Making a Pentecostal Matriarchal Divinity: A Bakhtinian-Kristevan Reading of Azusa Street Mission

“…life. My work identifies the socio-historical construction a sacred matriarchy of the Holy Spirit at Azusa, then traces its subjugation to patriarchy. ”

Team Members/Contributors

Erica M Ramirez Drew Theological School Contact Me

About this dissertation fellowship

My dissertation studies the American Pentecostal construction of the Holy Spirit at the turn of the century as a construction chiefly as mediated by ritual, as opposed to theology; first as a seasonal rite of passage, then as a seasonal rite of license. To do this work, I first mine the archives of American Pentecostal history to document that early converts were from largely rural social locations. Tracing the ritual culture of America’s agrarian folk at the turn of the 2Oth century, I demonstrate that the ritual liminality of Azusa Street Revival (1906-09), which is the prototype of American Pentecostalism, emerged as a sacralization of then-popular threshold rituals. A threshold ritual involves a functional suspension of the social order needed to bring in a community’s harvest, thus marking a cooperative, interdependent economy in a situation that is otherwise characterized more by competition. Threshold rituals also marked a period of feasting and communal affiliation that parlayed them past simple function, into an idealized season of farming life, a particular point of pride and nostalgia.

The person and work of the Holy Spirit was conceptually made Pentecostal at the Azusa Street Revival, at which point a carnivalistic suspension of the social order, in favor of an egalitarian communal one that is contrary to “the natural order,” was made the ritual signature of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. My work details how this ritual construction came to be, how it came to be gendered female, and how it yet portends an alternative ritual schematic, if only intermittently during revival season. I argue that understanding these gendered and landed dynamics, ritually-symbolically enacted during revivals, are key to understanding the present politics of Pentecostalism, both when liberative and when oppressive, as well as key to retrieval of its most salubrious potential.