Maggie's Farm

Peter Berger: Is The World Becoming Protestant?

(In proselytizing) Protestants stick out. By and large, Catholics, like mainline Protestants, have been less aggressive in efforts to convert people; Evangelicals have been the most aggressive, most spectacularly the Pentecostals among them, who have probably experienced the most explosive growth of any religion in human history. (Most Pentecostals can be described as Evangelicals with two important additions—speaking in tongues and miraculous healing). Modern Pentecostalism is usually dated from the so-called Azusa Street Revival in 1906, when an African-American preacher named William Seymour started to preach in an abandoned stable in Los Angeles, gathered around him a wildly enthusiastic (and incidentally inter-racial) congregation, who exhibited all the Pentecostal addenda and sent out missionaries throughout the United States and then abroad. In 2016 the prestigious Pew Research Center estimated the worldwide number of Pentecostals as 600 million people. For a number of reasons, I think that this is probably an underestimate. Still, a rather impressive trajectory from Azusa Street! (Seymour must have been a remarkable man.)