'When God Talks Back' To The Evangelical Community

[Bryant]

'When God Talks Back' To The Evangelical Community
NPR

While attending services and small group meetings at The Vineyard, an evangelical church with 600 branches across the country, anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann noticed that several members of the congregation said God had repeatedly spoken to them and that they had heard what God wanted them to do.

In When God Talks Back, which is based on an anthropological study she did at The Vineyard, Luhrmann examines the personal relationships people developed with God and explores how those relationships were cemented through the practice of prayer.

"The way I think about it as an anthropologist, I don't have the authority to pronounce on whether God is real or whether God is not real," she tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "I don't feel like I have a horse in that race. I don't feel I have the authority to say whether God showed up to somebody or did not. I do think that if God speaks to someone, God speaks to the human mind. And I can say something about the social, cultural and psychological features of what that person is experiencing."

Talking Directly With God

Poll numbers show that more Americans are experiencing God through personal relationships. The Pew Foundation found that nearly a quarter of Americans are what they call "renewalist" Christians, which means they have an interactive sense of God's presence. Another study cited by Luhrmann found that 26 percent of all Americans say they have been given a direct revelation from God.

"I would go to churches that were not explicitly experientially oriented, and those were churches where people were telling me that I should be having coffee with God," she says. "So I think this style of encountering God has become much more a part of the American experience."

Luhrmann has hypothesized that people going to services and prayer groups at evangelical churches have trained their minds to perceive God's voice. In the prayer classes she attended, she observed people experiencing what she calls a new "theory of mind."

"They learn to experience some of their thoughts as not being thoughts from them, but thoughts from God that they hear inside their mind," she says. "They're also invited to pretend that God is present. I take that verb from C.S. Lewis — he has a chapter of Mere Christianity entitled 'Let's Pretend.' ... These folks were invited to put out a second cup of coffee for God, they prayed to go for a walk with God, to go on a date with God, to snuggle with God, to imagine that they are sitting on a bench in the park with God's arms around their shoulders and they're talking about their respective days."

These people are using their imaginations to create this conversation, says Luhrmann.

"They're using their own understanding of conversation — their own conversations and friends — and building this daydreamlike exchange, but they're seeking to represent God the way that God is represented in church," she says. "In this kind of church, unconditionally loving, always wise, always responsive, always there — and then they're trying to experience that God as talking back to them and to experience what God says as being really real, and not the creation of their own imaginations."

Understanding What God Says

In these classes, congregants were taught to discern thoughts coming from their imagination with thoughts that were coming directly from God, says Luhrmann.

"What I was fascinated by, was that when people would enter the church, they'd say, 'I don't know what people are talking about. God doesn't talk to me,' " she says. "And then they would try praying in this interactive, free-form imagination-rich kind of way, and after six months, they would start to say that they recognize God's voice the way they recognize their mom's voice on the phone."

Congregants in the prayer classes at The Vineyard are taught that they are unconditionally loved by God. Luhrmann says she saw prayer groups in which a group would pray over someone who felt inadequate in some respect and remind that person that God loved him or her unconditionally.

"People practice experiencing God as a therapist," she says. "They have a sense of God being wise and good and loving, and they talk to God in their minds and talk about their problems, and then they are seeking to experience themselves as seeing it from the perspective of a loving God who then reflects back on their anxieties and interprets them differently."

On Unconditional Love

Luhrmann says she was struck by stories she heard about the moment people concluded that God loved them unconditionally.

"I would be often sitting with people, and at some point in the interview they'd begin to cry, and when they cried, they would talk about the moment when they really got it that God loved them just as they were," she says. "And then it would be gone. It was hard for people to hang onto. And I thought that many people were able to carry around in themselves this sense of being loved."

Members of the church do not use the term "self-help," but they do tell congregants that they will feel happier and more confident if they accept God into their lives, says Luhrmann.

"If you read Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Life, it reads from one perspective very much like a cognitive behavioral therapy manual," she says. "He's trying to get you to see yourself from God's perspective. It starts with the statement that you are not an accident. And then, with each chapter, he is asking you to reconsider yourself, not from the perspective of your own limitations or your own failures, but from the sense that you are not properly understanding yourself as seen from the person who created you. And I actually think this really helps people."

This, of course, is a radically different philosophy from churches that preach about the wrath of God and eternal damnation. Lurhmann explains that the experientially oriented churches grew out of the social upheavals of the 1960s.

"Atheism became an allowable life identity, and there were many different ways to be spiritual," she says. "There were many different ways to be in the world, and Christianity then became a buyer's market. People chose if they were going to be Christian and what type of church they would join. And churches like The Vineyard see themselves as trying to offer a God that's quite different from the one who terrified poor James Joyce."

Luhrmann says she noticed that when people in The Vineyard prayer group concentrated on speaking to God, they attended more intensely to their own internal worlds.

"It becomes more alive, it feels more real, and occasionally it almost slipped over the edge of that boundary that separates the inner and outer, and they would hear God speak audibly or they would see something that somebody else wouldn't see," she says. "I don't think that has anything to do with ontology. If there is a God, God is choosing those moments when you have that unusual experience. But the psychological technique of prayer is independent of religion. It is a way of changing the inner experience of the person."

Luhrmann says her experiences working with the people at The Vineyard changed her own ways of looking at God.

"There's this amazing prayer by a Jesuit father that says 'Fall in love with God, stay in love with God, and it will change everything,' " she says. "I don't have this ontological commitment to this God that's kind of out there, but I do have the sense that I'm a little more able to allow myself to experience the good and the aliveness of the world, if that makes any sense."

[Bryant]

A more in depth and technical discussion on the above topic:

Visions For All: People who report vivid religious experiences may hold clues to nonpsychotic hallucinations
By Bruce Bower
Science Mag
April 7th, 2012; Vol.181 #7 (p. 22)

Meeting the Almighty takes hallucinatory talent and training. And Hannah, a member of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, has got it down.

She talks with God every day. Sometimes she imagines that God is walking beside her, although no vision of the Almighty appears. On other occasions, Hannah goes on what she calls “date nights” with God. She buys a sandwich, finds a secluded bench and imagines that the big guy is sitting next to her. In both cases, imagination occasionally gives way to a sense of truly hearing God speak.

During these divine experiences, Hannah gets in touch with her unconscious mind, an undercurrent of thoughts and feelings she regards not as her own but as those of the Holy Spirit.

“I recognize that it’s not me, but God inside me, that I’m having a conversation with,” Hannah told Stanford University anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann. “Which makes this relationship way more complicated … trying to imagine some real but not real figure outside of my own self.”

Luhrmann spent more than four years interviewing evangelical Christians in Chicago and Palo Alto, Calif., for her 2012 book When God Talks Back. Her conversations with Vineyard members, including the young woman given the pseudonym Hannah, are part of an ongoing effort to try to understand how ordinary people can meet God through spiritual hallucinations.

Researchers studying hallucinations often focus on people with schizophrenia and other psychotic ailments who experience incessant, unwanted and distressing hallucinations. But emotionally stable, well-functioning individuals can have unusual sensory experiences too.

Luhrmann’s evidence suggests that this regular-folks brand of hallucinating is much more common than most people think, and understanding such hallucinations could offer new insights into how the mind works. People who effortlessly get caught up in imaginary worlds, nature and music are more likely to have hallucinations, for example. Luhrmann has also identified ways that, through practice, such hallucinatory abilities can be enhanced.

“Given the right training in how to pay attention to one’s mind, it’s easy to go on a walk with God,” Luhrmann says.

Nonpsychotic individuals do have hallucinations, other researchers agree. But, they argue, anyone who experiences hallucinations more than a few times in a lifetime probably falls on the functional end of a psychotic continuum and could be at risk for future psychosis. If true, the claim may bode ill for one Vineyard member.

Hallucination nation

Most of the more than 30 evangelical Christians interviewed by Luhrmann recalled one or a few times when they heard God’s voice or had a holy vision. But hallucinatory experiences don’t affect just the religious.

Surveys conducted over the last century find that 10 to 15 percent of U.S. and British adults report having been startled by briefly hearing a voice when alone or seeing something that could not be seen by others. About three-quarters of bereaved adults acknowledge having heard, seen or otherwise sensed their departed partners. People everywhere, including millions of Americans, have waking nightmares in which they lie frozen, eyes wide open, tormented by hallucinations of demons or other evil presences that sit on their chests as breathing becomes difficult (SN: 7/9/05, p. 27).

Westerners usually keep these experiences secret for the same reason that Vineyard congregants tend to stay tight-lipped about God talk outside of church — because they know that people who have hallucinations are often assumed to be mentally ill.

Elsewhere in the world, people openly discuss their hallucinatory experiences. In many non-Western cultures, such as Thailand’s Buddhist society, troubled minds are viewed as open to manipulation by ghosts and other forms of invisible, supernatural energy, Luhrmann says. In an upcoming issue of Religion and Society, Stanford anthropologist Julia Cassaniti and Luhrmann report that Thai college students and villagers often report having had waking nightmares, run-ins with ghosts and other supernatural encounters during periods of personal turmoil.

Luhrmann refers to congregants’ vivid encounters as well as other culturally driven hallucinations as sensory overrides, to distinguish them from the psychotic type of experiences.

Sensory overrides depend on a person’s capacity for getting caught up in his or her own imagination, or in nature, music and other worldly objects of interest, Luhrmann proposes. This tendency is called absorption, and she tests for the characteristic using a questionnaire developed in 1974 as a measure of susceptibility to hypnosis.

Meeting the Almighty takes hallucinatory talent and training. And Hannah, a member of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, has got it down.

She talks with God every day. Sometimes she imagines that God is walking beside her, although no vision of the Almighty appears. On other occasions, Hannah goes on what she calls “date nights” with God. She buys a sandwich, finds a secluded bench and imagines that the big guy is sitting next to her. In both cases, imagination occasionally gives way to a sense of truly hearing God speak.

During these divine experiences, Hannah gets in touch with her unconscious mind, an undercurrent of thoughts and feelings she regards not as her own but as those of the Holy Spirit.

“I recognize that it’s not me, but God inside me, that I’m having a conversation with,” Hannah told Stanford University anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann. “Which makes this relationship way more complicated … trying to imagine some real but not real figure outside of my own self.”

Luhrmann spent more than four years interviewing evangelical Christians in Chicago and Palo Alto, Calif., for her 2012 book When God Talks Back. Her conversations with Vineyard members, including the young woman given the pseudonym Hannah, are part of an ongoing effort to try to understand how ordinary people can meet God through spiritual hallucinations.

Researchers studying hallucinations often focus on people with schizophrenia and other psychotic ailments who experience incessant, unwanted and distressing hallucinations. But emotionally stable, well-functioning individuals can have unusual sensory experiences too.

Luhrmann’s evidence suggests that this regular-folks brand of hallucinating is much more common than most people think, and understanding such hallucinations could offer new insights into how the mind works. People who effortlessly get caught up in imaginary worlds, nature and music are more likely to have hallucinations, for example. Luhrmann has also identified ways that, through practice, such hallucinatory abilities can be enhanced.

“Given the right training in how to pay attention to one’s mind, it’s easy to go on a walk with God,” Luhrmann says.

A recent study looked at what characteristics of auditory hallucinations were shared and which differed among healthy participants and psychotic patients. Members of both groups hallucinated at least once a month. Scientists are not yet sure whether hallucinations in the two groups should be treated as the same phenomenon (K. Daalman et al/J Clin Psychiatry 2011).

Nonpsychotic individuals do have hallucinations, other researchers agree. But, they argue, anyone who experiences hallucinations more than a few times in a lifetime probably falls on the functional end of a psychotic continuum and could be at risk for future psychosis. If true, the claim may bode ill for one Vineyard member.

Hallucination nation

Most of the more than 30 evangelical Christians interviewed by Luhrmann recalled one or a few times when they heard God’s voice or had a holy vision. But hallucinatory experiences don’t affect just the religious.

Surveys conducted over the last century find that 10 to 15 percent of U.S. and British adults report having been startled by briefly hearing a voice when alone or seeing something that could not be seen by others. About three-quarters of bereaved adults acknowledge having heard, seen or otherwise sensed their departed partners. People everywhere, including millions of Americans, have waking nightmares in which they lie frozen, eyes wide open, tormented by hallucinations of demons or other evil presences that sit on their chests as breathing becomes difficult (SN: 7/9/05, p. 27).

Westerners usually keep these experiences secret for the same reason that Vineyard congregants tend to stay tight-lipped about God talk outside of church — because they know that people who have hallucinations are often assumed to be mentally ill.

Elsewhere in the world, people openly discuss their hallucinatory experiences. In many non-Western cultures, such as Thailand’s Buddhist society, troubled minds are viewed as open to manipulation by ghosts and other forms of invisible, supernatural energy, Luhrmann says. In an upcoming issue of Religion and Society, Stanford anthropologist Julia Cassaniti and Luhrmann report that Thai college students and villagers often report having had waking nightmares, run-ins with ghosts and other supernatural encounters during periods of personal turmoil.

Luhrmann refers to congregants’ vivid encounters as well as other culturally driven hallucinations as sensory overrides, to distinguish them from the psychotic type of experiences.

Sensory overrides depend on a person’s capacity for getting caught up in his or her own imagination, or in nature, music and other worldly objects of interest, Luhrmann proposes. This tendency is called absorption, and she tests for the characteristic using a questionnaire developed in 1974 as a measure of susceptibility to hypnosis.

Luhrmann argues that sensory overrides emerge from healthy brains that reorganize and stitch together external information based on expectations about what’s supposed to be out there. Given a perceptual system that seamlessly fills in the blanks of an uncertain world, those who trust their imaginations or know how to focus deeply on their thoughts and feelings occasionally see or hear things that no one else does.

In an effort to explain how modern people come to know God via sensory overrides, Luhrmann has turned up evidence that absorption forms a mental bridge from the act of praying to seeing or hearing the divine. “Absorption-related sensations of God’s presence are rare, brief, can be trained and are viewed as reassuring by those who report them,” she says.

In the March 2010 American Anthropologist, Luhrmann and her colleagues reported that the way 28 Vineyard members responded to an absorption questionnaire predicted whether they experienced God as a person through prayer. Those who scored high on absorption portrayed God as someone they talked to easily, laughed with, got angry at and who talked back from time to time.

After affirming nearly all 34 absorption questions, one volunteer told Luhrmann, “The man who created this scale lived inside my head.”

Not so for congregants with low absorption scores, who didn’t like praying because God never seemed to speak to them.

A prayer-challenged participant wrote next to one absorption item, “There are such people?”

Crucially, the volunteers who endorsed at least half the absorption questions were far more likely than the others to report sensory overrides, such as hearing God’s voice, feeling the Almighty’s touch or glimpsing an angel’s wing.

“The capacity to treat what the mind imagines as more real than the world one knows lies at the heart of experiencing God,” Luhrmann says. An aptitude for absorption can also influence experiences outside of startling religious shout-outs. It enables, for instance, temporary escape from one’s troubles by reading a book and entering an imaginary world.

All-access deity

A rare breed of otherwise healthy folks seem to take absorption to the extreme. Luhrmann calls this brand the “Joan of Arc” pattern, a reference to the 15th century French girl who said that she heard and sometimes saw two saints and the archangel Gabriel every day. These emissaries of God purportedly told Joan to lead the king’s army against England and gave her battle strategies — eventually leading to her capture and death.

Luhrmann met one Vineyard member who exhibited this pattern. This calm, well-respected churchgoer with a good job, whom Luhrmann calls Jane, constantly heard God talking to her. Jane said she heard “a little voice” as a child that she couldn’t make sense of. The voice fell silent for a while until she joined an evangelical church as a young adult. God then spoke to her often while she prayed and at other times, providing counsel and encouragement.

Jane probably inherited a genetic propensity for absorption and for unusual sensory experiences that can contribute to schizophrenia in people with other brain and emotional vulnerabilities, Luhrmann suggests. “But that doesn’t mean that she is ill.”

Luhrmann thinks of schizophrenia as a collection of traits — including disorganized thinking, blunted emotions, impulsiveness and hallucinations — that get stirred into a toxic brew by environmental factors such as harsh and traumatic experiences growing up.

Many psychiatrists suspect that a genetic predisposition, combined with prenatal brain damage and the psychological turmoil of young adulthood, orchestrates schizophrenia.

Given a relatively benign upbringing and a steadfast temperament, hearing God’s daily pronouncements made Jane feel good, as well as useful at church. But Jane’s case highlights a divide that exists between Luhrmann and other researchers. While Luhrmann regards the young woman as one of many mentally healthy folks who experience hallucinations, others view Jane as part of an understudied segment of the population consisting of people who function well despite displaying psychotic symptoms capable of flaring into mental illness.

Sensory overrides probably stand apart from psychotic hallucinations, but Jane’s hallucinations signal a vulnerability to schizophrenia, says psychiatrist Iris Sommer of University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands. In fact, an unappreciated number of people who work and live on their own experience hallucinations and other psychotic symptoms that are signs of a susceptibility to mental illness, she says.

Sommer regards sensory overrides as rare illusions among the healthy, such as a Catholic seeing a Mary statue cry or a wife who hears her late husband call her name. Schizophrenia symptoms, in contrast, take precious few breaks. Signs of mental deterioration usually appear around age 20, when patients find that they can’t handle adult jobs and relationships. Many of those who seek treatment have heard friendly voices since childhood, as Jane has, says Sommer. Those same voices turn threatening in young adulthood, and patients often develop paranoid delusions.

“If Joan of Arc had lived a little longer, she may have undergone the same transition,” Sommer suggests. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake at age 19.

Jane, now in her late 20s and holding down a good job, still stands a decent chance of eventually descending into psychosis, in Sommer’s opinion.

Some adults harness hallucinations successfully for several years — say, a charismatic leader of a religious sect — before psychosis flares and requires treatment, Sommer says. Conversely, some psychotic patients that she has treated have tamed their hallucinations enough to live independently.

Sommer’s clinical observations fit with surveys conducted in England and Wales by psychologist Louise Johns of the Institute of Psychiatry in London and colleagues. Johns finds that 4 percent of the white population reports recent hallucinations that she believes signal a vulnerability to psychosis. She regards that figure as a conservative estimate. “Some people who hear God through prayer may have a vulnerability to psychosis, although there are many people who experience hallucinations and don’t develop psychosis or need mental-health care,” she says.

Preliminary evidence indicates that childhood sexual abuse and other traumas boost hallucination proneness, possibly by causing people to become psychologically detached from their emotions, bodies and surroundings, Johns says.

Sommer’s team has studied 111 people who hallucinate at least once a month but have no psychiatric or brain disorders. Many work as mediums, psychics and spiritual healers. Volunteers described hearing voices as loudly and as vividly as 118 patients with schizophrenia and related disorders, the researchers reported in the March 2011 Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. But healthy individuals generally heard nice or neutral voices, whereas patients heard insults and commands to kill themselves.

Brain scans of 21 individuals from each group, taken while they said they were hearing voices, revealed similar activity for those with and without psychosis. Language production and comprehension areas of both hemispheres sprang into action, consistent with participants silently talking to themselves, Sommer and her colleagues reported in a paper published online last year in Schizophrenia Bulletin.

Studies conducted by other researchers with small numbers of hallucinating volunteers suggest that when people hear voices out of nowhere, their brains are failing to identify internal thoughts as self-generated, Sommer says. In other words, neural activity reflects a mental state in which imagined statements are interpreted as coming from someone else. Confusion about the source of one’s own thoughts could apply to sensory overrides as easily as to psychotic hallucinations, Luhrmann says.

Trained visions

However minds and brains instigate hallucinations, cultural training may lie at the heart of sensing the immaterial, Luhrmann says.

Consider that different religions ascribe special meaning to different senses. Protestants emphasize hearing as appropriate for experiencing God, as do evangelical Christians and Muslims. Members of these faiths typically hear God’s voice but don’t see God. Catholics and Hindus privilege sight as a holy channel and more often have super­natural visions.

Many non-Western cultures assume that one person’s mind can be occupied by another’s mind, or by supernatural forces. Sensory overrides appear to occur more easily among people in these societies, such as the Thai Buddhists studied by Cassaniti.

Cultural encouragement to focus carefully on inner thought, a characteristic of Islam, also prompts sensory overrides. And a study by Luhrmann has shown that evangelical Christians can develop a capacity for absorption by learning to focus on inner thoughts and feelings while praying. After a month of practicing this kind of prayer, many congregants reported that they had heard God’s voice for the first time.

“Anthropologists and psychologists don’t know much about the effects of cultural training on how people think about their own minds,” says anthropologist Rita Astuti of the London School of Economics and Political Science, who studies a fishing community in Madagascar. Members of that community frequently report being temporarily possessed by invisible spirits.

Ways in which cultures promote everything from spirit possessions to hearing God’s voice also remain largely unexplored. Luhrmann predicts investigations of the religious faithful will yield further insights into what personal characteristics other than absorption spark hallucinations.

She also thinks that regardless of what scientists turn up, Hannah will continue to enjoy date nights with God as much as ever.

[Dennis324]

Weird stuff. I'm not a fan of Rick Warren. Period. Imo the man is preaching false doctrine. The man has gone out of his way to combine Islam with Christianity for crying out loud...which are totally contrary faiths.

As for 'going on a date with God" or "Snuggling with God" thats a totally alien concept for me. I see God as the Father or my Lord. Not my date.

I have never heard of renewalism, but dont think this is mainstream teaching.

As for hallucinations....maybe these people are hallucinating..I dunno. I wont say that visions arent real. But I've never heard God speak to me audibly. But I do feel that He moves me to act via the Holy Spirit. And when I say that, I dont mean that I see God sitting across from me and talking to me.

Various Christian Churches (especialy today) run the risk of decieving themselves through odd new teachings. One has to be careful or you can find yourself in trouble in spiritual matters.

[Miles1]

So if you have this sort of predisposition and you don't end up drifting into one of these "vision-friendly" churches (or if you're an athiest), do you start believing that you're being visited by aliens instead?

[Marconius]

So if you have this sort of predisposition and you don't end up drifting into one of these "vision-friendly" churches (or if you're an athiest), do you start believing that you're being visited by aliens instead?

I've just been passing it off as flashbacks from a decade that never should have been (the '90's were kinda wild for a while).

[Sir Pun]

Im usually too busy speaking in tongues to hear gods voice.

[Miles1]

Im usually too busy speaking in tongues to hear gods voice.

What, he can't get a word in edgeways?

[Sir Pun]

Not between that and the snake handling

[Dennis324]

To my knowlege, God has never spoken audibly to me. That's what the Holy Spirit is for, and He's not very verbal either. I'm not gonna pick up a snake either. Lol!

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