Routledge Italian American Pentecostalism and the Struggle for Religious Identity (Routledge Studies in Religion)

While many established forms of Christianity have seen significant decline in recent decades, Pentecostals are currently one of the fastest growing religious groups across the world. This book examines the roots, inception, and expansion of Pentecostalism among Italian Americans to demonstrate how Pentecostalism moves so freely through widely varying cultures. The book begins with a survey of the origins and early shaping forces of Italian American Pentecostalism. It charts its birth among immigrants in Chicago as well as the initial expansion fuelled by the convergence of folk-Catholic, Reformed evangelical, and Holiness sources. The book goes on to explain how internal and external pressures demanded structure, leading to the founding of the Christian Church of North America in 1927. Paralleling this development was the emergence of the Italian District of the Assemblies of God, the Assemblee di Dio in Italia (Assemblies of God in Italy), the Canadian Assemblies of God, and formidable denominations in Brazil and Argentina. In the closing chapters, based on analysis of key theological loci and in lieu of contemporary developments, the future prospects of the movement are laid out and assessed. This book provides a purview into the religious lives of an underexamined, but culturally significant group in America. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars of Pentecostalism, Religious Studies and Religious History, as well as Migrations Studies and Cultural Studies in America Review This is a splendidly detailed study affirming the rich diversity of the religious experience in Italian American communities. Thanks to Paul Palma’s careful research Italian Pentecostalism has become a subject that historians and anthropologists studying Italian Americana will be reckoning with for years to come. It challenges popular stereotypes and scholarly core narratives concerning the relationship of Italian Americans with the Roman Catholic Church, and it forces us to look in a new way at the beliefs as well as the practices among the peoples of Italian ancestry in the Western Hemisphere in the 20th and 21st centuries. William J. Connell, co-editor of the Routledge History of Italian Americans, Joseph and Geraldine La Motta Chair in Italian Studies, Seton Hall University, USA The history of the emergence of Pentecostalism among Italian migrants has long awaited a summative account which takes seriously its larger story. Concentrating on theological distinctives and origins in the vast waves of migration which broke upon American shores from the 1880s, Paul Palma has satisfied this need. Bringing piquant insights from oral and family history, Palma describes the importance of the American experiment and its powerful missional outpourings. The core taxonomy (of reformed revivalism, Wesleyan Holiness, and ‘the primal spirituality of the contadini’) is a definite advance in the literature, pointing to the significant work still remaining to be done in Italian language sources. This work will remain for some time a benchmark against which other works will push. Mark Hutchinson, Professor of History and Dean of the Faculty of Education, Arts and Social Sciences, Alphacrucis College, Australia Despite a flood of new literature on global pentecostalism, almost nothing has been written in the last thirty years on white, European, ethnically-defined movements. Paul Palma’s groundbreaking book treats Italian-American pentecostals―centered in Chicago―in their trans-Atlantic and inter-American breadth, linking Italy, the USA, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina. Italian pentecostals fought over food, and whether the biblical prohibitions meant that blood sausage was forbidden. The "blood issue" divided astinenza (abstainers) from libertà (the freedom party), and signaled a larger tension between stricter or looser approaches to cultural adaptation. Palma’s monograph complicates and challenges existing black-white―or