“For men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances, the heavier his load of faith.”
― H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion

“The country and culture commonly known as ‘America’ had had a badly split personality all through its history. Its overt laws were almost always puritanical for a people whose covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were all Apollonian in varying degrees—its religious revivals were often hysterical in a fashion almost Dionysian.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

The Holy Spirit craves your attendance at Revival

Conducted by Messrs Plunkett and Figg.

Come as you are. Leave, a New Creation.

The torpid summer of 1925 was long, the latter because of the former. Revivalists Zadok Plunkett and B. D. Figg had announced their arrival months in advance. Anticipating crowds proportional to their reputation, they had also arranged the construction of a tabernacle on the old Parsons farm just south of Crispin Creek near the Broad Street bridge. The creek had been a popular venue for total immersion baptism since Agincourt’s founding in 1853 and it was about to be chastened again by a full ten days of refiner’s fire.

The Tabernacle was a ramshackle affair, mostly built of second-hand material donated in the spirit of expiation — contributions of labor and construction supplies toward the implied atonement for sin — despite how “Romish” the idea would have seemed if explained that way. Indulgences, after all, were a fundamental reason for the Reformation in the first place. Weeks before Plunkett & Figg’s appearance, wagon upon wagon deposited planks and posts in orderly heaps graded by size and quality for service to the Lord. Foursquare trumps fussy every time.

The revivalists had sent a drawing of the structure they required: fifty feet wide by one hundred feet long, with sides that could open for overflow crowds and, more likely, air movement on a stifling July night. The tabernacle had to be constructed in three weeks, serve for one, and then be dismantled, leaving the site as it had been. Did Plunkett and Figg know Sir Joseph Paxton? [If you know the conditions required for construction of the Crystal Palace, you’ll understand the reference.] But first a word about religious complexity.

Black & White or Shades of Grey

Bush 43 got some very bad advice or none at all on the eve of the Iraqi invasion. Quite aside from the botched intelligence on WMDs (which was either wrong or purposely spun that way), there was the matter of Islam and Bush’s sense that it is a monolith: the confrontation was a classic us vs. them, Christian “good guys” versus the purported evils of a religious faith other than Christianity, in this case, one with both oil resources and the weapons to defend them. It’s difficult to believe the Pentagon honestly believed Islam was one unified belief system. At minimum we should have understood the religious politics of the Middle East, where either Shi’a or Sunni dominate in each country — one is always an oppressed minority — and that Shi’a and Sunni are divided on a fundamental question of lineage with the Prophet. They not only disagree, they have been willing to shed blood over the question. Read Karen Armstrong’s Islam: a short history published in 2000 and readily available from Barnes & Noble by our military leaders in the Pentagon. If they’d read it, we’d have had some inkling of the can of whoop-ass that was about to open.

It’s far more complicated than that, for in addition to Shi’a and Sunni, and there are also Sufis (mystical Islam) and the Wahhabi sect, and very likely several other subsets of which I, as a secular Westerner, am ignorant. Karen Armstrong’s point in her 2000 introductory treatment of a complex topic was to draw a parallel with Christianity’s own Reformation and Counter-Reformation of the Sixteenth century: Islam has simply not undergone its own Reformation. And the more significant difference between that prospect and the Christian experience has been weaponry: ours occurred with the rough equivalent of bows and arrows, whereas today’s religious battles could be waged with nuclear warheads.

I only mention this as an aside for further discussion of the movement of the Holy Spirit across the land during the 1920s, when there were similar religious distinctions in the Evangelical movement that we often fail to note. Nuances that may be lost on the outside observer like myself but which were overlooked by Believers in the Arms of the Holy Spirit.

The Book of Revelation

Pre-dispensational-Post-tribulational-Antinomianism

For some True Believers, these theological distinctions are fighting words. So I wonder how smoothly the Plunkett & Figg revival may have gone.