Gorra: That really is a remarkable story. But are such God-experiences only psychological projections of some skilled kind?
Luhrmann: God is invisible. If you are going to represent God in the mind, you need to use the imagination. Asking about how religious people use the imagination to experience God says nothing about whether God is real or not.
Gorra: Your research focuses on American Christians self-identified as members of the sociologically and intellectually diverse Vineyard Church movement. Your focus is there, but you also take them as a type of what an "American Evangelical Relationship with God" looks like (as your subtitle suggests). But while Vineyard practices have important overlaps with American Evangelical practices, there are also differences (e.g., notably, not all self-identified evangelicals practice as if "God talks back"). So, for you as an anthropologist, how would you identify the overlap, and more importantly, why do you take Vineyard to be somewhat "representational" of the American Evangelical experience with God?
Luhrmann: The evangelical world is certainly broad and there are many kinds of people who call themselves evangelical. Still, the major shift in the American experience of God since 1965 has been toward a more experiential spirituality.
The Pew Foundation found that 23 percent of all Americans participate in "renewalist" Christianity, in which there is a direct interest in experiencing the Holy Spirit. Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life, which sets out to teach the reader how to experience God as a best friend, has sold over thirty million copies—the bestselling hardback book in American history.
The Vineyard is an example of what the sociologist Don Miller called "new paradigm" Protestantism in which people combine conservative evangelical theology with an intense interest in experiencing God directly in personal relationship. They take some of the style of Pentecostalism and render it acceptable to the white middle class.
On Understanding American Evangelical Spiritual Experience
Gorra: You say in the book that "we are primed to be alert for presence, whether anyone is present or not" (xii). Now, there's an evolutionary psychology explanation for this phenomenon. But you find that to be shortsighted. Why?
Luhrmann: Evolutionary psychology explains that our cognitive apparatus has evolved so that we are more likely to interpret an ambiguous sound as indicating a possible agent. But evolutionary psychology explains why the idea of an invisible agent seems plausible, not how faith is sustained over time.
Gorra: I wonder also if part of the limitations of evolutionary psychology is that it is not conducive to studying how the imagination can environ the longings and intentions of faith in the presence of intentional, supernatural agents.
Luhrmann: Evolutionary psychology really bases its arguments on fear: on the way people change because they are afraid of potential predators. Faith is really about hope. So I think it is possible that our cognition evolved so that we are alert to interpret agency, but I think that this evolved capacity then was, in effect, captured by the human yearning for love and beauty and for a world which is good.
Gorra: Let's talk a little further about what goes into your anthropological explanations of religious beliefs and practices. You utilize various important concepts to help explain (perhaps, especially to persuade unbelievers) the phenomenology of how non-crazy, stable people "hear God." Let's talk about some of these concepts. First, can you articulate the role that a "theory of mind" plays in the experiences of these believers?
Luhrmann: People who join a church in which people learn to hear from God in their minds must learn to experience their minds not as private, but as containing the presence of another being, God, who speaks directly through thoughts and images. That's sometimes tough for people to take seriously when they come to the church for the first time.
Gorra: Okay, but now why should someone think that these cases are not examples of mere hallucinations or delusions?
Luhrmann: As a social scientist, I can't distinguish between times when someone hears a voice and thinks it is God, and times when someone hears God. I can, however, see that these unusual experiences of God take place in a pattern that is quite different from the pattern of hallucinations one sees with people who are psychiatrically ill. The God-experiences tend to be rare, brief, and good (if startling), while the psychiatric experiences tend to be frequent, lengthy, and awful.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In