Does Knowing God Just Take Practice?

Does Knowing God Just Take Practice?

 

For both the faithful and the doubtful, the source of religious experience can seem mysterious. One anthropologist explores belief in more mundane terms—as a form of expertise.

 

 

By James Wood

The New Yorker November 9, 2020 Issue

November 2, 2020

 

 

Embedding with evangelicals, T. M. Luhrmann finds that communing with God is a skill, requiring talent and training.Illustration by Grace J. Kim

 

 

I was nine or ten when my parents left their stolid Anglican church for one that was undergoing what was known as “charismatic renewal.” This was the mid-nineteen-seventies, in the northern English city of Durham, but the energies were all American. The young congregants—our church was popular with local university students—played guitars, gave testimonials, raised their hands in rhapsody, and “danced with the spirit” in the aisles. Sometimes, though not often, people spoke in tongues, a diabolical glossolalia that I found deeply fascinating. There was a church band—twelve-string guitars, tambourines, trumpet, and flute. We sang American hymns, songs I vaguely thought of as “Californian.” I grew to dread one of the most popular, “I Am the Bread of Life,” which had a chorus with the words “And I will raise him up.” As the chorus soared, earnest hands were raised heavenward—including the hands of my parents, who were always moved by this song to forgo their customary physical reticence. I would glance sideways at them and then quickly look away, as if I’d witnessed the throes of some primal scene.

 

The extremity of emotion that pulsed through the congregation every Sunday alarmed me. I came to think of that church as the place where grownups weep. Charismatic or evangelical churches are theatres of spiritual catharsis. You come to such places and lay your burdens before the Lord, open your soul to the Holy Spirit, and “let all the sadness and evil out” (as my mother once put it). This crisis of transformation was often physically arduous. People shuddered and their eyes filled with tears, while others who had already been through such experiences held their hands or prayed over them. “Free prayer” was encouraged; worshippers might blurt out their hopes, secrets, prophecies. The natural order of things was inverted: adults, spasming in emotion, appeared to need the calm intervention of the dry-eyed child. This was where perfectly ordinary English people seemed to lead a kind of double life, an existence that, in its strange abandon and abnormality, appeared almost criminally intense.

 

What was unsettling to the child, in other words, was probably what was so exciting to the adult convert: the drama of transferred authority. The believing adult, pulled toward the commanding Christ, felt the divine power of God’s call, and the divinely inspired power of the pastors and the elders who voiced that call: You must change your life. But the unbelieving or skeptical child, with no great desire to change his life, felt abandoned by those who should have been in charge, and wondered furtively at the authority of that divine command. Who was this God, this Jesus, this Holy Spirit? If he didn’t exist, then Sunday morning was a mass sickness, nothing more than the contagion of hallucination. That prospect seemed quite troubling. But the alternative scenario didn’t seem any better. Evangelical practice presumes a highly interventionist Jesus, a surveillance God who not only numbers the hairs on your head but cares about your job interview, whom you go out with, the house you want to buy.

 

When my mother told the pastor that I had done well in a recent school exam, he gave me a hug and offered a hearty “Praise the Lord!” I thought that this God probably didn’t exist, but, if he did exist, he had all the scrutinizing powers of a meddlesome headmaster, always alert for the smallest failures and successes.

 

I know how unbalanced this is. I’m sure I should have seen all the human goodness and decency—there was plenty of that around, too. I bring it up as a way of explaining my somewhat unbalanced interest in the work of the Stanford anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann, who has been studying American evangelical worship for at least twenty years. In 2012, Luhrmann published “When God Talks Back,” an account of her experiences in charismatic churches in Chicago and the San Francisco area. These were part of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, a network of congregations founded in California in the nineteen-seventies. Curious about everything, open-eyed, endlessly patient, Luhrmann embedded herself like a military correspondent. Over several years, she interviewed more than fifty congregants, worshipped and prayed with them, joined Bible-study groups, and reported, with scrupulous neutrality, on their daily spiritual practice.

 

Her new book, “How God Becomes Real” (Princeton), represents a distillation of that deep work on American Evangelicalism, and expands her acute discussion of spiritual practice across other forms of religious devotion that she has studied or encountered over the years—charismatic Christian worship in Ghana and India, Santería (“a blend of Yoruba spirit possession and Catholicism that emerged among West African slaves in the Caribbean”), and British witchcraft (Luhrmann’s first book, “Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England,” from 1989, was the product of field work among apparently ordinary Londoners who practiced magic and witchcraft).

 

This comparative framework suits Luhrmann, precisely because she is not interested in the questions that so gripped me when I was young: what or who is God, and how can we know if this God exists? Luhrmann passes over questions of belief in search of questions of practice—the technologies of prayer. She wants to know how worshippers open themselves up to their experiences of God; how they communicate with gods and spirits and in turn hear those gods and spirits reply to them, and she is interested in the kind of therapeutic transformation that such prayerful conversation has on the worshipper. She calls this activity “real-making,” and adds that her new book is not a believer’s or an atheist’s, but an anthropologist’s work. “Rather than presuming that people worship because they believe, we ask instead whether people believe because they worship,” she writes. Thus “the puzzle of religion,” as she defines it, “is not the problem of false belief but the question of how gods and spirits become and remain real to people and what this real-making does for humans.” Whether these questions—of belief and of practice—can be separated quite as staunchly as she wishes is the “puzzle” that surely haunts her own work.

 

Readers without firsthand experience of evangelical communities were probably surprised by some of the day-to-day details in “When God Talks Back.” Luhrmann describes, at the Vineyard churches, a relationship with God of casual and remarkably friendly intimacy. She prepares us by cautioning that her evangelical subjects approach God in a way that, to traditional believers, might seem “vulgar, overemotional, or even psychotic.” Among her interviewees, Elaine prays for guidance about whether to take a roommate or move to a new apartment. Kate gets angry with God and “yells at him when things go wrong—when she organizes a trip for the church and the bus company is flaky or it rains.” Stacy prays for a good haircut, and Hannah asks God about whom to date, and sometimes feels he is pranking her in little ways: “I’ll trip and fall, and I’ll be like, Thanks, God.” Rachel asks for help with how to dress: “Like, God, what should I wear? . . . I think God cares about really, really little things in my life.”

 

Other women speak of setting an evening aside for a “date night” with the Lord (men speak of “quiet time” with God, Luhrmann reports). They are perhaps encouraged in this thinking by their pastor, who suggests that his congregants should “set out a second cup of coffee for God in the morning—to pour God an actual cup of steaming coffee, to place it on an actual table, and to sit down at that table . . . to talk to God about the things on our minds.”

 

These believers speak to their creator, and hear him speak to them. Generally, God’s voice is not audible, and “God” is merely the mental attribution of what a voiced divine reply would be like. But sometimes Luhrmann’s subjects attest to having heard an actual voice. Elaine, who is one of Luhrmann’s principal witnesses and the leader of the Bible-study group she joins, tells her that she was praying when she heard the Lord clearly say the words “Start a school.” But what believers hear, Luhrmann discovers, depends on where they’re from. In her new book, she finds that in India and Ghana God seems to speak more audibly than in America: “People reported experiencing God talking more palpably, as if He spoke from outside their inner mind, than He did in the United States.” She thinks that a culture of skepticism—and perhaps an embarrassment about appearing weird or insane—prompts American worshippers to be somewhat suspicious of such audibility.

 

Luhrmann emphasizes that one needs a talent for this kind of highly attuned prayer. She notices how hard her subjects work at their relationships with God. Hearing God’s voice, she says, is a “richly layered skill,” and her subjects speak of developing it as one would speak of any expertise; they think that “repeated exposure and attention, coupled with specific training, helps the expert to see things that are really present but that the raw observer just cannot.” At various moments, Luhrmann likens the way her congregants view this aptitude for prayerful communication to wine tasting, being a sonogram technician, playing tennis. The Vineyard members talk to her about the importance of “discernment,” a word that Paul uses in I Corinthians, where he lists various “gifts” of the Spirit—the powers of prophecy, of healing, of speaking in tongues, and the “discerning of spirits.” I remember how important that talismanic phrase “gifts of the Spirit” was in our congregation, because it distinguished those churches fortunate enough to be in possession of such charismatic powers.

 

Luhrmann tells us that no one at the Vineyard laid out any rules of discernment, but that when she asked people how they knew that God was speaking to them they would revert to four “tests.” First, did a suggestion seem spontaneous, unlikely, not the kind of thing you would normally say or imagine? Second, was what you were hearing the kind of thing God might say, and not in contradiction to Biblical example or teaching? (Luhrmann stresses that the Vineyard’s God is not the severe God of the Hebrew Bible—who, for instance, orders Abraham to kill his son—but the loving God of the New Testament.) Third, could the revelation be verified by asking other people who were praying for the same outcome whether they had heard a similar message? Fourth, did hearing God’s voice impart a sense of peace? “If what you heard (or saw) did not, it did not come from God.”

 

I have a flyer from the Jehovah’s Witnesses that asks “Can We Really Believe What the Bible Says?” and lists three reasons for doing so, the third of which is “God cannot lie. The Bible plainly states: ‘It is impossible for God to lie.’ (Hebrews 6:18).” Below this, a friend of mine has written, in pen, “Q.E.D.” The four tests of the Vineyard are beset by a similar circularity, and, in fairness, it’s not clear how any so-called theological test could escape it. The evangelical relationship to God is so possessive, and so near-idolatrous, that it’s hard to see how one could get outside it and manage the necessary “verification.” Idolatrous, because conceiving a God who is interested in what shirt you wear can look a lot like inventing a God for your own small purposes. Again and again, evangelical worshippers seem to use God to validate the great luxury of capitalism: choice. Should I choose Denver or Chicago? This job or that job? That boyfriend or not? (The usual formulation for validating your decision is “I feel God calling me to do x.”)

 

There’s a story that the lovable German poet (and convert from Judaism) Heinrich Heine, lying on his deathbed in 1856, calmly uttered these final words about God’s forgiveness: “He’ll forgive me; that’s his job.” Heine, one imagines, was making fun of the whole contraption of last-minute bargains; more subtly, he was mocking the idea that we control God, that we know what tricks this little brass effigy we have fabricated in our own image will perform on our behalf. Evangelicals are very good at knowing what God’s job is. Heine sounds like Ludwig Feuerbach, who proposed, fifteen years before Heine’s death, in “The Essence of Christianity,” that we make the God we need, projecting onto this creation our deepest anxieties and desires.

 

Modern Christians in the West like to think of themselves as believers who have left behind any cultic relationship with a usable God. Doubtless not a few of them harbor a special disdain for American Evangelicalism, with its gaudy, prosperous instrumentalism. Certainly, if belief were plotted along a spectrum, at one end might lie the austere indescribability of the Jewish or Islamic God (“Silence is prayer to thee,” Maimonides wrote) and at the other the noisy, all-too-knowable God of charismatic worship, happy to be chatted to and apparently happy to chat back. But it is still a spectrum, and, indeed, any kind of petitionary prayer presumes a God onto whom one is projecting local human attributes. In this sense, you could say that Christianity is essentially a form of idolatry. The difficult, unspeakable Jewish God becomes the incarnated Jesus, a God made flesh, who lived among us, who resembles us. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer blamed Christian anti-Semitism on just this idolatry of the man-God: “Christ the incarnated spirit is the deified sorcerer.” They called this “the spiritualization of magic.” Evangelicals are hardly the only Christian believers to draw this Jesus, the deified sorcerer, near to them. I’m reminded of that whenever I see professional soccer players crossing themselves as they run onto the field, as if God really cared whether Arsenal beats Manchester United.

 

Luhrmann would say, with some justice, that in such cases we should focus more on the practice than on the beliefs. Crossing oneself is ritualistic, and she would probably add that the soccer player then performs on the field as if he and his team alone determined the outcome of the game, which is to say that—in a sense—he performs as if God didn’t exist after all. In “How God Becomes Real,” Luhrmann calls this the art of possessing “flexible ontologies,” because “people may talk as if the gods are straightforwardly real, but they don’t act that way.” A driver who prays that the car will stop without his using the brakes “would seem mad, not devout.” The real world, dependent on the laws of physics, runs easily alongside a highly elaborated and imagined belief-world, which shares several of the properties of fiction-making and fiction-reading. The Vineyard believers, Luhrmann discovered, learn how to “pretend that God is present and to make believe that he is talking back like the very best of buddies.” As with a fictional character, this God is at once absolutely real and not quite real. Luhrmann likens the capacity for imaginative absorption to being “engrossed in good magical fiction of the Harry Potter kind.” One of the spiritual guidebooks she consults suggests that worshippers relate to God not as an “Author,” a view that will make you “go mad or despair,” but as a “character.” As she notes, this move effectively abolishes heresy and doubt, by personalizing God’s authority. The “question of evil,” the ancient dilemma that has driven people to madness or despair—why is the world beset by tragedy if a providential and loving Author created it?—becomes a much easier therapeutic question: why is my life the way it is, and how can Jesus help me to make it better? Luhrmann neglects to say that the interventionist evangelical God ought to make the believer feel the problem of evil all the more acutely, since a deity mundane enough to have an interest in the outcome of a job interview might also be presumed to have had some role to play during, say, the Holocaust.

 

Luhrmann has brilliantly illuminated the magical attunement that constitutes a great deal of evangelical charismatic belief. Yet her work, at least to the religious skeptic, also carries with it an almost unbearable tension. She is, for the most part, carefully neutral about the existence of God, or even somewhat hospitable to the notion. When she talks about the playful or pretend elements of charismatic belief, she reminds her readers that of course it isn’t just pretend, that these worshippers are making “a real claim about the nature of the world, a claim about the objective reality of the Holy Spirit and God’s supernatural presence.” In “How God Becomes Real,” when she emphasizes how much training and technique go into spiritual absorption and prayerful communication, she concedes that such an argument might seem to “explain gods and spirits away, as if the experience of a god were nothing more than a temperamental byproduct.” That’s not what she thinks, she quickly adds, though without telling us why she doesn’t think so. At other moments, she seems to have done a bit of “real-making” of her own—having apparently been so deeply embedded in Elaine’s prayer group that “I was her prayer partner in house group, and week after week we prayed for specific upcoming job interviews” for Elaine.

 

We aren’t told who or what Luhrmann was praying to. My surmise is that she isn’t sure (a perfectly respectable position), which explains how often her analysis, at the very brink of deciding, as it were, which way to vote, engages in curious slippages of argument. Her major refuge is a kind of therapeutic pragmatism. She’s fond of the verb “work.” Prayer works, belief works, real-making works, she says, in the sense that, as far as these believers are concerned, God is made real; and these prayer practices therapeutically change the people who practice them. But does prayer “work” in the most important sense, of achieving what it proposes—which is to communicate with an actually existing God? Luhrmann won’t be drawn out, committed as she is to a kind of Feuerbachian religious anthropology, in which God is merely the reality we conjure and create through our activities, imaginings, and yearnings.

 

“These practices work,” she writes at the start of “When God Talks Back.” “They change people. That is, they change mental experience, and those changes help people to experience God as more real.” A page later, she writes that the most difficult problem that faces “anyone who believes or wants to believe in God” is “not whether God exists, in some abstract, in-principle, out-in-the-universe way, but how to find God in the everyday world and how to know that what you have found is God, and not someone else’s deluded fantasy or your own selfish wish.” This sounds like a reasonable caveat, but it’s something of a fudge. Can the practice of finding God be so easily separated from the crucial question of whether there is a God to find? Presumably, once you are convinced that the God you have found is not a “deluded fantasy,” you also believe that God exists, both as an abstract proposition and as an actual presence.

 

Luhrmann ends “When God Talks Back” by telling us that she doesn’t “presume to know ultimate reality” but does feel that she has “come to know God.” She wouldn’t call herself a Christian, but finds herself defending Christianity. (Luhrmann was brought up as a Unitarian—a denomination that most evangelicals would consider essentially godless.) At the end of “How God Becomes Real,” she announces that she doesn’t believe that God exists, if by God one means “an invisible other somehow out there, sitting apart, a man with a beard in the sky.” On the other hand, she finds it “uncomfortable to characterize what one might call believers as having false beliefs.” Instead, she finds herself caught in the middle—between discounting the idea of God as something equally real and present in the world as “table and chairs” and discounting the words of the believers she has interviewed as “mere metaphors” (which would seem as if she were judging their beliefs as false).

 

 

 

There’s something there: but what is it? In fact, Luhrmann’s account quietly, insidiously, and even unwittingly deconstructs the notion that this something has an existence independent of the “mere metaphors” that her subjects use to describe their visionary experiences. In particular, her work on the training and teaching of prayerful instinct, as she acknowledges, inevitably emphasizes the cultivation of visionary expertise over the existence of the object of that vision. Chekhov writes jokingly about an exterminator who, when he reads Tolstoy’s “The Cossacks,” decides it’s worthless because it doesn’t mention bugs. We look for what we want to find, but its discovery is no guarantee of its existence. Wine tasters and sonogram technicians are drinking real wine and looking for real babies, but ghostbusters and psychics might be thought to have “trained” themselves to find mere figments. Luhrmann’s analogies and angles of inquiry (looking for God is like reading “Harry Potter,” and so on) often align her evangelical believers with the latter group.

 

In her new book, she writes about the proclivity for imaginative absorption. Apparently, people who score high in absorption tests “are more likely to say that God speaks to them.” She adds that the more “some phenomenological event” (like crying or speaking in tongues) is “valued within a faith community, the more it will occur.” She considers herself someone with just this talent for absorption: she tells us that she loved Tolkien when she was growing up, and provides an engrossing discussion of the years she spent as a young ethnographer in London, while investigating the practices of British witches. Like evangelicals, these witches studied how to wield their specific magical powers. Luhrmann took a nine-month course in such powers, which involved meditation and visualization, and, she reports, “my mental imagery did seem to become clearer.” She began to have more “anomalous” experiences—“visions, voices, a sense of presence, out-of-body experiences.” So the analyst with a proclivity for visionary experiences is reporting on a proclivity for visionary experiences, which in turn seems to predispose certain adepts to those visionary experiences: lots of bugs here. Yet surely prayer can’t be studied solely as a technology or a practice. Prayer is also a proposition. It proposes that God exists and that we can communicate with that God. And evangelical prayer, premised on faith in an interventionist God, goes further, because it insists on a certain connection to miracle. Luhrmann may distance herself from the table-like reality of God, but her evangelical subjects almost certainly don’t. God, for them, is even more real than a table and chairs, and, when it suits him, this real God can do miraculous things with tables and chairs.

 

There’s nothing intellectually improper about Luhrmann’s omnivorous agnosticism, to be sure, and only a thoroughly unbalanced reader like this one, with rusty old theological axes to grind, would demand that her writing be other than what it so valuably is. Besides, even when one has decided that God doesn’t exist, one might still hesitate to conclude that religious practice, with its glories and degradations, is just one long unending history of illusion and hallucination. When I was growing up, the evangelical church I attended didn’t offer the only example of how to think about religion. Durham is dominated by a beautiful cathedral, one of the great achievements of Romanesque architecture. I spent long hours inside this magnificent building as a cathedral chorister, and grew to love its gray silence, its massive, calm nave, the weight of centuries of devotion. Sometimes I could almost feel the presence of the faithful stonemasons who, in the twelfth century, arduously placed one stone on top of another.

 

A friend of mine, with whom, when I was older, I used to have long “God battles” (me against, him for), once teased me with a question: If, as I claimed, religion was just an enormous illusion, was Durham Cathedral “just a mistake”? No, not a mistake—of course not, I replied. “O.K., a great temple, then, erected to honor an illusion? A big stone hoax?” Yes, perhaps. ♦

 

 

 

Published in the print edition of the November 9, 2020, issue, with the headline “Creating God.”

James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007. In November, he will publish “Serious Noticing,” a selection of essays.