This project seeks to understand the religion of Pentecostalism on its own terms paying close attention to the creative acts of this religion. In particular this project will allow for a social history and religious study that looks closely at the the double-bind construction of race in the 1880s to 1950s in the Pentecostal group known as The Church of God. Specifically, this project tracks a complex triangulated relationship between race, class, and religion by focusing on the history of poor and working class white Americans who practiced an African American religion, Pentecostalism. With special attention to the Church of God’s location in Southern Appalachia, this project will interrogate the racial construction of “long lost Anglo Saxons brothers” of the frontier region by Protestant missionaries during the reconstruction era. On the one hand, these Protestants denied Pentecostals claims to be true Christians and labeled their religion “negroid,” pathological, and the result of abject poverty. On the other hand, they referred to precisely these religious practices in order to substantiate the idea that these white Pentecostals, as their primitive pure white blood ancestors, should take priority over the recently-freed African Americans.

This dissertation will explore the way that historically the conversion of white Appalachians to Protestantism was necessary to save the racial soul of American religion. This will be illustrated by drawing not only on constructions of race from outside Pentecostalism, but also mid twentieth century institutional histories of Pentecostalism written by Church of God leaders, that re-deployed narratives of the racial beginnings of Southern Appalachia. Leveraging the racial Appalachian myth, they situated the Church of God within a white Protestant heritage of American manifest destiny: from the “rags” of Appalachian poverty they rose to middle class “riches” of socially respectable religion