


Most of the contemporary expressions of the Pentecostal movement trace their roots, in one way or another, to a religious revival that began in Los Angeles well before it became the world's entertainment capital. The L.A. of 1906 was very different from the relatively stable, suburbanized metropolis of today. Racial unrest, violent labor protests and the threat of typhus, cholera and even bubonic plague roiled Southern California. Los Angeles itself was experiencing difficult growing pains—the city would triple in size during that first decade of the 20th century, and a boom-and-bust economy had created a restive underclass.

Actress Megan Fox Getty Images

In the midst of this turmoil an unorthodox black preacher named William J. Seymour appeared. Seymour's testimony about the spiritual transformation that followed the believer's personal experience of the Holy Spirit connected a radically individualist form of Christianity to the event at Pentecost—an account in the New Testament that serves as a touchstone for both Pentecostals and their Catholic counterparts, Charismatic Renewalists.

During the Pentecost event, which is supposed to have occurred 50 days after Jesus' resurrection, his 12 main disciples and several dozen other followers were visited by the Holy Spirit, an ecstatic encounter that bestowed on them abilities such as healing, prophesy and supernatural speech—or "speaking in tongues."

Seymour's church on Azusa Street in downtown L.A. drew motley throngs that alarmed members of a civic and religious establishment. They saw little to like in a black preacher leading an interracial flock that engaged in a noisily emotional form of worship. But the emphasis on emotion in Pentecostalism was, arguably, the primary reason it proved so attractive.

Mainline Protestant denominations and traditional Catholicism defined themselves largely through creeds, liturgical orthodoxies and conventions of biblical interpretation—they were, in short, religions more of the head than of the heart. At a time of rapid urbanization and social upheaval, Pentecostalism's promise of supernatural power and healing made it a popular remedy for the forms of soul sickness that afflicted many people in early 20th-century L.A. and beyond, as the new movement spread via missionary networks of established denominations.

Today, Pentecostalism is being embraced in countries that are undergoing tumultuous change in a modernizing world. Visits to Pentecostal congregations in places like Brazil, Nigeria, India and Indonesia reveal concerns and yearnings like those in long-ago L.A. As a pastor in El Salvador recently said to me, a believer's experience of a direct encounter with the Holy Spirit and the easing of "emotional commotion" is at the heart of Pentecostalism's appeal.

A striking aspect of the excitement surrounding Megan Fox's revelation of her experience of speaking in tongues and getting the Holy Ghost is that some journalists seem to assume that their audiences are likely to be curious instead of just contented to gawk. A Los Angeles Times blogger, for instance, pointed to a 2006 report that said U.K. evangelicals "who spoke in tongues were found to be more emotionally stable than those who did not." The tone is not so much voyeurism as infomercial—sexy young star touts an exotic spiritual product. Try it if you dare!

This way of framing the story reflects a couple of trends in American religion: First, the growth of the spiritual-but-not-religious "Nones"—those who tick "none of the above" on religious-identification surveys and who now account for about 20% of the general population and nearly a third of young adults, according to the most-recent data from Pew Research. And, second, the shift of younger evangelicals away from the "family values" rhetoric that defined the religious culture of their elders and toward a more spiritually oriented form of social engagement.

These broad developments—a yearning for an intensely personal experience of religiosity, disenchantment with established institutions, and a concern for collective ills that those institutions seem unwilling or unable to address—strongly resemble the existential conditions that spawned Pentecostalism in Los Angeles a century ago. They also nurture Pentecostal movements in the developing world today.

Is Megan Fox the herald of America's latest Great Awakening? You'll know it if the hundreds of thousands of followers of her Twitter feed begin to tweet in tongues.

Mr. Street is senior writer with the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California.