My wife and I left the Holiness churches at the beginning of 2004 and joined the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS). I was already a heavy reader of theology at that time (both books and blogs), which is partly why we left Holiness. Once I no longer had to hide my growing and serious disagreements with the churches of my childhood, I started my own blog. My first post was an explanation of why I left Holiness. The post was titled “The Given Life” after the Wendell Berry poem. I’ve thought about reproducing it on this blog but it’s so badly written that I can’t bear it. While I’m not a great writer now, I was much worse then.
Ten years after that I wrote an essay cleverly entitled “Ten Years Out of Fundamentalism.” That one is a bit less embarrassing.
Since this is the twentieth year since we left, I’ve often thought over the last few months of writing a new version of the essay but never got started. So rather than trying to write a single, long piece, I’ve decided to make it easy on myself and write a series of shorter posts, which I’ll gather under a category “The Given Life”, named after that first essay.
First, who are the Holiness people?
I’ll tell you now: you’ve never heard of them. You may think you have but you’re very likely wrong. Not only are they an obscure branch of fundamentalist Christianity, they’re fiercely independent and don’t have a single denominational identifier. Say what you will about the alphabet soup of Christian denominations; at least they’re identifiable.
The Holiness people are a group of independent, traditional Pentecostal Holiness churches.
- Independent: Each church is self-governing, though there are loose affiliations or “fellowships” around the country created for the purposes of supporting each other and, often, organizing campmeetings. The pastor rules each church–which is why I’ve said before that each individual church can range from “merely” fundamentalist to cultish. I’ve been a member of churches all along that spectrum. As for their opinion of other Christians, the Holiness people believe they are pretty much the only ones going to Heaven. There are a couple of other (also rather obscure) groups that might be okay but that’s it.
- Traditional Pentecostal: They are not Charismatic or Word-Faith or Assembly of God or any of those folks you see on Christian TV. In fact, they loathe those people. The Holiness people believe in healing, yes, but not in the “name it and claim it” sense; for them, healing is a real but rare thing to be sought but not demanded. They also believe in ecstatic worship and speaking in tongues. Not learned tongues, mind you. That is one of the things they loathe about the TV Pentecostals: they “taught” people how to speak in tongues. For the Holiness people, speaking in tongues is a spontaneous act of the Holy Ghost speaking through a person. When they dance in the Spirit, it is not a choreographed, practiced step but a wild paroxysm. Though they would reject this framing, the Holiness people believe in worship that could be characterized as shamanistic. They utterly reject the “respectable” or the “formal.”
- Holiness: For the Holiness people, Christianity fell almost entirely into formalism and apostasy sometime in or after the apostolic age and did not recover until around the time of John Wesley or, at latest, the Azusa Street revival. Some Holiness people believe in a “second work of grace” experience of sanctification like the Wesleyans. Mostly, though, the “holiness” in Holiness people is less about a doctrine of sanctification than it is about “standards”, i.e, rules of dress and behavior. An incomplete list: women must have long, untrimmed hair; men’s hair must be cut at the natural hairline and no facial hair; women’s must wear dresses or skirts that are knee length; no makeup; no shorts or jewelry for anyone (some made an exception for wedding rings); no television or movies; no secular music; no Christian rock or pop music. The list really could go on for a while. Also, to be clear, these were not considered “house rules” but the very commandments of God. To violate these standards was to sin.
I should note that I’m explaining the Holiness people as they were when I was among them 20+ years ago. I suspect, based on what I see of them today, that they are not quite so strict as they used to be.
I think that will serve as a decent introduction to the Holiness people. Feel free to add comments or questions, and if anything significant comes up I may edit this post to include it. The next post will shift to my experience in the Holiness churches.