When W. F. Carothers travelled across Texas and the South in the early days of the 20th century, he saw the Holy Spirit at work. People were being healed. People were speaking in tongues. Souls were being saved and sanctified. And racial segregation was being strengthened.
Carothers denied he was, himself, racially prejudiced. He was, he said, "a native Southerner, who through the sanctifying grace of Jesus Christ is incapable of prejudice."
He believed blacks could be Christians as well as whites. He acknowledged the value of their souls and recognized they too received the Pentecostal sign of sanctification and were filled with the Spirit and speaking in tongues.
That didn't have anything to do with the rightness of segregation, though.
In fact, this early Pentecostal leader, who played a role in the beginnings of the Assemblies of God, saw sanctification as an aid to segregation. Where Northern do-gooders might meddle with the laws enforcing the natural order that divided the races, the Holy Spirit was working on human hearts to preserve those divisions.
Reflecting on talk of racial integration, Carouthers' wrote,
Now to meet this unnatural, unheard of condition, God has resorted to the next best expedient, and through his Spirit has intensified the racial impulses between the white and black man as the only remaining possible barrier to the miscegenation of their respective races ... in truth it is the work of God.
Carother's was not the only racist among the early Pentecostals.
As the General Superintendent of the Assemblies of God, George O. Wood, said this month, it was an "epoch in America where the church caved in to to the culture rather than transforming the culture."
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W.F. Carothers |
The Assemblies of God has recently called attention to that past as it has pursued racial reconciliation. One of the largest Pentecostal denomination in the US, the Assemblies is increasingly racially diverse, in contrast to most of American Protestantism, evangelical and mainline. Currently, about 40 percent of US members are non-white. The church's
racial make-up very closely mirrors America's. In the process of the once all-white church's transformation, leaders have been open, too, to recalling and condemning the racism of early leaders such as Carothers.
It is worth noting, though, that Carothers' position was not the only option. There were some white ministers empowered by the Holy Spirit, as they saw it, to reject racism, reject segregation, and defy other white Pentecostal's opinions. They flouted the law, cultural norms, good taste, and what was held by most whites to be the natural order.
The story of racism among white Pentecostals in the early days of the movement is complicated by opposite extremes. There were ministers like Carouthers, and then there those like William B. Holt and James Logan Delk.