ABSTRACT
Of all the travails of my intellectual life the initial reception accorded on global Pentecostalism was most difficult to anticipate and to bear. The standard sociological narrative about Pentecostalism was a corollary of the wider secularisation thesis that the author had challenged even on its home territory of Western Europe, where it had, and where it retains, serious plausibility. It would be tedious to itemise in detail the numerous attempts to undermine my credibility or to document the intensity of feeling aroused by any attempt publicly to discuss Pentecostalism that did not replicate dominant academic and theological prejudices. In short Catholic radicalism was the unintended consequence of the spread of Evangelical and Pentecostal Protestantism. There were scholars like Matthew Engelke, Joel Cabrita and Richard Werbner who wrote sympathetically about African Independent Churches in Southern Africa in ways that make clear the continuities with Pentecostal developments.
