Pillar of Fire under Alma White (historical era)

Alma Bridwell White broke from mainstream Methodism to found the Pentecostal Union Church in Denver in 1901 with her husband Kent White, relocating its headquarters to a donated farm at Zarephath, New Jersey, in 1907-08 and renaming the movement Pillar of Fire as it distanced itself from the wider Pentecostal movement. In 1918 the Holiness evangelist William Baxter Godbey consecrated White as bishop, making her the first woman to hold that office in the United States; she led the movement communally from Zarephath and a Denver campus, with members surrendering wages into shared community operations that grew to include schools, farms, a printing operation, and eventually radio stations. By her death in 1946 the movement had grown to roughly 4,000 followers, 61 churches, seven schools, ten periodicals, and two broadcasting stations.

White combined outspoken feminism -- she was a forceful advocate of legal and social equality for white Protestant women -- with equally outspoken antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, and racism, which she justified as no less biblically mandated than women's equality. In the 1920s and 1930s, under her leadership, Pillar of Fire developed what historians describe as an unusually close and public alliance with the Ku Klux Klan for a religious denomination: Klan meetings and cross-burnings were held on Pillar of Fire properties, and White's monthly periodical, The Good Citizen, together with three books she published -- The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy, Klansmen: Guardians of Liberty, and Heroes of the Fiery Cross -- actively promoted the Klan and its ideology. Preaching at the 1929 Zarephath camp meeting's "Patriotic Day," in a sermon titled "America -- the White Man's Heritage," White argued that racial equality violated biblical and moral law and suggested the country should consider repealing the Fifteenth Amendment. Her alliance with the Klan waned in the early 1930s as the organisation was damaged by public scandal, and in 1943 she republished her Klan trilogy under the softened title Guardians of Liberty, dropping the word "Klansmen" from the title while still endorsing the Klan's underlying "principles" -- writing, in a sermon reprinted that year, that Pillar of Fire had "no connection with the Klan organization" but endorsed what it stood for, even as she claimed "there is no room in our hearts for racial prejudice."

The modern Pillar of Fire denomination has formally and explicitly broken with this legacy: in 1997 and again in 2009, the church repudiated its founder-era association with racism and the Klan and asked forgiveness for having held that position, and its present-day congregation at Zarephath is racially mixed. This entry scores the founder-era communal-authority structure and documented Klan alliance as a historical case; it does not treat the present, much smaller denomination -- which operates conventionally and has disavowed the racial politics of its founder -- as continuing to exhibit the same pattern.