In what ways have scholars accounted for Pentecostals’ historical engagement in politics? In what ways can reconsiderations of Pentecostal history and Pentecostals themselves illuminate the present and future of Pentecostal political engagement? This panel offers scholarly reflections on the past impacts, current shape, and future horizons the ways Pentecostals present themselves and act politically. Panelists will consider Pentecostal relationships to the Religious Right, denominationalism, and an enduring utopian strain in religion and politics. Tying these papers together is an enduring concern for the dynamic nature of Pentecostalism and its changing forms in US politics.
Religious identity has long been shown to shape political attitudes in the United States, with Evangelical or Born-Again Christians often treated as a single political category. Yet emerging evidence suggests that charismatic and Pentecostal beliefs increasingly characterize the future demographic profile of American evangelicalism. Drawing on original survey research conducted in cooperation with the Public Religion Research Institute, this paper parses charismatic identity from broader evangelical affiliation by measuring charismatic practices such as prophecy, divine healing, and speaking in tongues. Using insights from Social Identity Theory (SIT) and Self-Categorization Theory (SCT), the study analyzes how charismatic practices contribute to the development of group consciousness and political attitudes. Across three national surveys conducted in 2023 and 2024, charismatic respondents emerge as younger and more racially diverse than non-charismatic evangelicals while also exhibiting distinctive perceptions of cultural threat and democratic authority—patterns that are critical for understanding the political future of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity.
This paper explores the relationship between the discipline of American history and the study of Pentecostalism, particularly as it relates to the literature on the rise of the Religious Right and conservative evangelical Christianity. Since the 1990s, but accelerating since the presidency of George W. Bush, historians have turned their attention to the emergence of the Religious Right and the politicization of evangelical Christianity across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Yet, Pentecostals and charismatics, with a few notable exceptions, have remained marginal figures within this broader historiographical turn. It examines this absence with particular attention to the writing and development of two fields: how the study of the Religious Right took place within the American historical profession and how American Pentecostal historiography emerged with a distinct reluctance to engage in political questions.
This paper argues for describing the Pentecostal doctrine of divine healing as inherently utopian. Beginning with the historical account of Zion City, a failed Pentecostal utopia, this paper traces an aesthetic representation of healing that sought racial equality and yet was vulnerable to white supremacy. This vulnerability culminated in the fatal exorcism of Letitia Greenhaulgh, a resident suffering from paralysis. An application of Fredric Jameson’s theory of utopia reveals Zion’s ambiguous relationship to race as ideological. After examining prominent anti-utopian political theory of the 20th century, the paper demonstrates the impossibility of completely affirming or negating Pentecostalism’s Utopianism. The conclusion urges future representations of Pentecostalism to recognize the presence of healing ideology in the movement to best account for its past and future relationship to democracy.