Kindred Spirits
In 1927, Sarah Comstock profiled the Pentecostal preacher Aimee Semple McPherson, the “prima donna of revivalism,” for this magazine [“A Bejazzed World,” From the Archive, August]. Pentecostalism was about two decades old at the time, and its early practices of interracial worship, speaking in tongues, and divine healing were subjects of lively conversation among the relatively staid and respectable churchmen of mainline Protestantism. But these distinguished reverends could grasp only so much about a character like McPherson and the movement she represented. A newswoman like Comstock proved better suited to understanding the photogenic pastor’s capacity for spectacle and spirituality; through Comstock’s observations, the scandal-prone, media-savvy, market-conscious nature of Pentecostalism was put on full display.
A century later, Pentecostalism has moved from the fringes of American society to the center of public life. Sam Kestenbaum’s portrait of Greg Locke [“The Demon Slayers,” Letter from Tennessee, August] shows that the theatricality and entrepreneurialism of Pentecostal preachers have hardly dimmed over time. While in the Roaring Twenties McPherson specialized in divine healings broadcast over radio airwaves, streaming platforms of the twenty-first century favor demon-casting. Kestenbaum asks: “If an exorcism happens in the Tennessee woods and no one is filming, did it even happen?”
Footage of Locke is in wide circulation, thanks in part to his stint as an exuberant Trump apologist. Locke’s raucous conservatism, however, is not the only reason for his ubiquity on social media; like many Pentecostals before him, Locke has an instinct for celebrity culture, mass media, and business. The rise of Locke and other Pentecostal celebrities on the American religious right is well documented, but just how Pentecostals have grown in influence—the constant hustle, the knack for promotion, and the perpetual optimism in harnessing the power of new media—is not well understood. The embedded journalistic approach adopted by both Kestenbaum and Comstock shows that wonder working, mass media, and the Almighty’s dollar have long gone hand in hand.
Leah Payne
Associate Professor of American Religious History, Portland Seminary
Portland, Ore.
Greg Locke is an authoritarian, independent, fundamentalist Baptist turned independent charismatic who claims God’s authority anoints him to slay the demonic. But his is not a new story. Popular conservative evangelical Baptists like Pat Robertson, James Robison, and John Osteen (father of Houston’s Joel Osteen) all made the journey to independent charismatic faith, with its fewer guardrails. They sought for themselves and then offered their followers a more visible, miraculous, and direct experience of God, using television and savvy marketing. Locke is just the latest, though certainly no less extravagant, example.
Doug Weaver
Professor of Religion, Baylor University
Hewitt, Texas
Truth and Reconciliation
William T. Vollmann’s “Korean Hearts” [Folio, August] recounts the author’s sojourn along the DMZ and, purportedly, his journey into the souls of the Korean people. Yet the piece does not sufficiently account for the United States’ role in the division of Korea, the war that followed, and the present situation of dangerously escalating tensions.
Americans often view events in Korea as a kind of alien spectacle, but the truth is that the problems there are all-American. It was the United States that decided to divide Korea in 1945, thereby setting the stage for the war, during which it dropped more than 500,000 tons of bombs on Korea, pulverizing virtually every city in the north. The anticommunist killings and repression in South Korea that Vollmann describes were the intentional result of U.S. policy, oversight, and direction. The extent of these crimes was suppressed for decades by South Korea’s U.S.-backed dictatorships, which crafted the collective punishment system to silence survivors and witnesses that Pastor Kim Eui-joong endured as a child. After South Korea began its formal democratization in the late Eighties, censorship of such testimony was somewhat reduced. The South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established in 2005 under the liberal presidency of Roh Moo-hyun, has found that 82 percent of wartime massacres were perpetrated by “state agents”—the South Korean military and police, including their U.S. counterparts.
There are indeed open wounds in the Korean heart. But for each one there is a corresponding hole in the American psyche, and it is in this contented ignorance that the United States’ ongoing impunity in Korea thrives. The U.S. and South Korean militaries conducted two hundred days of war drills in South Korea in 2023, at times joined by the Japanese military; earlier this year, they rehearsed deploying U.S. nuclear weapons to Korea. Until Americans face their own government’s responsibility for the Korean War, they will know neither Koreans nor themselves, and the chances of building a just society in the United States will remain severely diminished.
Ju-Hyun Park
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Out of Left Field
I was in Worcester, Massachusetts, not Somerville, on March 1, 2020. Otherwise, Matthew Karp’s essay on the decline of the American left [“Blank Ballot,” Easy Chair, August] reflects my own experiences of hope and pessimism more elegantly than I could have. Wherever we go from here, we’ll have to find our footing in what Karp calls the “existing political topography.” But on one important point, I found his map hard to decipher. The general tectonic pattern Karp describes is one of “class dealignment”—the failure of voters’ behavior to correspond to their economic position. At the same time, he writes that Bernie Sanders “remained on terrain where he knew a working-class majority could stand behind him.” According to this image, the protagonist of class politics already exists: a red sleeping beauty awaiting its politician-prince.
Class politics has never been simple; it certainly is not so today. Karp’s essay alludes to one important example. While correctly noting that popular majorities oppose the slaughter in Gaza, he also registers “bipartisan concerns about the rise of China.” Is there currently any one authentic U.S. working-class position on China? How “should” the U.S. working class balance “its” various interests in peace, tariffs, defense contracts, national pride, and international solidarity? Answering these questions—that is to say, building a working-class response to the new cold war—would require imagining and organizing a new definition of common interests for them, rather than merely repeating the demand that politicians stop neglecting a “working-class majority” that already exists.
Tim Barker
Brooklyn, N.Y.
