The Press and Azusa Street¶

The claim¶

In April 1906 a small Holiness mission in a former church building at 312 Azusa Street in Los Angeles became the centre of a revival that within three years had sent eyewitnesses across the United States and to Europe, India, and Africa. Its newspaper, The Apostolic Faith, carried testimonies of tongues, healings, and prophecy. And on 18 April 1906 the Los Angeles Times went to the mission, watched, and published a mocking report under the headline "Weird Babel of Tongues".

That hostile report is the most useful document in the case. It does not prove that the revival was of God. It proves that the phenomenon was public, that it was reported within days by someone who had no interest in defending it, and that the people involved were paying a price for it. Those are the first tests of testimony, and Azusa passes them.

The revival¶

The leader was William J. Seymour, an African American Holiness preacher from Louisiana, blind in one eye, the son of former slaves. He had studied under Charles Parham in Houston, where he took up the teaching that speaking in tongues was the evidence of the baptism in the Spirit. In early 1906 he was invited to Los Angeles to preach in a small Holiness mission. When he taught his doctrine of tongues, the church that had invited him turned against him and barred him from its pulpit.

He continued in a private house on Bonnie Brae Street, where in April 1906 several of the group began to speak in tongues. The meetings grew; the house could not hold the crowds; and within days the group moved to 312 Azusa Street, an old African Methodist Episcopal church building that had been used as a warehouse. Services ran there for about three years, several times a day, with a mixed congregation of Black and white worshippers — itself a scandal in Los Angeles in 1906.

Seymour's paper, The Apostolic Faith, began in September 1906 and ran to thirteen issues by 1908. It printed testimonies, letters, and reports of healings, and it was mailed across the country and to missionaries abroad. It was a promotional paper, and it should be read as one. But it is also a primary source with dates, names, and addresses, and it shows what the mission claimed at the time, not what its descendants claimed decades later.

The hostile witness¶

The Times report of 18 April 1906 is a piece of mockery. The reporter described a tumble-down shack on Azusa Street, a congregation of Black and white worshippers, and people speaking in tongues and shouting. The headline called it a "weird babel"; the tone was contemptuous; the article treated the worshippers as a spectacle.

Read as evidence, the mockery is an asset. The reporter was not a sympathiser. He had no stake in the revival's success, and every incentive to make it look absurd. What he inadvertently establishes is the thing a legend cannot establish: that on a particular day, at a particular address, a public meeting was happening, with real people in it, and that the phenomenon was not invented by later writers.

The report also establishes cost. The people in that building were not gaining respectability; they were losing it. In 1906 Los Angeles, a racially mixed congregation of poor people speaking in tongues in a former warehouse was a public humiliation. People do not pay that price for a hoax they know to be a hoax, though they may pay it for a mistake they believe.

Why a hostile newspaper is good evidence¶

The tests on how to weigh a testimony put the hostile witness near the top for a reason. Friendly testimony is cheap: a movement will always report its own successes. Hostile testimony is expensive, because the witness would rather the thing had not happened.

The Times report is contemporaneous (within days of the move to Azusa Street), it is public (a reporter walked in), it is specific (an address, a date, a description), and it is hostile. Those four features make it a better witness to the fact of the revival than a hundred later tributes. It says nothing about whether the tongues were genuine, whether the healings occurred, or whether the theology was sound. It says that the claim was made, publicly, at cost.

That is the first test of testimony, and it is the one most often skipped in this debate. The question is not whether a report is edifying; it is whether it is falsifiable and whether it was falsified. A public claim, made by named people, in a place that could be visited, is a claim that could have been checked. The Times checked it and found it ridiculous. It did not find it absent.

How it spread¶

The revival spread through people who had been there. Florence Crawford carried it to Portland; William Durham to Chicago; T. B. Barratt to Norway; A. G. Garr to India; John G. Lake to South Africa. The pattern matters for the argument: the movement did not spread by a book or a rumour but by eyewitnesses who travelled, and who were often opposed, and who sometimes paid for it with their health or their livelihoods.

Independent attestation is one of the tests of testimony, and this is a form of it: not independent in the sense of unconnected, but independent in the sense that different people, in different places, with different audiences, reported the same kind of phenomenon. That does not make the reports true. It makes them a body of evidence rather than a single story.

The honest limits¶

There is no medical documentation. The healings reported in The Apostolic Faith were not examined by doctors, and the paper had an interest in reporting them. They belong to the category this casebook calls "reported", not "documented". They should not be presented as medical evidence, and anyone who does so is overclaiming.

There was much emotion, and some confusion. The meetings were loud, physical, and chaotic by the standards of the day; people fell, shouted, and spoke at once. Some of this was, by the judgement of the leaders themselves, flesh rather than Spirit. Seymour warned against excess and insisted on love and order, which is itself evidence that he knew the difference.

There was fraud and credulity. A movement that grows that fast attracts hangers-on, and some claims were certainly false. The honest way to say it is that the revival contained wheat and chaff, and that the newspaper gives us no way to sort them.

The tongues were not what many expected. Some early Pentecostals believed the tongues were known human languages and sailed for the mission field on that basis; several discovered they could not speak the language they had expected. That is an awkward fact for the movement's own account, and it belongs in the record.

The revival declined. By about 1909 the Azusa mission had lost its centrality; the work fragmented, and Seymour's own influence waned. A revival that ends is not thereby false, but its ending is part of the story.

What this does and does not prove¶

It proves: that the Pentecostal claim was made publicly, in a named place, at a date the newspapers can fix; that it was reported by a hostile witness within days; that it was carried by eyewitnesses to other continents; and that the people who made it paid a social cost for doing so. Those are the ordinary marks of testimony that deserves to be weighed rather than dismissed.

It does not prove: that the tongues were a gift of the Spirit, that the healings occurred, that Seymour's theology was correct, or that the revival was a work of God. It proves that the press record, read against the grain, establishes the publicity and the cost of the claim — which is where the examination of any testimony begins, not where it ends.