Forbidden Revolutions: David Martin’s Encounter with Pentecostalism

David Martin’s journey into Pentecostalism began in the mid-1980s. Although appearing a radical refocus of his intellectual interests this change in direction allowed him to pursue pre-existing important themes in his scholarship in a new manner. It prompted new insights into the sociological method, the relation of religion to politics, the modernity of religion, and the secularisation thesis. The latter came about by setting Western secularisation in a global context of revival and religious effervescence that was Pentecostal religion. Here, as David pointed out, was a religious movement amounting to about a quarter of billion people worldwide, identifiable by the ‘free and democratic availability of gifts of the spirit’. David’s encounter with Pentecostalism was also deeply personal. Although a global phenomenon, his research focussed upon its expression in Latin America which was the first region of the Southern hemisphere to witness a Pentecostal take-off from the late 1970s onwards. His move to the Southern Methodist University in Dallas Fort Worth, Texas, in 1986 brought him into close encounter with his subjects, just across the border. As he discovered, Pentecostals are little disposed to allow researchers the luxury of ethnographic neutrality. Those academics who profess faith find it tested through invitations to preach and testify. And so in due course he was presented with the opportunity to tell his own family’s ‘story’ of struggle, upward mobility, and Non-Conformity, integrating his narrative into the ‘Grand Narrative’ of salvation in a manner that generated solidarity and heartfelt appreciation from an audience of rural laborers outside of Santiago in Chile. Research on Latin American Pentecostalism thus represented an important turning point in his academic and personal trajectory, allowing him to come to terms with his own Methodist ‘revivalist childhood’ on both intellectual and emotional levels.Non