Pneuma 29 (2007) 103-111
Sanctified Passion or Carnal Pleasure?
A Review Essay
T. McCracken and Robert B. Blodgett, Holy Rollers: Murder and Madness in Oregon’s Love Cult (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Press, 2002). xv + 295 pp. $16.95, paper.
Jim Phillips and Rosemary Gartner, Murdering Holiness: The Trials of Franz Creffield and George Mitchell (Vancouver, BC: University of British Colombia Press, 2003). x + 347 pp. $34.95, cloth.
Picture to yourself, if your imagination has the strength, a meeting of the Holy Rollers, where men and women shout frenziedly, draw themselves into contortions and roll about the floor as if they were wild beasts or humans possessed of demons. Intensify the picture by giving it as a companion one in which the Holy Rollers are offering a sacrifice. See a great fire surrounded by women and children who hold loved things in their hands and cast them forth into the flames as they are moved by the words of a leader.
See, also, mistily, however, the same flames blazing as if they waited for more and think of the little children that are to be their human fuel, if the reports of Pacific coast papers correctly forecast the future intentions of this curious sect.1
Word pictures such as these published in 1906 were designed to sell papers. They would do the same today. “Holy Rollers,” they were called, a moniker used indiscriminately to describe any number of groups that did not conform to commonly accepted standards of religious practice. And a coffee-klatch of recent German émigrés in St. Louis, Missouri, good Lutheran women, decided the “Holy Rollers” needed help.
Mrs. Bertha von Porten was hosting a coffee-klatch when her husband returned from work, newspaper in hand. The women asked Mr. von Porten to summarize the headlines for them. He repeated the story of alleged events
1
“Send a Missionary West to Convert Holy Rollers,” Los Angeles Herald (August 13, 1906), 4; cf. “St Louis Woman Coming to Convert ‘Rollers’,” The Evening Telegram (Portland, Oregon) (August 8, 1906), 9.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007 DOI: 10.1163/157007407X178265
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concerning the “Holy Rollers” in Monrovia, California. The women were immediately shaken as they imagined these people who would sacrifice their children. “Why doesn’t the government intervene?” they asked. “What can be done to help these people?” “Have they never heard of Christ that they can believe the stories made up by Creffield?” And they decided to send a Christian missionary to the west coast to explain the Gospel to the “Holy Rollers.”2
Readers were misled when the reporter confused the “Holy Rollers” of Franz Edmund Creffield of Corvallis, Oregon, with a completely unrelated group of “Holy Rollers” in Monrovia, California. The “Holy Rollers” in Monrovia, California, were a direct outgrowth of the Azusa Street Revival. Glenn Cook went from Azusa Street to the nearby Holiness Church in Monrovia, where he preached on the subject of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac as described in Genesis 22. Neighbors heard enough shouted snippets from the sermon to conjure up a rumor that the “Holy Rollers” in Monrovia were planning, quite literally, to sacrifice their children.3
Eight hundred miles to the north of Los Angeles, Franz Creffield had held his own “Holy Roller” meetings. In 1902 he cried, “God, save us from com- promising preachers!” in an article published by Martin Wells Knapp, among whose disciples he worshipped in Oregon.4 He had been a successful church planter in The Dalles, Oregon, where he organized a Holiness mission.
5 Creffield went on to serve as a Salvation Army officer. He also participated in services led by M. L. Ryan. In short, he was well known in Oregon’s Holiness circles. A diminutive, charismatic German immigrant, Creffield was successful in attracting a small but extremely loyal following of men and women (mostly women) that formed a Radical Holiness sect in Corvallis, Oregon. The press quickly dubbed them “Holy Rollers.”
It was not a sect that spoke in tongues but, rather, one that held a radical position on sanctification. The names of those who joined the sect were entered into a “Holy Roll” and they were expected to follow Creffield’s directions, since he allegedly received them directly from God. T at meant lying prostrate or rolling on the floor while praying in highly demonstrative ways. It meant casting posses- sions that stood between them and perfection into a literal bonfire. It meant
2
“Send A Missionary West,” 4.
3
“Would Kill Babies,” The Evening News (July 20, 1906), 1; “Jumpers to Kill Children,” Los Angeles Herald (July 20, 1906), 1-2; “Monrovians Ask Officers to Act,” Los Angeles Herald (July 21, 1906), 4.
4
Edmund Crefeld ( sic), “He’ll Not Compromise,” God’s Revivalist and Bible Advocate (August 21, 1902), 2.
5
“Not Creffieldites,” The Dalles Semi-Weekly Chronicle (The Dalles, Oregon) (August 3, 1904), 4.
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that the women donned simple, loose-fitting shifts, wore no undergarments, ran bare footed, and allowed their hair to hang loosely and uncovered. Ultimately, it meant following Creffield’s lead in all things, up to and including, for want of a better term, a form of “sanctified” free love. Creffield was no Elmer Gantry, mind you, but he may have been sexually demanding of a few female followers.
It is a very short leap from such reports to visions from our own recent past. The antics of certain Pentecostal televangelists, and the actions of David Koresh and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, or Jim Jones and Jonestown, Guyana, come quickly to mind. In the latter half of the 1950s, for instance, Jim Jones was a rising young star in the independent Pentecostal Latter Rain Movement. Several of his sermons were published in The Herald of Faith . Joseph Mattsson Boze, a prominent leader in the Latter Rain, described him as a “fine young man” with “an outstanding gift of healing as well as discernment.”6 And Jones hosted vibrant Latter Rain conventions in his People’s Temple in Indianapolis in 1956 and 1957. He is best known, however, for leading 913 of his followers into an act of mass suicide in Jonestown on November 18, 1978.7
Let me see if I can briefly summarize the Creffield story. In 1903, Franz Edmund Creffield took the name Joshua and formed a sect into which he introduced some controversial features. For his efforts he was tarred and feathered and run out of town. Creffield married one of his followers but was soon charged with the crime of adultery by the husband of another of his followers. Now a wanted man, Creffield went on the lam. During his months in hiding, Creffield’s hold over his female followers led concerned family members to have most of them committed to various asylums. Under pressure from family members, his wife divorced him. In 1904, without food or clothing, Creffield was found in a hole beneath the home of one of his followers. He was arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned for eighteen months. Upon his release in 1906, he regathered his flock, took the name Elijah, and promised a messianic heir to one lucky “virgin.” He left his flock on the coast of Oregon while he and his ex-wife clandestinely traveled by different routes to Seattle, where they were remarried.
6
Cf. James W. Jones, “The Church a Miracle and Miracles in the Church,” The Herald of Faith 22, no. 8 (August 1955), 7, 12; James W. Jones, “As a Man T inketh So He Is,” The Herald of Faith 22 ( sic), no. 5 (May 1956), 8, 10-11; James Jones, “Faith without Works Is Dead,” The Herald of Faith 23, no. 12 (December 1956), 11, 21-22.
7
Jim Jones provides a fundamental example of independent, authoritarian leadership like that of Creffield. For an analysis of Jones’ style, see Craig Darr and Anson Shupe, Metaphors of Social Control in a Pentecostal Sect, Studies in Religion and Society 6 (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1983).
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Days later on the streets of Seattle, Creffield was murdered by George Mitchell, a brother of two of Creffield’s women followers. While Creffield’s women waited for him to rise from the dead, Mitchell’s trial drew interna- tional attention. He was subsequently acquitted. Two days after his acquittal, George Mitchell was murdered by his sister, Esther, whose honor he had tried to avenge. Since Creffield’s wife, Maud, had aided and abetted Esther, both women were quickly arrested for Mitchell’s murder. A sanity commission was convened. Both women were judged to be insane. And both were committed to an asylum. Shortly thereafter, Maud committed suicide. Esther was later released from the asylum but was never tried for murder. She married, but in 1914, she, too, committed suicide.
In short, it is a story of Holiness religion, an authoritative leader, illicit if not promiscuous sex, human pathos, courtroom drama, legal maneuvering, public debate on issues of church and state, the proper roles of men and women, the rights of individuals to appeal to unwritten laws, and the limits of sanity — all the stuff that makes for great reality television in postmodern America! Move over, Maury!
T en again, it is a story of sin and salvation, the meaning of Christian com- mitment, radical discipleship, the quest for holiness, charismatic expectations, and separation from a world that did not understand or attempt to understand people who lived in such a countercultural way. And it is an important story for understanding early Pentecostals and the difficult time that some Pentecostals had in spreading the faith, especially in the Pacific Northwest.
The implications of the Creffield story for the birth and growth of Pente- costalism become readily apparent when we realize that William J. Seymour, like Creffield, had a connection with Martin Wells Knapp. He attended “God’s Bible School” in Cincinnati, where Knapp was Superintendent. Like Creffield, Seymour also had a relationship with M. L. Ryan, who was baptized in the Holy Spirit at the Azusa Street Mission, after which he invited Seymour to send a group of evangelists from Azusa Street to help him establish a Pentecostal presence in Salem, Oregon. It becomes yet more apparent when we read the Creffield story in conjunction with that of Frank Sandford in Shiloh, Maine, John Alexander Dowie in Zion, Illinois, and Charles Fox Parham in Kansas and Texas, all of whom embraced Holiness convictions, all of whom were counter- cultural, and all of whom at one time or another saw themselves as Elijah.8
8
D. William Faupel, The Everlasting Gospel: The Significance of Eschatology in the Development of Pentecostal T ought , JPTSupp. 10 (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 115-86.
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McCracken and Blodgett ( Holy Rollers: Murder and Madness in Oregon’s Love Cult) are both trained as scientists. McCracken teaches natural history and works as a naturalist, while Blodgett works as a paleontologist/stratigrapher. T eir pursuit of Creffield’s story arises from their knowledge of the region and of family members of those who followed him, and their nose for a good story. T eir account reads like a novel, with facts woven into a fascinating narrative, made the more interesting by the sensational bombshells they drop from time to time. McCracken and Blodgett tend to take as fact most, if not all, of the sensational claims made about these “Holy Rollers” by their contemporaries. Drawing from the massive newspaper coverage given to Creffield and his fol- lowers and employing many other public documents, the authors set forth this intriguing tale, providing a timeline of events along with interesting tidbits about local life.
Each chapter begins and/or ends with the words of an appropriate biblical passage or the words of a tune drawn from Knapp’s Bible Songs of Salvation and Victory, the song book of Creffield’s choice. Tese quotations help to contex- tualize Creffield amid the language and rhetoric of radical holiness in his day. T ey are the lenses through which certain events can best be understood. And they are thought provoking when viewed in this way.
Interspersed throughout the story are short italicized paragraphs, sometimes in question form, that are often interpolations offered by the authors, intent upon making a point. The authors have tried to keep faith with the cast of participants by getting into their minds.9 As the world around Creffield and his followers began to crumble, for example, one can well imagine the prayers that might have been uttered and that the authors have thoughtfully placed more than once on the lips of a now shaky follower: “Oh God, oh, Jesus — don’t let Joshua be wrong! ” (41, 46-49). While there are no footnotes, the authors have provided an extensive bibliography at the end of the book that is a very useful resource.
Holy Rollers is the kind of book one might read curled up in front of a fireplace in a single evening. It is fast paced, action-packed, edge-of-the-seat kind of stuff. It is dramatic, even if it is depressing. Its primary weaknesses lie in the fact that it provides only a limited context for the events that mark the story, and it lacks the critical edge that one would expect to find in a good
9
Linda Crew, Brides of Eden: A True Story Imagined (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins Publishers, 2001), provides an imaginative narrative of events by telling the story from the perspective of one of Creffield’s followers, Eva Mae Hurt. Crew imagines a revealing discourse in the minds and on the lips of Eva and those who interact with her, but she is faithful to the basic documented facts.
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historical assessment. Still, it should find a useful place on the shelves of anyone interested in understanding better the radical nature of “Holy Roller” religion, Holiness or Pentecostal, as seen through the lens of Creffield and his followers.
Jim Phillips and Rosemary Gartner ( Murdering Holiness: The Trials of Franz Creffield and George Mitchell ), a husband and wife team, provide a much more sophisticated and nuanced treatment of the Creffield story. Phillips is Director of the Centre of Criminology and a professor in the Faculty of Law and Department of History at the University of Toronto. Gartner is a professor at the Centre of Criminology and in the Department of Sociology. Admittedly, their interest is in various legal aspects of the story, but with the tools of his- tory, sociology, and law at their disposal, they provide a sensitive, thoughtful, intelligent, and enlightening study of Creffield and the many factors that made him and the events that swirled around him and his followers so compelling.
Phillips and Gartner, like McCracken and Blodgett, treat the religious dimension of the story with considerable respect. While McCracken and Blodgett do so through their asides, Phillips and Gartner do so through their assessment of the facts. Both sets of authors take seriously the contributions of the Holiness movement to Creffield and his followers, though Phillips and Gartner provide it more credibility, especially when they question the integrity of the many charges made against the group. While many of the charges made at that time would have easily found their way into the pages of today’s National Enquirer, internal evidence in some cases and conflicting testimony in others lead Phillips and Gartner to explain Creffield and his followers as being motivated less by lust and more by a desire for genuine spirituality than their story might at first lead one to believe (68).
Murdering Holiness helps us see how society viewed and acted upon those who made radical religious claims and choices and embraced what, from the outside, were viewed as too radical religious practices. Phillips and Gartner demonstrate that the fact that so many of Creffield’s followers spent time in asylums strongly points to such places as providing a form of religious and social or community control (3, 89). Whether in Corvallis, Oregon, with the Creffieldites, or in southern California with the Azusa Street faithful, arrests and committals on grounds of insanity for radical religious expression were very common.10
When the use of asylums for enforcing social behavior is linked to questions of gender and the social roles of men and women, the assessment helps to
10
“Holy Roller Is Under Arrest,” Los Angeles Herald (August 22, 1906), 10; “An Insane ‘Roller,’” Los Angeles Daily Times (September 10, 1906), 18.
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explain why so many Pentecostal women who sought to play a public role had difficulty in doing so. Florence Crawford, for instance, arrived in Salem and Portland, Oregon, from Azusa Street on the heels of Creffield’s murder and Mitchell’s trial and murder, and she was immediately linked by the press to all the negative publicity that Creffield’s memory engendered.11
Phillips and Gartner scrutinize carefully the many legal issues surrounding Creffield and his followers. T ey follow the charges of adultery, the disappearance of Creffield, the offering of a reward for his capture, his ultimate discovery, and his treatment by the judicial system. Later they meticulously explore the trial of Creffield’s assassin, George Mitchell, as well as the very different treatment given to Maud Creffield and Esther Mitchell. In George’s case, the authors assess the strategies employed by both prosecution and defense attorneys intended to get the responses they want (the practice of law appears to be more about winning than it is about justice.), beginning with their attempt to conduct a trial in the press from the time of Mitchell’s arrest throughout the judicial trial itself. T ey analyze the selection of the jury, the strategic points underlying the rhetoric of the opening arguments, and the selection and use of specific witnesses, and discuss the various points of law that they view as important to these cases and the summary arguments of the attorneys.
While the law was clear throughout, and while George Mitchell readily admitted that he had pursued and shot Creffield in a calculated manner consistent with first-degree murder, the trial in the press pitted Oregon against Washington, vigilante justice against the rule of law, the ordinary worker against the upper class, and in some cases, women against men. The authors address various views of vigilante justice, both as actions of a community (such as the “White Cappers” in Corvallis) and of individuals (such as George or Esther Mitchell). When these issues are all linked to the questions of gender, the entire sequence of events and arguments explodes with all kinds of implications. In so doing, the authors expose the fact that the practice of law is often as much about art as it is about science.
This was a day when adultery was still a crime, punishable by up to two years in prison. It was a day in which a woman was viewed as a “domesticated and passionless being with no public role other than that of recipient of chivalry” (139). Yet it was a day in which chivalry and appeals to natural law were being replaced by appeals to codified law, which in the minds of many seemed to lack adequate teeth to provide justice. What right does a man have to defend
11
“Madness and Misery in the Downfall of the Strange Religions,” The Daily Oregon Journal (Portland) (January 13, 1907), Magazine Section T ree, 5.
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the honor of the women of his family who have been disgraced and had their reputations publicly ruined? What is the extent of that right when no written law seems to provide adequate recourse?
The treatment of the Creffield sect by Phillips and Gartner provides an excellent example of the treatment of sectarian communities, including both Holiness and Pentecostal communities, that took place throughout the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.12 While on the one hand it “demonstrates the enormous power of religious conviction in the period,” on the other hand it shows how laws have sometimes been manipulated against groups that stand outside the religious mainstream of American life (241-42). A number of lessons with a direct relationship to the rise and spread of Pentecostalism can easily be derived from this study.
Many early Pentecostal leaders were heavily influenced by the more radical wings of the Holiness movement. T eir formation among Holiness folk was not solely theological, but also practical and pragmatic. Many of them viewed life in the starkest of terms. T ey were right; the rest of the world was wrong! Recent research suggests what I have found to be the case in my own study of the Azusa Street Revival, that publishers and preachers both have long stigmatized Holiness and Pentecostal Christians in order to validate and universalize their own social, political, cultural, educational, class, gender, and racial status. T ey have portrayed Holiness and Pentecostal Christians as irrational, overly zealous, narrow, bigoted, offbeat, enthusiastic, neurotic, sectarian, cultic, and the like, while describing themselves as “orthodox,” “majority,” “historic,” and “mainline.” T ey have also charged these so-called “marginal” groups with everything from hypnotic or mesmeric powers to employing brainwashing techniques.13 And early Pentecostals often took positions or responded to such analyses in ways that made such simplistic caricatures plausible.14
12
Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 3-4, explains how a gulf that leads to sectarian labels is produced between various groups — often based upon alleged differences between various social strata — before placing them into dialogue with one another; see also 226-49, 328-41.
13
Sean McCloud, Making the American Religious Fringe: Exotics, Subversives, and Journalists, 1955-1993 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 7, 37, 41, passim.
14
Cecil M. Robeck, Jr., The Azusa Street Mission and Revival: The Birth of the Global Pentecostal Movement (Nashville, TN: Nelson Reference and Electronic, 2006), 83-86, 204-16, 227-34, 244-47.
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If we take seriously the lessons that Franz Creffield provides, those of us who are consciously Holiness and/or Pentecostal must ask ourselves some soul-searching questions. What is it about Holiness and Pentecostal attitudes toward ecclesiology that has produced so many independent groups unwilling to consider greater issues of accountability to the church? What is it that seems to attract so many “leaders” seeking positions of unquestioned authority, often under the guise of being an apostle or a prophet? What is it about Holiness and Pentecostal religion that seems to attract so many leaders who are long on personal charisma and short on personal ethics? What is it in our Holiness and Pentecostal psyche that allows such leaders to redefine our theological vocabu- lary and concepts, through their apparent “knowledge” or “wisdom” allegedly revealed by God only to them? What is it about Holiness and Pentecostal understandings of sexuality and marriage that seem to facilitate unfaithfulness in so many of our homes and churches, enabling us to accept the logic of their manipulative pronouncements of such leaders as we jump into their arms and beds? What do we mean when we say that we are called upon to “discern the spirits,” and how can this gift to be used to protect our people?
Finally, William J. Seymour never offered any undisputable demands, never developed an autocratic form of leadership, and rejected all forms of sex outside the marriage covenant. Given all that Seymour and Creffield seemed to share, including a commitment to “Holiness” and similarities in the expressiveness of worship patterns, what factors led them down such different theological, moral, and ethical paths? Until we can understand the answers to such questions, the lessons of Franz Creffield, Jim Jones, and others will leave Holiness and Pentecostal Christians vulnerable targets who are unable to discern the difference between sanctified passion and carnal pleasure.
Reviewed by Cecil M. Robeck, Jr. Fuller Theological Seminary Pasadena, California
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