Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture

Grant Wacker is a historian of American religion, and this academic book, published by Harvard University Press, examines the first generation of American Pentecostals in the early twentieth century, tracing how a movement that expected the imminent supernatural end of history also built durable institutions and adapted to ordinary American life. Its strength is that Wacker takes early Pentecostal believers' own supernatural worldview seriously as a subject of historical analysis, rather than explaining it away, while also documenting the very practical organizational work that let the movement endure. Its limit is that it focuses on the movement's earliest American decades specifically, so Pentecostalism's later, much larger global expansion needs separate, more current sources to cover.