Review:
Martin, David, Pentecostalism: The World their Parish, 224 pages,
Blackwell Publishers, 2001.
David Martin is a really clever bloke… No, really. In an age when terms such as
‘leading scholar’ and ‘seminal thinker’ have been undercut by the ‘death of the
author’, describing an author the stature of David Martin, who has earned that
stature by pursuing a life of scholarship at the highest level in the same
direction becomes difficult. There are very few people (in the ‘knowledge
machine’ which modern academia has become) like him for scope, rigour and
personal honesty. So, RCB (“really clever bloke”) status is about the best we
may be able to do – but then, it won’t carry the punch and the intricacy that a
scholar such as Martin brings to a work.
Martin has said publicly that his sociology, like much sociology of religion, is
‘highly autobiographical.’ It is his own background in a lower-class
conservative evangelical home, and his continuing engagement with broader
British Anglicanism and peace movements, which are half the base line from which
he operates. The other half is a passion for poetry, literature, and music – he
is an accomplished pianist. His interest in Pentecostalism is thus an interplay
between his personal interests in sectarian religion and his professional
interests in the development of a General Theory of Secularization, a project he
began at the LSE from 1965 onwards. Pentecostalism and its global success, for
Martin, is partly a case of the exception requiring a qualification of the
‘rules’, and his interest in it comes from a personal history of questioning and
developing in faith. Here is an eye that sees what is, through the cant and
ideological obfuscation which one too often finds in not just religious circles,
but in sociological ones as well. It is important, furthermore, to understand
Pentecostals: The World Their Parish, not as a compressed introduction to a
large subject, but as a continuing product of a highly powerful mind on a
lifelong quest.
As with all his work, Martin begins by demonstrating that the standard
secularisation theory – that modernisation means secularisation, and
secularisation means the death of religion – is flawed. It is a projection of a
European ‘master narrative’ on the rest of the world which, even within Europe,
needs serious qualification. In this latest variation on a theme, Martin
develops a more articulated schema which will take some readers a little time to
get their heads around. The first section of the book is highly theoretical,
followed by a number of applications and expansions. This is a synthesis of
Martin’s sociological pursuits (his penchant for actually engaging with the
theory qua theory, as opposed to simply applying odds and sods from Max Weber)
with Martin’s own voracious, symphonic mind. More than one person I have spoken
to did not ‘like’ the first section at all, in the same way that many people do
not ‘like’ Rachmaninoff. This section is both highly compressed (a reflection
back on Martin’s previous work), and highly mobile, as Martin reaches the limits
of available sociological language and turns to literary and other terms to
explain the ‘downward mobilisation’ concept in its various guises. And of
course, Martin is dead right in tying the Pentecostal outpouring of the
twentieth century with the Methodist outpouring of the eighteenth and
nineteenth. (As recent studies of Australian Pentecostalism demonstrate,
particularly in Queensland) Martin is also subtle – unlike Harvey Cox, for
instance, he does not fall into the trap of simply identifying Pentecostalism
with shamanism, but rather looks for synergies and global resonances. In all it,
is lovely stuff. Many people will still at the end not ‘like’ this book, but
then, reviews, like sociology or religion, are ‘highly biographical’. A real
contribution both to the understanding of global Pentecostalism and to an
understanding of the theory of secularisation, Pentecostalism: The World Their
Parish is brilliant material. If only Blackwells could produce RCBs like David
Martin in the quantity that they produce literature, the world would be a
happier place.
Mark Hutchinson
© Southern Cross College, 2004