“The Color Line Was Washed Away in the Blood”: Race and Religious Practice in the Pentecostal Healing Revivals, 1940s–60s

This paper explores interracial tent revivals led by Pentecostal faith healers from the late 1940s to the early 1960s throughout the United States. White Pentecostals based in Oklahoma and Texas, such as Oral Roberts and A.A. Allen, transgressed the era’s racial boundaries by holding interracial revivals amongst the American poor that incorporated highly emotional and overtly physical services through the laying of hands for healing on the bodies of woman, African Americans, and Native Americans. These preachers claimed to heal the sick, remove disabilities, and spread the word that God would financially bless the faithful. However, despite the racially integrated nature of the revivals, healing and prosperity were understood as divine gifts for the spirit-filled believer rather than a reflection of the distribution of material and social power.

This paper examines the healing revivals, the religious practice operating within them, and the theological assumptions produced from it, to explore the long-term implications for working-class interracial solidarity in the United States and the rise of modern conservatism. Despite a recent resurgence in scholarship on the Religious Right that focuses on the economy, our narratives still overwhelmingly focus on mainstream evangelicals. In contrast, this paper focuses on Pentecostals located on the periphery of our studies. By pioneering an interracial approach to religious practice that implicitly denied race, Roberts and other Pentecostal faith healers constructed a message of financial blessing in colorblind terms that reinforced society’s structural inequalities. This lay the groundwork for the Prosperity Gospel in the second half of the twentieth century. Rather than focusing on a small set of religious leaders who were financed by capitalists, which we have extensive recent historiography on, this paper explores how ordinary working-class Americans reconciled prosperity theology with their own material circumstances and incorporated it into their own lives.