Holy Mayhem, Part I

The Second Coming of the Pentecostals in Los Angeles (2006)

Supporters praying during a Trump rally in Warren, Mich., in 2022. Brittany Greeson for The New York Times.

Dear Subscribers,

The post that follows is a magazine story that I wrote on spec, i.e. without an assignment and a contract, about a convention of Pentecostal believers from around the world that descended on Los Angeles in 2006 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the much-fabled Azusa Street Revival. This was a series of multi-racial prayer meetings that took place in 1906, overseen by a Black itinerant preacher named William J. Seymour, that gave birth to the Pentecostal way of worship in the U.S.—though Pentecostalism would soon become a global phenomenon.

In 2005 I had taken a job as interim director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. It was an ultimately failed experiment in living outside of New York, and the first full-time academic job I had ever taken to that point. I was miserable on the Eastern Shore, feeling adrift from my life in Brooklyn and from the novel I was trying to write at the time. One lonely weekend, before heading out to Waterman’s Crab House in Rock Hall, I had visited a megachurch nearby and witnessed the phenomenon known as “speaking in tongues” for the first time.

What is this? I wondered. Can this really be happening? It was a prosperous church in suburban Maryland, the parking lot filled with SUVs and minivans and the sleek new Mini Coopers made by BMW, the worship band electrified, competent and rehearsed. It felt like I was watching The Tonight Show or I had wandered into a Christian reboot of The Truman Show rather than stopping in at a typical suburban megachurch in the mid-Atlantic region.

This is almost twenty years ago now, but I still remember the sheer weirdness, and the shock, of watching one of the worship leaders, with piano backing, work the entire church up into a frenzy of nonsensical babbling, all of which was supposed to be “tongues,” or a holy expression of language that came from the Holy Spirit.

This video from Vice T.V. captures roughly what I saw in church that day …

This is almost twenty years ago now. But I have never really gotten over the initial experience of seeing prosperous suburban churchgoers in America, white, black and Asian American, all worshipping together, revert to a kind of pre-language, maybe post-language is more accurate, in which they saw great holiness, meaning and significance.

I went on to dive quite deeply into the history of the Pentecostal church in America, beginning with an essay I already knew by the radical historian Mike Davis from Grand Street, “L.A.’s Pentecostal Earthquake.” (I had worked at Grand Street in the early 2000s, and Jean Stein, the magazine’s editor and a dear friend, had given me a copy of the print issue with Davis’s essay. Issue #68, Symbols, is still floating around on the resale market—grab a copy if you can!)

First I wrote a short piece about the Azusa Street centennial for the brilliantly exacting Alex Star at New York Times Magazine, and when that was not deep enough of an immersion, I paid my own way to Los Angeles to attend the Azusa Street Centennial conference in April of 2006, one hundred years after William J. Seymour’s revival on Azusa Street had first sparked the Pentecostal movement in the U.S.

While I was researching and writing this first piece about the Pentecostal movement for the Times Magazine, I kept being told by the scholars I interviewed that Pentecostals were not a politically engaged movement—that they disdained a “worldly” church and were content to live in a private communion with the Holy Spirit rather than getting involved in politics—whether it was abortion, gun rights, school choice, or even endorsing candidates for higher office.

This consensus opinion from scholars of contemporary Christianity did not match the Pentecostal believers that I saw and interviewed in Los Angeles in 2006. To me, it was, if anything, a highly politicized Christian movement that was ready to do battle in the court of public opinion, and in the streets, if it turned out to be necessary, to see the Law of scripture imposed over all U.S. citizens as the Law of the Land. It seemed to me they were trying to seed a second Reconstruction, the ugly period after the conclusion of the Civil War when many of the gains made by Black Americans were clawed back by White Supremacists in power.

They spoke openly about “spiritual warfare,” a calling to do endless battle against the forces of evil in a fallen world—the Supreme Court’s Obergfell v. Hodges decision legalizing same-sex marriage was still a decade away (2015), but they could feel the tide of culture shifting in favor of equal rights for homosexual Americans, and they were busy organizing and gathering power to swing the pendulum back.

One line of scripture they often quoted was this call to arms from Ephesians (6:11-13):

Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm.

I’ve barely touched this piece since I finished the final draft in 2007—just a few little tweaks here and there for clarity and continuity.

This is the first half. The rest of the piece will be posted to this Substack in a week or so.

It’s called “Holy Mayhem,” and I hope you enjoy it.

Bis Bald,

B.A.

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HOLY MAYHEM: THE SECOND COMING OF PENTECOSTALS IN L.A.

1.

The second Pentecostal century, just like the first, which sought to restore God’s mystery to a church that had become too ‘worldly’ in its mission and its language of worship, was heralded by a tremor of the earth in greater Los Angeles. In April of 1906, with itinerant preacher William J. Seymour’s Holy Spirit revival underway in an old Methodist church that had seen more recent use as a tenement, warehouse and stables, the earth had moved with aftershocks from the great San Francisco earthquake.

A hundred years later, as I crossed a culvert on foot, a little lost—this was the Mapquest-printout era of navigation—and started climbing a hill to what I hoped would turn out to be Bonnie Brae Street, the disturbance that shook the asphalt and set off a chain-reaction of car alarms nearby was manmade: the diabolical throat-singing of a dozen Harley Davidsons. I am not religious, let alone a Christian—the word made flesh has always been an obstacle for me, a kind of papering over of a beautiful and original terror—and I had come to Los Angeles to attend a convention of especially fierce Christian fundamentalist believers, listen to their stories of signs, wonders, and blessings from a Creator who still muddies his hands in earthly clay, and bear witness to a new revival, or so they’d hoped, from the original epicenter of the Pentecostal way of worship.

The Azusa Street Riders—bikers from The Apostolic Motorcycle Ministry of Jesus Christ, an evangelical group with ten chapters nationwide—know that fear lies at the business end of a chrome drag pipe, and their horrible racket darkened that Saturday morning like a prophecy of doom. First one rider came to a rolling stop at the intersection above me, dressed in black leather and wraparound sunglasses, pausing at the stop sign before his chopper surged to life again, and then another rider came, and then three more … Soon, the Azusa Street Riders were swarming everywhere, tearing the sky with their throttles and creating a short-circuit in my nervous system. Then they were gone, almost instantly, and I could hear them throttling their jubilee further down the street, making dogs bark, sirens wail, and spreading Holy mayhem in this neighborhood of neatly kept houses with walled-in front yards and satellite dishes angled every which way to receive transmissions from the heavens. The windows were all curtained shut behind iron security grates, and I imagined couples turning over in bed and cursing the infernal bikers who had woken them so rudely from their sleep.

I was lost. I was full of doubt. I was still feeling fuzzy-headed from the flight to California. I was looking for 214 North Bonnie Brae Street—the cottage where the Holy Spirit first “fell” on William J. Seymour and his acolytes during fervent prayer meetings a hundred years before, and where that morning’s procession to the site of the Apostolic Faith Mission on Azusa Street would kick off. With the last of the riders drifting away, and the car alarms, one by one, falling quiet with an automated chirp, I heard applause in the distance and the sound of a preacher’s voice amplified by a bullhorn. I put away my printed map and put my faith, instead, in the Azusa Street Riders. They would know the way. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was following the exhortation, from the Epistle of Jude, that opened every issue of The Apostolic Faith, the newsletter that had first spread Seymour’s gospel:

Earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.

From the Azusa Street Riders International website

2.

This is before I had shared seats in a converted school bus with a young woman I will call The Jewish Believer, before I would witness an outpouring of the Holy Spirit underneath an escalator in the L.A. Convention Center, before I would lead an exodus from the Holy Spirit procession to a Starbucks in a depressing plaza not far from Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall and stand in line for what seemed like an eternity. (“Extra hot,” one creased and prosperous looking volunteer from the Crenshaw Christian Center kept on reminding the barista. “I want that latte extra hot.”) It was before Lisa Johnston wrote to me Open your heart, Benjamin, and let the God of this universe begin to speak to you. He brought you to Azusa Street for a reason and has something for you. And it was before I went to the Faith Dome and heard the sound of eight thousand bible pages turning at once when the Prosperity preacher Creflo Dollar licked his fingertips and said, “Now listen to this and amplify it.”

First, there was the parade. I mean, procession.

But really, it was a parade.

I checked in with a group of volunteers in matching yellow polo shirts, taking a number that determined my place in the Holy Spirit procession—section nine, as it turned out, with the other later arrivals—and I grabbed a bottle of donated spring water from a stack of open cases on the curb. While I had been disappointed, at first, that my number was so high, this turned out to be a stroke of good luck: the rear fringes of the procession provided the perfect vantage point for surveying the scene at Bonnie Brae Street. Pentecostal saints and dignitaries—white, Black, Latino, Asian American—took turns at the bullhorn to rile up the crowd from the front porch of the holy site, unchanged, or so it seemed, from the period house in grainy pictures I had come across in the religious publications I’d been collecting. (Most were cheaply printed, using the poorest materials available, as if to advertise the ephemeral quality of earthly things.) As the Pentecostal Saints addressed the organized and early-risen with speeches and words of praise, arms flew up in unison, air-horns blew and flags waved. THE NAME ABOVE ALL NAMES, one homemade banner read. Meanwhile stragglers kept arriving and hung in back to fill the rear flank, yawning, or hurried through in divinity costume to join the groups in front, talking through cell phones or Bluetooth earpieces to invisible companions.

I saw two female members of the Wave of Worship gospel choir, resplendent in royal blue satin, teeter past on heels so high they looked dangerous, laughing wildly together. I saw children in yarmulkes and tasseled tallitot being tugged along by parents dressed in Broadway desert garb, complete with leather sandals and a shofar on a string. (This was perhaps the biggest surprise of the convention: the sheer number of Messianic Jews attending an overtly Christian convention. Most were practicing Christians who had adopted Jewish worship traditions and faux-Israelite costumes in an attempt to “get closer” to the religion of the Apostles.)

I watched members of the Cahuilla Band of Indians raise their hands and let out war whoops at the finish of a prayer; Korean Americans in expensive sweatsuits and golf outfits fill the sidewalk in a swarm, walking two and three abreast; elderly Filipinos glide past in an electric golf cart, outfitted with the flag of their church. There were thugs, gangbangers, stoners and club kids among the teenagers in the crowd—albeit scrubbed of the vices that made the uniforms famous—and a dark-eyed Romanian youth group, the girls in traditional dress with bonnets, the boys in leather jackets and spiked black hair, gathered around a giant Romanian flag they would carry, like a bed sheet, all the way to the procession’s finish. The truth about parades is that they’re tedious to watch from sidelines and exhilarating, for those who wear their costumes in good faith, to take part in, judging by the expressions of faith and joy from the marchers. The crowd undulated from my place in section nine all the way to Beverly Boulevard in the distance. While the scene was undeniably of this world, populated with scores of believers—and enabled by technology—that William Seymour scarcely would have recognized, had he gathered with the others on the porch that morning, the revelers were following scripture that he would have known by heart:

I will rejoice greatly in the LORD, my soul will exult in my God; for he has clothed me with garments of salvation, He has wrapped me with a robe of righteousness. As a bridegroom decks himself in garland, as a bride adorns herself in jewels.

Isaiah 61:10

Every day is a parade for the Pentecostal worshipper, an opportunity to rejoice, in God’s own finery, for the gift the Lord has bestowed on them. They have found what the American Transcendentalists sought in their own ecstatic communion with the divine, what Emerson called “an original relation to the universe.” While the rest of us watch from the crowd along the parade route, bored and ill at ease, they reach across the barriers and beckon us. Here, they say. Come walk with me.

The distance between the Bonnie Brae House and the revival tent in Little Tokyo where the procession ended was a fraction over two miles, and I must have walked it two or three times in the hours it took for the marchers to pass through the blighted stretch of Beverly that ends at the 110, cross underneath the freeway to 1970s office blocks and Frank Gehry’s silver, pavement-softening mirage of a concert hall, and onward to the plaza where Seymour and his followers once held their raucous prayer meetings as many as three times a day. The parade moved forward like a Brooklyn-bound train on weekends, lurching to a halt repeatedly from no visible cause and then starting off again in tentative bursts. Spirits never lagged, however, and the organizers had thought of everything—marchers in satin costume ministered to the homeless and the infirmed while they waited together in line for the comfort stations. I remember a Buddhist monk in a long orange robe getting up from his chair inside the courtyard of the Wat Khmer Temple on Beverly to watch the procession through the bars of an iron gate. (He politely declined my request for an interview.) Postal workers from the Downtown Carrier Annex stepped outside to listen to the gospel choir when a float passed; one, a believer herself, danced on the sidewalk with her arms held high and called to the crowd, “I’ll see ya’ll tomorrow!” Downtown, outside the Disney Concert Hall, which tilted and shimmered in the gray sunlight, soldiers of Christ marched in place with jousting stakes and shields while their damsels, in tights and gold tunics, waved Tongues of Fire flags—orange and yellow, slender like flames—on flexible graphite rods that looked as if they might snap but at any moment but never did.

Pentecostal believers are keepers of the supernatural, by self-definition. The movement is named for the day of Pentecost, fifty days after Christ’s resurrection, when the Holy Spirit descended on the apostles in the form of tongues “as of fire” and anointed them with the power to teach the Gospel “in many languages,” and I was not alone in having come to the procession in search of miracles. But miracles are hard to discern in the hard light of an L.A. morning, much less verify with the tools of journalism. There are no facts to weigh and compare with an observable truth, only competing forms of testimony. “The Holy Spirit is here!” people would tell me with tears streaming down their faces. “I feel it!”

“The Spirit’s come back to Los Angeles! It’s a bright new day!”

Everywhere I walked that first morning, I encountered groups of strangers clutching each other in prayer, a living pietà, or men and women fallen to their knees on the pavement, some murmuring, others praying quietly—all of them overcome by a private ecstasy that I could only try to describe, try to apprehend, from a distance. Can this be what miracles look like? I asked myself again and again as I stumbled onto another scene. Or is that the genuine miracle, over there? Was I missing the chance to encounter something truly astonishing every time I passed up an interview? My record of the parade would be incomplete without the testimony of believers who were certain they had encountered the Holy Spirit in L.A. Here is one such story:

I will never forget that overcast morning in April. I arrived in Los Angeles and quietly watched the crowds of people that were gathering. There was such a feeling of peace in the air, which I found to be rather strange, because in that part of Los Angeles there is not a lot of peace to be found! As I was standing in the crowd, I noticed a man on the porch of the Bonnie Brae house. I recognized his picture from a book I had been reading entitled The Charismatic Century: The Enduring Impact of the Azusa Street Revival. It was Jack Hayford, a pastor from Van Nuys, California. My desire was to approach Pastor Hayford to thank him for writing the book, because it had begun to open my eyes to the workings of God’s Holy Spirit. It was impossible for me to approach Pastor Hayford, though, because the gates that led to the porch were closed and there were many people surrounding the house.

The parade got underway and I began to walk down the street towards our final destination. As I moved down the street, I found myself looking to my right, and there stood Pastor Hayford! I approached the area where he was standing and after asking permission to speak to him and began to thank him for writing his book. Pastor Hayford was very kind and gave me a few minutes to share with him why I had come to the parade. He then asked if he could pray with me for a release of Holy Spirit, and I said sure! Pastor Hayford asked God to show me His power and to release His precious Spirit within me. I did not know what to think about his prayer, but I felt very safe as this total stranger prayed for me.

Lisa Johnston runs the Scarlet Cord Ministries in Lake Forest, California with her mother, Lucile Vigué. Scarlet Cord is primarily an online “outreach” ministry, meaning the Johnstons run a website. They have also published a book of Lucile’s devotional poems called Thou Art My Armor. Lisa gained celebrity at the Azusa Street Centennial when a story about her appeared in the convention’s daily bulletin, produced by the convention’s press office and distributed to attendees every morning. Lisa had suffered chronic back pain from an early age and wore lifts in her shoes to counteract a birth defect. She had ruptured a disk five years earlier, been confined to bed for nine months, and became dependent on painkillers. During a service by the evangelist Benny Hinn on the opening night of the convention, she received “the gift of healing” and tossed away her orthopedic lifts. In the days since Benny Hinn’s healing service, Lisa claimed, she had been entirely pain-free. “It felt like a gel was injected into my spine and my left leg bone lengthened,” she told a reporter for the bulletin. When I interviewed her behind a curtain at the humming press office one day, Lisa told me the story in greater detail, standing up at one point and running her hands down the length of her body to describe the progress of the “gel” beneath her skin.

Lisa was smart, warm, talkative, unfailingly polite, and clearly relishing all of the attention. If her irises seemed to leak a little too much electricity, at least this flaw was recognizably human. Lisa gave me a copy of her mother’s book of poetry and promised to report back once her doctor had verified the healing of her legs and spine. (I wrote to her a few weeks later to hear more about the doctor’s report, but I never heard back from Lisa.)

This is how she met her miracle on the procession from Bonnie Brae Street:

Pastor Hayford … told me to continue walking in the parade and that God was going to release the Holy Spirit in me. I gave him a puzzled look, turned and continued to walk. About five minutes later I began to tell Jesus how holy and perfect he is and began to thank him for his presence. I began to cry and felt this strange heat come over me. Suddenly the noise from the parade faded away and I didn’t even feel like I was walking. I felt something begin to pour over me like a thick cream or syrup starting from the top of my head. My legs became weak and then I heard this sound come from my mouth. It startled me so I put my hand over my mouth, not knowing what was happening. When I removed my hand, the sound came out again. My breathing became rapid and I felt like my feet were hovering about two inches off of the ground. About thirty minutes passed—I knew because I looked at my watch—and the next thing I knew I was at the final end point of the parade.

It’s hard to know whether I ever saw Lisa as I wandered the concrete plaza in Little Tokyo where the Azusa Street Revival had first taken place. The dignitaries and their coteries had gathered beneath a tent, a stage had been erected for a full program of devotional music, Christian mime and ethnic dance, and a light rain began to fall as soon as the last of the marchers had reached the plaza and filed inside, looking up at the sky in faint protest. Raindrops spotted satin robes, store-bought cardboard swords and velvet capes. I stayed for most of the performances, but truth be told I had grown weary, by then, of the emotionalism and talent-show pageantry that had surrounded me all morning. Before the Cahuilla Band of Indians brought me to a saturation point, I stood near the back of the plaza and watched one of the Holy Spirit flag-bearers dancing all by herself, to inaudible music, while the crowd kept their eyes pinned to the stage. She twirled herself in circles, grasping her flag-pole like a partner, watching the nylon tongues of fire dance above her in the air and letting the rest of us melt away. Her gold tunic glowed and made streaks in the air as she dipped and whirled. She kept on dancing with her Holy Spirit flag. And she kept on dancing.

3.

If I had been saved by the Pentecostals when I joined them in Los Angeles (and believe me, they tried, praying fervently for me in the seats of their temples, in the dimly lit corridors outside the seminar rooms in the Convention Center, on the anointed spot of carpet underneath the escalator), I wouldn’t be writing this. Like Jennie Moore, a serving girl who, when first “slain in the Spirit” at the Bonnie Brae House, played the piano with startling expertise and sang in at least six languages (including Greek and Hindustani). Or William Seymour himself—poor, scarred by smallpox, a man so humble that he led his revival preaching with his head inside a crate—I would be an instrument of God instead of an American writer who merely witnessed a congress of believers in Los Angeles at the start of the 21^st Century.

Signs and wonders are the bricks and mortar of religious experience (just pull down the Ouija board and ask William James), particularly in the Christian tradition. Think of the child’s sing-song voice telling St. Augustine, in the Confessions, to tolle lege, or, “take it and read.” But no other Christian sect has been quite so adept at making the miracles of the Gospels available to every individual seeker with a desire to be changed, changed utterly. This is the Pentecostal gift. And it has been an amazingly adaptable gift, too, the message spreading seamlessly by the technologies of old media (print media, radio and TV), new media (the Internet and wireless technology), and everything in between.

If given a choice, how many worshippers would pray for salvation from an unseen, unresponsive God when, in charismatic Pentecostal worship, “God is on-call 24/7,” right from your handheld, and makes your knees weak, your pain disappear, your wallet fatten, and your lips move on demand? How many believers would pass up an invitation to walk hand in hand with the God of the Apostles in our world, all the time, and long after the consolation of a metaphor instead?

In just one hundred years, the movement that began with a prayer meeting among a handful of pious Black Americans in a parlor on Bonnie Brae Street has amplified, to quote the good Dr. Dollar, into a rollicking global revival with over 580 million disciples. There are over 100 distinct denominations around the world where the Holy Spirit reigns supreme, minting nineteen million new Pentecostal believers every year and making charismatic Pentecostal worshipers the fastest-growing army in Christendom. They are the poor of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America; the strivers of Seoul, South Korea and black ex-urban Dallas; the wealthy in Memphis, Lima, Fairfax, Manila—and their housecleaners too. Never before in modern history has the supernatural been such an active force in so many lives, and not since the time of the apostles has the prophecy of Joel seemed so near at hand:

‘It will come to pass in these last days,’ God says, ‘That I will pour out a portion of my spirit upon all flesh. Your sons and your daughters will prophesy, your young men shall see visions, your old men shall dream dreams.’

Acts 2:17

By the peak days of the Azusa Street Centennial in 2006, 30,745 delegates had registered, representing 113 countries (who knew there were so many countries in Christendom?). There were times, as I wandered the Convention Center in the morning, before the events got underway, or during the lunch break, when the halls and conference rooms spilled out their wondrous masses, when it seemed as if the whole world had come to Los Angeles and somehow fit itself underneath that glass and steel edifice. The parade never stopped for the entire week and the variety was almost too much for the eye to bear. I went to seminars on healing prayer; heard the pioneer of the Purpose Driven Church, Rick Warren, give a talk on the “Seven Words for the Next 100 Years”; I spent time in the convention’s Prayer Room (LACC 514) with John Harrison, a buoyant minister with the Business Men’s Fellowship USA, a corporate outreach group. I wandered the Exhibitors’ Hall, a vast Christian marketplace, collecting pamphlets, free magazines, sample DVDs, and marveling at the entrepreneurial spirit that could bring the world sanctified bee products, high-design worship furniture, and private Christian group health insurance. But mostly I watched, and listened, and talked to the people I met. I talked to anyone who was willing to open up to a stranger with a laminated press pass hanging around his neck. Which was almost everyone I met at the convention. And the stories I heard from the delegates, though they came in all shapes and sizes and from every different walk of life, shared one single element in common: love. God loved them, they insisted to me, and they loved God back. They knew this love was “for real” when the Holy Spirit fell on them and gave them the gift of tongues, or healed a family member’s serious illness through prayer. Seymour’s genius had been to make salvation, a remote, otherworldly possibility in most Christian worship, an immediate earthly possibility, something that can happen in the now, and to offer as proof an experience of God from the Apostles’ time that anyone can share.

“We are not fighting men or churches,” a passage in the first issue of The Apostolic Faith reads, “but seeking to replace dead forms and creeds … with living, practical Christianity.”

It was moving, for me—an observer—to watch so many Pentecostals praying together, talking together, and walking together in the unfriendly corridors of the L.A. Convention Center, often clutching each other by the arm, exchanging soulful hugs, or holding hands like members of a family. They shared in the comfort of a fellowship that seemed in short supply in the world I had come from, a wilderness of separate languages spoken at the same time, uncertain fates in a lottery of survival, and accidents of love among the lonely.

Part II of this story will be posted on this Substack on Friday, May 9.