-referential, responsive and self-transforming (Beck et al., 2003: 1) – is the period beginning in many Western nations in the late 20th century. This is marked by challenges to the institutions of classical modernity, such as the nation state and the nuclear family, and the enthronement of the individual as the chief agent of meaning, as well as a movement away from Fordist production economies to service and information economies. Reflexive modernity is marked by the rise of secularisation, particularly in the third sense Taylor elucidates above. However, both reflexive and classical modern societies are also marked by increasing levels of religious pluralism – no particular religious expression, nor atheism, enjoys exclusive status in most 21st-century societies.

So the classical modern and reflexive modern societies of the early 21st century are largely characterised by a religious pluralism quite different from the universal secularism that many anticipated at the dawn of the last century. One religious phenomenon in particular – Pentecostalism – was birthed and has grown in a plural world in which any religious affiliation is understood to be one option among many. As Tonda (2011: 42) puts it, Pentecostalism’s success in so many different contexts gives the impression that it is a religious movement which is ‘at once pre-modern, modern and post-modern’. Thus, while it is tempting to explain Pentecostalism’s success in terms of the pre-modern and classical modern contexts of the Majority world, where Christianity seeks refuge from the secular Western world (Asamoah-Gyadu, 2011), such an approach cannot explain the continuing growth of the movement in reflexive modern contexts such as the United States, France and parts of China. How can this be explained and understood?

In proposing one possible answer to this question, I shall need to explore the nature of Pentecostalism itself as a religious phenomenon that focuses explicitly on catalysing the ecstatic experience of the divine. The next section of this paper briefly sketches the beginnings and development of Pentecostalism, and the connection this at times enigmatic religious movement has to the effervescence Durkheim described. It will become evident that latent in Durkheim’s sociology of religion are clues that may help to explain the explosive growth and endurance of this religious movement in the modern world.

Pentecostalism and the centrality of ecstatic experience

In his book on the waning of atheism in the modern world, theologian Alister McGrath (2004) devotes a short section to the phenomenon of Pentecostalism. He suggests that atheistic critiques, aimed at early 18th-century French Catholicism, ‘prove ineffective against this new variant of faith’. Pentecostalism has demonstrated that the Christian faith is ‘perfectly capable of reinventing itself’, resulting in an experientially, culturally and socially engaged form of religion that has re-established a connection with societies which had become disconnected from established religions (McGrath, 2004: 192–197). How has this remarkable shift happened, given that we live in a century in which many believed that religion would be finished and gone?

A detailed analysis of the historical contingencies that led up to the movement we now know as Pentecostalism are outside the scope of this paper, and would certainly fill at least a book. As with many reforming movements in religious history, it seems to have been largely a response to a perceived crisis. Confronted with the formalism of late-19th-century Protestantism in the United Kingdom and the US, many yearned for the ‘latter rain’ – a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit that would reform the church, trigger a worldwide resurgence of faith and bring about the apocalyptic Kingdom of God (Cox, 1995: 47–48; Drayton, 1987: 26–28). The book of Acts contains narratives of people being healed, speaking in other tongues, demons being cast out, people being ‘baptised in the Holy Spirit’ and even the dead being raised to life. The burning question for many was – if then, why not now (Drayton, 1987: 24–26; Wacker, 2001: 3)? The ‘proto-Pentecostals’ mainly from the Holiness movement, prayed for a revival and reformation of their dry and formal churches. This is what they believed they experienced in Pentecostalism.

While most agree that the movement that would come to be known as Pentecostalism began early in the 20th century, its direct antecedents and the location in which it first took hold are already disputed. Perhaps the most commonly held origin story indicates that student Agnes Ozman first exhibited glossolalia – speaking in tongues, which would become the hallmark of the movement – in a prayer meeting at her college in Topeka, Kansas on 1 January 1901. The phenomenon spread throughout the United States, but exploded through the ministry of William Seymour at the Azusa Street Faith Mission in Los Angeles around 1906 (Hollenweger, 1997: 18–24; Wacker, 2001: 5). However, others point to the Welsh Revival of 1904 as being the wellspring of the movement (Creech, 1996: 405). There is even some evidence that Holiness missionaries in India documented the phenomenon earlier than 1900 (Case, 2006). Add to this the recent rediscovery of Edward Irving’s charismatic ministry in Great Britain during the 19th century (Elliott, 2013), together with John Alexander Dowie’s healing ministry in Australia and the founding of Zion City in the US (Chant, 1973: 9–21; Lindsay, 1980: 124–138), and it becomes clear that tracing the movement to a single starting point is likely to be an exercise in futility.

Wherever and whenever it may have started, what is beyond dispute is Pentecostalism’s stupendous growth in the 20th century. In Southern Africa, there is evidence of Pentecostal awakenings and ecstatic phenomena such as healings and ‘holy laughter’ as early as 1908 in Johannesburg, possibly linked to the missionaries from Zion City in the US, and expanding rapidly along existing church networks (Maxwell, 1999: 244–247). Mexican Pentecostalism, which dates to at least 1912 and can trace its roots to Azusa Street, remains the fastest growing form of Protestantism today, with a strong emphasis on divine healing as a catalyst for conversion (Navarro and Leatham, 2004). In Brazil, Pentecostalism has shown itself to be remarkably adaptable to the effects of modern pluralism deep in historically Catholic territory, and remains the fastest growing religion in the nation, doubling in size between 1991 and 2000 to around 25 million adherents (Freston, 2013). Indeed Ferreira (2012: 1468) argues that the growth of one Pentecostal denomination – the Assemblies of God – in Brazil is due to the church’s ‘secularisation’, becoming adept at marketing itself in an increasingly intense religious marketplace.

Pentecostalism was and is a religious sect with a focus from its inception on phenomena that could best be described as ‘ecstatic’, such as glossolalia and divine healing. Pentecostalism has maintained to a higher degree than any other form of Christianity an emphasis on catalysing tangible religious experience, or what Durkheim might have called ‘effervescence’. Not only does Pentecostalism offer this catalyst, but it links to a tradition and a set of rituals and symbols that allow the repeatable catalysation of effervescence (Jennings, 2008). Arguably, it is the movement’s ability to harness effervescent experience that offers the best explanation for Pentecostalism’s success in an increasingly secular age.

Grant Wacker’s historical analysis of early American Pentecostalism offers some insight into the reasons behind Pentecostalism’s rapid growth in the United States and then the world. Wacker observes in Pentecostalism a twin emphasis on the ‘primitive’ and the ‘pragmatic’ (2001: 10, 13–14). Wacker justifies his use of the term ‘primitive’ in terms of the etymology of the word – from primus, that which comes first (2001: 12). The primitive, for Wacker, refers to the source of religious zeal and piety, and also direct, first-hand experience and revelation from God. It is thus intimately concerned with the wellspring of religion itself – that which Durkheim posits is to be encountered through effervescent experience.

Pentecostalism, effervescence and Durkheim

In understanding the role of effervescence in the beginnings of Pentecostalism, it is important to remember that effervescence – particularly when connected with ritual – can have a renewing effect on existing social phenomena. In Pentecostalism, participants encounter a religious phenomenon that offers ecstatic experience, often combined with a primitive, seemingly magical, belief in the possibility of healing and miracles, and a claim to connect participants directly to the divine source. At the same time, it is linked to a tradition – Christianity – that offers an explanation and context for this experience. The movement began at a crucial time in the history of the United States, a relatively pious modern country, and first took hold in a unique place – early-20th-century Los Angeles, a city Harvey Cox describes as ‘teeming with frustrated, disillusioned refugees from the south and Midwest, who had brought with them their revivalist and Holiness pieties … tinder ready to burn’ (Cox, 1995: 56). The connection between the ecstasis catalysed by the early Pentecostals and an existing system of theological and cultural symbols and ideas – theology – was easily made, allowing people excited by the effervescence within the movement to connect to the Christian tradition.

Thus, what takes place in Pentecostalism is not a new religion as such, but an effervescent renewing of the religious wellspring of Christian piety. The early Pentecostals understood their movement to be a reforming movement – in fact, a return to the Biblical norm (Wacker, 2001: 71). The emphasis on healing and glossolalia evident in pre-cursors to Pentecostalism, such as Edward Irving or John Alexander Dowie, may appear bizarre or weird to secular moderns. However, within the context of those dissatisfied with late-19th-century Protestantism, longing for a faith that connected with genuine pious experience of the divine as well as living up to the Biblical narratives of healing and other charismata in the early church makes sense. These were a people who longed not just to endure their faith, but to enjoy it, to paraphrase Texan pastor LC Hall (cited in Wacker, 2001: 68). Why did miracles, healings and manifestations such as speaking in tongues take place in the New Testament but not in modern religion? In early Pentecostalism, they did, as the following example from Wacker (2001: 100) demonstrates:

There can be little doubt that Pentecostal meetings can be aptly described with two words: chaotic and deafening. It would be hard to exaggerate the apparent disorder that prevailed through the 1910s and, in many places, through the 1920s (and sometimes to the present). The first known newspaper account of a Pentecostal meeting spoke of the men and women at Charles Parham’s Bible school in Topeka, Kansas in January 1901, ‘racing about the room’ for the better part of thirteen hours, all the while ‘jabbering a strange gibberish.’ Topeka foreshadowed things to come. Journalists witnessed similar phenomena when the revival made its way to Los Angeles in 1906. ‘The night is made hideous … by the howlings of the worshippers,’ wrote the Los Angeles Times reporter who first described the newborn Azusa Mission. ‘[T]he devotees of the weird doctrine practice the most fanatical rites, preach the wildest theories and work themselves into a state of mad excitement.’

It is hard to read such an account and not be reminded of Durkheim’s description of effervescence in The Elementary Forms.

The following excerpt is another example, this time from Barry Chant’s account of early Pentecostalism in Australia – specifically Janet Lancaster’s Good News Hall in Melbourne. While the veracity of the healing experiences listed might be questioned, there seems little doubt that people believed that such phenomena were happening, and hence were attracted to the nascent Pentecostal faith:

Sometimes people were so impressed by the presence of God that they fell prostrate to the floor. This did not concern the believers … ‘Dancing in the Spirit’ was another manifestation that sometimes appeared. During the singing of a hymn at one service, one woman moved from her seat and began to dance beautifully and gracefully around the Hall. Although her eyes were shut the whole time she touched no one else nor collided with any of the furniture or fittings … Prophetic utterances and utterances in tongues occurred in the worship services … Many miracles of healing occurred. One lady wrote: ‘You will remember anointing for paralysis the young girl whose mother and father sought the Lord? This morning she prepared lunch for her mother and myself with her own hand and is now using her foot to work the sewing machine. Glory to Jesus.’ (Chant, 1973: 33–34)

One final example – from this century – concerns a Pentecostal prayer meeting in Kampala, Uganda and demonstrates the development of Pentecostalism over the course of the 20th century. There is less emphasis on bizarre manifestations such as howling or falling. What remains, however, is the focus on the effervescent experience of the numinous, which is an enduring emphasis in Pentecostalism.

People began pacing back and forth within the confines of their pew, crying out to God. Others walked in the aisles. One young man was gesturing in the air with his hands as he prayed. The sincerity and authenticity of the several hundred worshippers was palpable as heart, mind and body coalesced into one concerted effort to connect the human with the divine … What followed was a highly democratic process in which people from the congregation came forward to offer a ‘word of knowledge.’ Dozens of people participated as they were moved by the Spirit. For example, one woman took the microphone and, quite literally, spoke on behalf of God, saying, ‘Do not be afraid of the sin you fear,’ and other words of comfort and instruction … Punctuating the prayers and commentary was the sound of people speaking in tongues. Often they would slip into this prayer language after praising God in English. It was an effortless transition and in the moment seemed very natural. When words could no longer express what they were feeling, they moved into an alternate discourse, one that was not bound by ordinary syntax. (Miller and Yamamori, 2007: 130–131)

In short, the effervescence Durkheim described and articulated as the wellspring and renewing source of religious life was the very phenomenon which played such an important part in revitalising Christianity, leading to a religious movement that harnessed the power of effervescence to grow explosively in the modern era. Durkheim identified the fact that no new gods were being set up; what happens in Pentecostalism is not the setting-up of a ‘new god’ per se (although that seems to be what many outside the movement thought was happening – if not new gods, new devils perhaps). However, as we have seen, effervescence can be not only an originating force, but also a revitalising or reforming one. It not only begins religion, but it is also the wellspring from which religion itself is constantly being renewed.

Something that may have surprised Durkheim is the absence of secular phenomena that have harnessed effervescence in the same way as Pentecostalism. Effervescence, as we have already discussed, is not merely something that begins religion, nor is it necessarily linked to religious contexts. Effervescent experiences that never lead to full-blown religious expression constitute what I have elsewhere called ‘proto-religious phenomena’ (Jennings, 2010; 2014). Durkheim recognised just such effervescent phenomena; indeed, they are critical to his vision of the future evolution of collective conscience – or perhaps what we might call ‘secular religion’.

Why have other effervescent phenomena not captured the hearts and minds of secular people in the modern world, and spawned secular ‘sacralisation’? As we have already seen in Tiryakian’s work, it could be argued that on occasion this has happened. Some might point to effervescence in the experience of fans at a music festival or sports events as examples (Jennings, 2010: 108–113; 2014: 11–14). Nationalism has at times effectively catalysed and maintained effervescence and devotion, as demonstrated by the cult of personality which developed around charismatic leaders such as Hitler, Stalin or Kim Jong-un. However, none of these phenomena (with the arguable exception of North Koreans’ devotion to their leader, which is hardly voluntary) have been able to harness effervescence into effective growth over a long period in the way that Pentecostalism has.

In what seems at first glance like a paradox, some of the clues we have uncovered in Durkheim’s system lead to the conclusion that Pentecostalism has thwarted secularisation (at least in Taylor’s second sense of the word) because it is a religious phenomenon, although perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it is connected to a religion – Christianity. Pentecostalism offers more than the one-off catalyst of effervescence available through participation in crowds at music and sporting events – although some of these, as Robin Sylvan (2002) points out, have developed into a religious-like devotion.

In comparison, Pentecostalism is able to offer the crucial element of what Paul Tillich (1957) calls ‘Ultimate Concern’, which itself is an essential component of the experience transcending existence and life itself. As Miller and Yamamori (2007: 134) point out, most Pentecostals would almost certainly find Durkheim’s explanation of the origin of the religious consciousness too reductive. Instead of leading to an understanding of the sacred as the sui generis social, effervescence has connected modern Pentecostals to an ancient tradition of a transcendent deity, wholly other from humanity and irreducible to it.

Conclusion

While Durkheim predicted that science and rationalism would leave the world bereft of religious faith as humankind came to understand that what they were worshipping was in fact the social itself, what actually occurs in Pentecostalism is a reconnection through effervescence between adherents and the God of the Christian tradition. The clues as to why this would happen were to be found in Durkheim’s own system. Durkheim and his contemporaries saw a simple equation in relation to religious faith. With the advent of science, religious ideas as explanations for physical phenomena would simply wither on the vine. Durkheim believed that there would have to be a replacement for this religious component of life, which would be discovered through the experience of effervescence. Yet, in Durkheim’s secular future, humanity would understand that effervescence led to the collective worship of the social itself, and thus religions that posited the object of worship as a transcendent deity would be untenable.

As a secularist and proto-functionalist, Durkheim believed that as humanity matured and understood the role that religion played in society, they would find other secular equivalents. However, religious people did not merely discard their religion in favour of more secular ideas and pursuits that would fulfil the same function. For many (if not most) religious people, such a move is not a possibility. What actually took place in the effervescence of early Pentecostalism was renewal and reform of the Christian tradition. Modern non-believers in the early 20th century, perhaps living in a secular vacuum of Ultimate Concern, were drawn to the nascent movement, which offered an experience – complete with miracles, healing and weird manifestations – of religion.

Durkheim understood, correctly as it turned out, that effervescence was not bringing about the creation of new religious faiths. However, he may not have fully grasped the ways in which effervescence could act as a renewing and reaffirming energy within an existing tradition. This, arguably, is exactly what occurred within late-19th/early-20th-century Pentecostalism, with a twin emphasis on renewal of effervescent experience within the existing religious tradition together with a desire to reform (rather than simply discard) the same religious tradition. The Pentecostals were able to reconnect with societies disaffected with religion through an emphasis on the experiential – in short, offering effervescent experience linked with an existing faith and moral tradition.