When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God

by T.M. Luhrmann

            How does God become and remain real for modern evangelicals? How are rational, sensible people of faith able to experience the presence of a powerful yet invisible being and sustain that belief in an environment of overwhelming skepticism? T. M. Luhrmann, an anthropologist trained in psychology and the acclaimed author of Of Two Minds, explores the extraordinary process that leads some believers to a place where God is profoundly real and his voice can be heard amid the clutter of everyday thoughts.
            While attending services and various small group meetings at her local branch of the Vineyard, an evangelical church with hundreds of congregations across the country, Luhrmann sought to understand how some members were able to communicate with God, not just through one-sided prayers but with discernable feedback. Some saw visions, while others claimed to hear the voice of God himself. For these congregants and many other Christians, God was intensely alive. After holding a series of honest, personal interviews with Vineyard members who claimed to have had isolated or ongoing supernatural experiences with God, Luhrmann hypothesized that the practice of prayer could train a person to hear God’s voice—to use one’s mind differently and focus on God’s voice until it became clear. A subsequent experiment conducted between people who were and weren’t practiced in prayer further illuminated her conclusion. For those who have trained themselves to concentrate on their inner experiences, God is experienced in the brain as an actual social his voice was identified, and that identification was trusted and regarded as real and interactive.
Astute, deeply intelligent, and sensitive, When God Talks Back is a remarkable approach to the intersection of religion, psychology, and science, and the effect it has on the daily practices of the faithful.

Genres: Religion, Nonfiction, Anthropology, Psychology, Spirituality, Christianity, Theology

464 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is currently the Watkins University Professor in the Anthropology Department at Stanford University. She has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

Tanya Marie Luhrmann (born 1959) is an American psychological anthropologist best known for her studies of modern-day witches, charismatic Christians, and psychiatrists. She received her AB summa cum laude in Folklore and Mythology from Harvard-Radcliffe in 1981, working with Stanley Tambiah. She then studied Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, working with Jack Goody and Ernest Gellner. In 1986 she received her PhD for work on modern-day witches in England, later published as Persuasions of the Witch's Craft (1989). In this book, she described the ways in which magic and other esoteric techniques both serve emotional needs and come to seem reasonable through the experience of practice.

Her second research project looked at the situation of contemporary Parsis, a Zoroastrian community in India. The Parsi community enjoyed a privileged position under the British Raj; although by many standards, Parsis have continued to do quite well economically in post-colonial India, they have become politically marginal in comparison to their previous position, and many Parsis speak pessimistically about the future of their community. Luhrmann's book The Good Parsi (1996) explored the contradictions inherent in the social psychology of a post-colonial elite.

Her third book, and the most widely acclaimed, explored the contradictions and tensions between two models of psychiatry, the psychodynamic (psychoanalytic) and the biomedical, through the ethnographic study of the training of American psychiatry residents during the health care transition of the early 1990s. Of Two Minds (2000) received several awards, including the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing and the Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology (2001).

Her fourth book, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (March 2012), examines the growing movement of evangelical and charismatic Christianity, and specifically how practitioners come to experience God as someone with whom they can communicate on a daily basis through prayer and visualization.

Other projects she is working on include a NIMH-funded study of how life on the streets (chronically or periodically homeless) contributes to the experience and morbidity of schizophrenia.

Reviews

[Jessaka · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book reads as if the author were trying to convert people to the Vineyard prosperity church. I thought when I bought it that it was more of a critical analysis of their belief system. So, since I am critical of this movement, I will offer my own views.

Little negativity comes out of the author's mouth about this church, and yet distractors are there and are telling their stories on the internet. They are hurt, shunned, depressed, and discouraged. Of course, since the church doesn't allow negative speech, perhaps that is why the author had not done her homework.

The new message is this: God doesn’t want you to wait for that mansion in the sky; he wants you to have it all now. Christians are tired of waiting. Who wouldn’t be, especially since they have preached for hundreds of years that Christ is going to take them to heaven while at the same time destroy the evil doers? Thank God, they are not now tired of that waiting and taking up arms against those they consider evil.

This idea that God wants everyone to be rich, I believe, is a distortion of the scriptures, and I feel that this has led people to now measure their self worth by how wealthy they are. What happens when they don’t get rich? It has to be their fault, just as they believe that it is the poor person’s fault for being poor. I know this last statement to be true, because I live in the Bible belt. I listen, and I cringe.

Do they ever look at how large these new churches are whose preachers teach these messages? Do they think it is wonderful that the money is spent on such extravagances? Does it prove to them that the message works? Do they ever wonder what kind of car the minister drives, how he/she lives or do they just make excuses? How many people in these churches get rich themselves? Do they ever get around to what Christ said, “"Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth.” Or do they find other scriptures to support their beliefs and just ignore his message? Maybe, instead of reading the Bible, they just listen to their minister?

People are having mystical experiences in these Pentecostal churches. They believe that they are connecting with God, and well, maybe some are, but these mystical experiences are always tainted by their own religious belief system. So an Orthodox Catholic will still believe in hell, purgatory, etc., and a Hindu and a Buddhist will tell you that there is karma and hell. So now, add to that, these experiences that people have in a prosperity church validate their new materialist views.

But I realize that an experience of God is one of the most powerful and rewarding moments in a person’s life. It will change them, and they will never get over that experience. Still, like I said, I believe that they are tainted. What would they be like if they weren’t? What are atheist mystical experiences like? They do have them. But the Vineyard Church takes this one step further. You are taught how to distinguish our own thoughts from God's. This really opens up the door to abuse. You can claim anything, and they often do.

What happens to those people in these religions who don’t experience God? Do they begin to believe that God doesn’t exist? I would think so. Some may even feel that God doesn’t love them since He has not shown himself to them. Well, I learned after reading this that some are told that it is the devil that is keeping them from having these experiences; the devil is in them. What a horrible and cruel thing to place on people, especially when they came to a religion to find God.

Then when people pray for material things and don’t get their prayers answered, what then? Of course these religions come up with all kinds of reasons that God didn’t answer their prayers, like maybe he just said No. But for some those answers are not enough, and so they leave, that is, if they can leave their friends, and if they do, then what?

I know what it is like to have developed friendships in a religion and what it was like to have walked away. I also know what it is like to try to stay in a religion when you no longer believe. I know what it is like to pray to God in almost every religion and not be heard. And I know what it is like to shun members of a church because you believe, along with all the other members, that they are evil. Then I learned what it is like to be accused and shunned myself, and told that I was evil, that I was of the devil.

But eventually I learned the peace of just leaving all religion behind.

[Roy Lotz · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Listen,” he said, “I don’t care what you say about me or anything, but if you start making cracks about my goddam religion for Chrissake—”

“Relax,” I said. “Nobody’s making any cracks about your goddam religion.”

—J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

When this book unexpectedly plopped onto my ‘to-read’ list, I had high hopes. I’ve long been interested in the social science of religion, and this was a full-blown anthropological and psychological investigation of a religion quite close to home. It seemed perfect.

But reading it was a different experience. For every genuinely enlightening idea, for every penetrating insight, for every interesting fact in these pages, were equal parts frustration and—to be perfectly honest—alarm. I found myself scribbling notes in every free corner of the pages (something I rarely do), pouring out my exasperation at a good book that could have been much, much better.

I will start with the positives. Luhrmann is a skillful and clear writer, if a bit pedestrian (but perhaps I thought this because I was reading this book side-by-side with Swann's Way). In the best anthropological tradition, Luhrmann is a master of the anecdote—pulling out little moments from her fieldwork to exemplify her points. She’s also done her homework, making references to the great theologians, philosophers, and psychologists of the past.

Luhrmann is also very versatile. She makes some subtle philosophical points, conducts psychological tests, spends hours doing in-depth fieldwork, traces the history of the religious movement, and then pulls it all together in an enjoyable book. In summary, I think this is an excellent piece of scholarship, and a well-written work.

But now for my frustrations.

Luhrmann starts off the book by voicing the hope that she will help to “bridge the gap” between secular and religious perspectives in America. This is an admirable goal. And, it must be said, exposing yourself to different perspectives is one of the most difficult and rewarding experiences in this life. It builds empathy and wisdom.

Nevertheless, I think Luhrmann expects a bit too much. This is a result of what I will call the “anthropological promise.” This promise is, to put it bluntly, the idea that understanding necessarily leads to accepting. At first glance, this seems true. When people learn about different cultures, they are more accepting of said cultures. When you empathize with your partner, you better understand why they’re mad at you.

However, this promise doesn’t always hold true. Take this extreme example. If you investigate the causes that lead someone to commit murder, you are increasing your understanding of murderers. But this in no ways means that you condone murder.

To get round to this book, I had a similar reaction. Now that I better understand the Vineyard, I feel more antipathy to them than ever. I’m rather ashamed to admit this, but it’s true. In fact, the first day I read this book I was genuinely horrified. A large proportion of the population is apparently walking around with voices in their heads. Grown adults go on imaginary dates with God. People train themselves to regard their own thoughts as not their own. But the most frightening thing of all was that these people seemed to realize how absurd this was, they seemed to be reasonably intelligent, and still did these things.

Meanwhile, Luhrmann goes on cheerfully explaining this religion in a tone that makes you wonder whether she drank too much of the Kool-Aid herself. (In fact, after reading to the end, I think she did.) What bothered me is not that she didn’t criticize them, but that she seemed to condone them—that she thought the Vineyard Church was a really swell thing. Finally, after about 200 pages, she gets to a chapter entitled “But Are They Crazy?” and gets around to addressing these (to me) obvious and pressing questions.

In fact, Luhrmann comes across as almost entirely blind to the potential negatives of this practice. At the same time, she is so alive to its potential positives that she almost sounds like an advertisement. For example, she starts off by posing the question: “If you could believe in God, why wouldn’t you?” Then she merrily lists off the physical and psychological health benefits experienced by those of faith, as if God is a super-charged diet program.

This paragraph manages to encapsulate one of the most distasteful aspects of this religious practice: its profound selfishness. Later on in the book, Luhrmann reports that congregants pray for new red cars, for specific scores on their MCATS, and for nice haircuts. Luhrmann repeatedly emphasizes that people are attracted to this faith to feel better. The Vineyard actually strikes me as something closer to Freudian psychoanalysis than traditional Christianity.

Now, I’m all for people feeling better. But if you pray for a Cadillac and a perfect golf-swing then I think something is badly wrong. This faith is not inspiring people to go out and improve the world. It’s doing the exact opposite: encouraging them to shrink the world to the size of their own petty problems. (I am not a believer myself, but I think religion is at its best when it reminds people how small they are when compared with the vastness of the universe.)

But let me backtrack a little. If this book was simply a verbal trashing of this religion it would be useless garbage. All I wanted was a more neutral treatment, instead of the blatant promotion that Luhrmann seemed to be doing. Consider this passage:

The less obvious consequence that one should practice love, peace, and joy is that performing the emotion can become more important than its outcome. Feeding the homeless can seem more pressing than calculating when the homeless need food. Supporting the young mission team can feel more urgent than thinking about what the mission effort will do. And asserting a stance—abortion, pornography, stem cell research—can feel more necessary than analyzing the impact of the stance…

After this, I expected Luhrmann to perhaps say a few words about the potential negative repercussions that this kind of thinking might have in a democracy; after all, consequences are just as important as motivations, if not more so. Instead, this is how she ends the sentence: “… a difference of perspective that liberal observers sometimes fail to understand.”

When I read this I did a double-take. The problem is with those who try and think logically? Not with those who willfully do not? To quote the New York Times's excellent review of this book, "She passes over most evangelical's affirmation of the Bibles' infallibility as if it were of no concern to outsiders, a tradition comparable to avoiding shellfish. One wonders if she ever engaged her subjects in a lively conversation about gay marriage or evolution."

A related problem is a kind of calculated dishonesty on Luhrmann’s part, motivated by her not wanting to offend her Christian readers. She wants to have her cake and eat it too, which leads her into contradictions.

For example, Luhrmann includes some interesting and enlightening information on the psychological mechanisms behind out-of-body experiences, hearing voices, speaking in tongues, etc. In fact, it is in these parts of the book that she regains the scholarly distance that she so lacks in her anthropological descriptions. But she still insistently, intentionally, leaves the door open to supernatural explanations. For instance, after summing up some scientific research on out-of-body experiences, she concludes, “Does the soul really leave the body? Social science cannot answer that question.”

To me, this is a plain lie. In psychology, no such entity as a “soul” is held to exist, because there is no evidence for it. In fact, every shred of evidence suggests that there is no such thing, and that mental states are an epiphenomenon of the brain’s activity. So, no, social science cannot definitively rule out the possibility of a soul, but its existence seems unlikely.

This kind of calculated dishonesty carries on throughout the book. After every scientific explanation, she will throw a bone at the religious crowd, reassuring them that her model is compatible with the existence of God. That, to me, is the same as saying “tectonic activity is responsible for earthquakes—but hey, you never know, Godzilla might be involved too.” It is a scholar’s task to get to the truth using evidence and logic—not to make people happy or protect their feelings.

All of these frustrations aside, I still think that this is a rewarding book. Despite her attempts to appease too wide an audience, Luhrmann is an excellent scholar. Several chapters (especially the last) are full to the brim with information, and make for entertaining reading. And just the fact that this book managed to provoke such a strong emotional reaction (as well as a too-long book review) from me speaks to her skill and intelligence. If Luhrmann has any fatal flaw, it is that she is too nice—which is as good a fatal flaw as anyone can ask for.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

When God Talks Back by T.M. Luhrmann is one of the most impressive nonfiction books I have read in some time. Luhrmann is articulate, dynamic and poetic, while effectively conveying the information expected from quality nonfiction.

This book is an in-depth look at the spiritual life of today's evangelical Protestants, particularly those in the Vineyard and similar churches, which have a decidedly experiential bent to their worship. Luhrmann chronicles the spiritual and social lives of this subculture with both compassion and dispassion, with belief and skepticism. The reader is left with a feeling of understanding and knowing these people deeply. A believer and a skeptic can read this book and both come away feeling vindicated; or, possibly, both might come away moved to change their minds; hopefully, both come away understanding each other better. This is the delicate balance which Luhrmann maintains throughout the book, bridging the gap between divergent worldviews.

Luhrmann gives us a history lesson to understand the context from which the Vineyard arose and out of which their worship style evolved. There is a brief overview of the movements we know in America as Evangelicalism, Fundamentalism, and Pentecostalism. I was surprised to learn of the key role which the "hippie movement" of the late-1960's played in the rise of congregations like the Vineyard. I won't go into detail here because the history is not the point of the book. Suffice to say, Luhrmann lays a proper foundation, then puts the reader right in the middle of the lives of people attending Vineyard churches in Chicago and Orange County.

She lives with these people, worships with them, prays with them, and also studies them. In the process she gains insight into what they experience and why they experience it. Luhrmann later sets up an experiment at Stanford to test the knowledge she gained and, in the process, she compiles evidence that a believer and skeptic can both look at and feel justified in their worldviews.

The People

I'm going to write this section as though you, the reader, are not a member of an experiential congregation like the Vineyard. If you are, you know what it's like. Particularly if you are someone who experiences the spiritual in a vivid, real manner, you're not going to care what the "science" says about your experiences—they're real to you and that's what matters. And that's as it should be. Neither Luhrmann nor I are trying to say that your experiences are not real or not valuable in your life. Indeed I envy your ability to blur the line between the spiritual and material. Moreover, Luhrmann's research suggests that someone like me may be able to develop your ability to some extent, and I might just try; after all, I've got nothing to lose. If, on the other hand, you are not a member of this type of congregation, and especially if you're not an evangelical Christian or even a Christian at all, you might be surprised at how different this subculture is from yours.

These are people you work with, live with, and see at the farmer's market. You probably have much in common with many of them—you root for the same teams, your kids attend the same school, you're on the same neighborhood watch board, and you share educational and career goals. You may vote for the same political candidates and volunteer at the same charity. However, at a fundamental level, they see the world in a different way than you, and they live a very different life.

For these people, the immaterial is as real and present as the material is for you. They see God in the room and they hear Him speak, just as you see and hear the person with whom you're on a romantic date. They feel the comfort of the Holy Spirit as tangibly as you feel your partner's arm around your shoulders. It's no accident that I compare their experience to romantic relationships, for that's precisely what it's like for them. When somebody first comes to know Christ in this sort of experiential manner, particularly if the person is a new Christian, he or she feels the heart-fluttering, breath-taking giddiness of a person who is falling in love. As faith progresses, i.e. matures, he or she experiences the more lasting, mature love of a married person, or as Luhrmann puts it: "love in the context of diapers and mortgage payments."

Luhrmann lived in this subculture for about four years, getting to know people intimately, watching their lives—spiritual and otherwise—progress, and compiling hundreds of hours of interviews. Luhrmann is a trained anthropologist and psychologist who studied her subjects from both viewpoints; but, more than that, she observed them as people. I found myself wondering if Luhrmann perhaps got too close, too personally involved. It must have taken great emotional fortitude on Luhrmann's part, for how could she not grow to love some of the people with whom she spent years discussing intimate details of their lives? And yet she knew she would have to write about them dispassionately when all was said and done. Perhaps she did get too close or even lost her objectivity. However, if that happened, it didn't show in the final product.

Other than being members of the Vineyard church, Luhrmann's subjects are a typical cross-section of American society—racially, financially, politically—and they decidedly are not crazy. Or, to be more precise, one or two of them might be psychotic or schizophrenic, but it's not because of their brand of experiential Christianity. Many of them can see and hear the divine as part of their daily prayer routine without being what we would think of as "crazy". Luhrmann is quite adamant that seeing and hearing God's response to one's prayers—even if that seeing and hearing is more than metaphorical—is not a sign of psychosis.

The Experience

To understand Luhrmann's research one needs to understand the term "sensory override." It's the term by which Luhrmann describes an experience of seeing and/or hearing something that is otherwise immaterial. By "seeing" or "hearing" I do not mean in the person's imagination—these things are not experienced "in the mind's eye"—but rather experienced as though there is an external stimulus present. The person is not stupid or crazy; he or she knows there is no material external stimulus present, but he or she is otherwise unable to distinguish between that experience and a "real" sight or sound. Luhrmann prefers to call these experiences sensory overrides rather than, say, hallucinations, because she wants a neutral term without negative connotations. Moreover, these sensory-override experiences are not psychotic hallucinations because they are relatively rare, they typically last only a few moments, and perhaps most importantly, these are positive experiences which make the person feel good and have a positive effect (as opposed to a debilitating effect) on their lives.

From her time spent among this community of experiential believers, Luhrmann reports two patterns, one behavioral and one psychological, that make a person more likely to report seeing or hearing God in a sensory-override manner.

The behavioral pattern is an intense, daily, and active prayer life. This prayer is intense insofar as it makes use of the person's imagination in a vivid, focused manner. They use their imaginations to picture the divine sitting with them, to picture themselves as participants in Bible stories, to picture the Spirit working in their church. With practice, they report increased ability to focus and concentrate in all areas of their lives, not just in prayer. This prayer is daily; in a sense they are addicted to prayer. They pray many times a day and often for an hour or more at a time. This prayer is also active in that the participants don't just sit back and wait for God. Make no mistake—they do sit back and wait for God to speak—but only after they've spoken to God about the most intimate details of their lives and the lives of others in their community. These people seek God and bring specific matters to His attention.

The psychological pattern involves something called "absorption." As I understand it, this measures a person's ability to blur the lines between the real and the imaginary, and to accept the imaginary—the immaterial—as material. Luhrmann administered a survey that was designed to measure a person's susceptibility to hypnosis. The survey questions target a person's capacity for absorption. Those who scored higher on the survey were much more likely to report sensory overrides than those who scored lower. Luhrmann notes that there were some very committed, sincere believers who practiced the type of intense prayer described above, but who never had a sensory-override experience. The people who did not have the sensory overrides apparently scored much lower on the absorption scale, which Luhrmann thinks may explain why God doesn't "speak" to them despite their committed prayer lives. Incidentally, the people who did not experience sensory overrides often were disappointed or discouraged by this fact, and they both envied and admired the people who were capable of having such experiences. Luhrmann implies that it's not their fault, that they just aren’t wired to have those experiences no matter hard they try, and while she didn't say so, I think she felt sorry for them.

The Test

Luhrmann formed a hypothesis: a person who is naturally high on the absorption scale can be trained to experience sensory overrides. She set up a test, which she ran at Stanford University over the course of a year, in order to try and prove or disprove her hypothesis.

Luhrmann recruited a couple hundred volunteers, all of them at least nominally Christian. She first put them through a variety of psychological tests and screenings. For one thing, she needed to know where each person scored on the absorption scale. For another, she needed to screen out people who were in need of genuine psychological help—therapy or medication—because they were having psychotic hallucinatory experiences.

Having scored and screened the volunteers, Luhrmann randomly gave each test subject one of three different kinds of packages. Each package contained an iPod with 30 recordings of 30-minutes each, along with instructions. The person was to go home and listen to the iPod for 30 minutes a day, for 30 days, then come back and repeat many of the same tests and screenings they had taken at the beginning.

First Test Group

The first package instructed the subject on how to engage in a type of passive prayer commonly called "centering prayer." The iPod recordings were 30 minutes of what Luhrmann calls "pink noise," meaning it's more than just white noise, perhaps the sounds of waves breaking on a beach or crickets in a forest. The purpose of the pink noise was to help the subject shut out the sights and sounds of the external world and focus inward. The subject picks a single word or short phrase, and simply repeats that phrase in his or her mind for the half hour, trying to focus all attention inward.

Centering prayer has its origins in monastic mysticism. My pastor, who is something of a mystic himself, teaches it at my parish, and I've tried it myself on several occasions. It is exceedingly difficult. It was probably hard enough for ancient monks living in a quiet monastery, and it's all the more so for someone in our modern culture, where our minds are accustomed to being bombarded with sights and sounds constantly. Try it sometime. Try to sit, even if only for five or ten minutes, not moving, breathing deeply, and ignoring everything around you, focusing inward on a single word of phrase. Perhaps just the word "Jesus" or "Spirit," or the phrase "God loves me" or "Jesus is Lord." It sounds easy in principle; in practice it's highly challenging.

Like me, most of the subjects in Luhrmann's test found centering prayer challenging and frustrating. Most didn't like it and felt like they progressed little over the 30 days. A few, however, enjoyed the peace it brought them and found themselves being able to focus a little better each day, until by the end they could sit for 30 minutes and focus inwardly, leaving all distractions outside.

Second Test Group

In the second package, the iPod contained recordings that Luhrmann created herself designed to help the subjects pray in a more active fashion. (Luhrmann dealt with test subjects only through intermediary assistants, so none of the subjects would recognize her voice.) These recordings guiding meditation on particular passages of scripture, perhaps a psalm one day, then a story from one of the gospels the next day. The subjects were encouraged to imagine themselves in the midst of the story or song or poem; they were to imagine all the little details of the world around them … the feeling of a blade of grass, or the crunch of gravel under their feet … the voices of the people in the story and the rough feel of ancient garments on their bodies. The recording encouraged the subjects to actively seek God's presence in the manner that many of the people whom Luhrmann had encountered in the Vineyard church did so.

This kind of prayer, which Luhrmann called "cataphatic" prayer, is also taught as a form of mystic practice in my parish. It's much easier for most people than centering prayer; certainly I find it easier. I still have trouble leaving behind all the distractions of daily life and focusing inward, but at least the encouragement to imagine vivid sights, sounds, smells, etc. gives me something more tangible to focus on than a simple word or phrase. This kind of prayer develops one's ability to imagine vivid details and to focus on real or imaginary objects. After reading about the benefits of this kind of prayer in When God Talks Back, I'm actually feeling motivated to make room in my daily routine of kids, work, cooking, cleaning, exercising and all the other things in my life, even if only 15 minutes each morning, to give this a try. I want to try it for a couple of months and see if it really does help me with concentration and focus, two things that have been lacking in my life of late. And if it helps an agnostic like me get closer to God, well, then that would be fine, too.

Third Test Group

For the third set of packages, Luhrmann loaded the iPods with lectures on the gospels given by a seminary professor. Luhrmann insists these were very interesting lectures, easy for the layperson to understand, and something that would hold most people's attention. She didn't want the subjects to be bored. (Luhrmann notes, for the record, that she purchased 30 copies of the lectures for loading on the 30 iPods; apparently she was worried that an intellectual property attorney might read her book!) I haven't heard these lectures myself so I can't comment on them, but according to Luhrmann most of the subjects said they enjoyed the lectures very much.

The Data

After 30 days, the subjects returned to Stanford University and gave their iPods back to Luhrmann's team. The team gave the subjects the same battery of tests, questionnaires, and screenings, that they had before people listened to the iPods, so as to compare the results. They interviewed the subjects about their experiences listening to the iPods, in particular listening for evidence that people experienced sensory overrides.

The test group which experienced the most sensory overrides during their 30 days listening to the iPods was … drum roll please … the second group! This, as you might have guessed, is what Luhrmann hypothesized would happen. Moreover, the second group reported many more sensory override experiences than people in either of the other groups. The first group reported a few such experiences while, if I remember correctly, the third group did not report any. Furthermore, Luhrmann found the same correlation between high scores on the absorption scale and sensory overrides. The people who experienced the most sensory overrides were people who scored high on the absorption scale and were listening to the active-prayer recordings in the second package.

All of this seemed to confirm Luhrmann's hypothesis that someone who is naturally high-absorption—that is, someone who can easily blur the lines between the imaginary and the material, and who easily accepts the immaterial as real—can be trained to have more sensory override experiences, more sights and sounds of the divine.

The Conclusion

This book is what you make of it. You can draw any number of equally valid conclusions. If you're a believer, you'll say that Luhrmann documented the mechanism by which people can experience the divine directly. If you're a skeptic, you'll say that Luhrmann documented the mechanism by which human minds can become fooled into seeing what they think is the divine. Certainly her hypothesis appears to have been proven correct: people who are naturally higher on the absorption scale can be trained to experience sensory overrides which seem to the person like a divine presence. But that neither validates nor invalidates the experience itself. As Luhrmann points out, if God is real and he really speaks to people, it simply may be that some people are more attuned to him (higher absorption, more intense prayer life) than other people. Because God is, by definition, immaterial, it would take somebody with a developed ability to blur the lines between immaterial and material to see or hear him. That of course is just speculation on Luhrmann's part, but what it shows is that a skeptic can't use her research as proof that God doesn't speak to people any more than a believer could use her research has proof that God does speak to people. She has merely demonstrated the psychological mechanism by which the experiences happen. Whether the experiences are "real" is left for the reader to decide.

I have tried to faithfully summarize When God Talks Back in this review, but please keep in mind that there is much, much more in the book than I have the space to write about here. I have covered only a few things that stuck with me and hopefully captured the most salient points Luhrmann was trying to make. If you are at all interested in this subject or intrigued by what I wrote here, I strongly encourage you to pick up the book and read it yourself. The interviews with the Vineyard people alone are worth reading to get an understanding of how a growing segment of our society sees the world. There are pages and pages of rich, fascinating history, told from a combined anthropological and psychological point of view. There are Luhrmann's own musings, observations, and deductions about what she's seeing and hearing from people, what she really think is going on inside their heads and what they seem to be getting (or not getting) from their spiritual walk. There's a fascinating discussion of psychotic illness and how it compares to people who say they can hear God speak to them. Luhrmann also gives great insight into how the brain works and perceives the world. I could go on and on.

Finally, I don't want to end this review without saying something about Luhrmann's writing. She can write nonfiction that reads like a poetic, flowing narrative. I love her use of language and vocabulary to tell the story of the people she's studying. Her sentences are dynamic and encouraging; you forge ahead from one to the next until you've read half the book without realizing it.

I hope you enjoy this book as much as I did.

[Tom]

After listening to really interesting interview with author on Fresh Air yesterday, I decided to add this. I was impressed with how respectful and open-minded Luhrmann was in describing practices -- which some / many would probably find pretty unconventional, to say the least -- of Vineyard evangelicals and with how candid she was in discussing her own ambivalent spiritual leanings.


Update: 5.2.12 Interesting review from NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/boo...

[Karen Jean Martinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wanted to read this book because I do not at all understand charismatic Christianity, and rather than be off-put by its (to my eyes) obsessively present and dominating relationship with God (2 + 2 + Jesus = 4, but 2 + 2 is somehow impossible), I wanted to understand what it meant to those who practice it. Really, I wanted to understand how it could be so meaningful to them while appearing so foreign and false to me. This book is an excellent resource; it is thoughtful, well-researched, nuanced, and quite objective. I suspect that believers and non-believers can both view it as an honest, fair account of Evangelicalism - no easy feat in our polemicized contemporary moment. Written by an anthropologist who performed ethnographic research with two Vineyard churches in Chicago and Northern California, it blends history, observation, data-driven research, and personal accounts to explore the specific practices, general beliefs, struggles, and values of charismatic Christians.

One of the most interesting things, to me, is its treatment of the issue of doubt. Luhrmann posits that doubt becomes central to this form of religious belief - knowledge that there are doubters (those who do not believe), doubt instilled from the lack of intended results (e.g. I believe that God will give me all that I ask if I ask him in prayer; I pray and He does not give me what I ask for); and doubt that one is actually experiencing this personal and ever-present God ((and this is a paraphrase of an actual quote from one of the church members) was that God signaling to me or was it the burrito I ate for lunch?) - that doubt makes God more real than real. This explains a lot. Like how when you say to a believer that it has been proven that intercessory prayer does not work, they smile and say that that's because God is bigger than that. Or that any logical argument against the existence of God only strengthens their belief in the existence of God. In this form of Christianity, faith isn't just continued belief in the absence of proof; rather, it is continued belief when the reality of disproof seems to be punching you in the face.

This book helped me see the work that many Christians put into maintaining their faith and what they get out of it. Though I'll happily remain agnostic, I think it's important that we work to understand those who appear to be most different from us, and this book helps me to do that.

[Jesse Hayden · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I switched my major from English to anthropology during my sophomore year of college, I was drawn to the discipline’s emphasis on empathy. Using field notes, interviews, culture theory, and participant observation, anthropologists attempt to immerse themselves as fully as possible in the lived experience of the “other,” seeking first and foremost to understand. Over time, I fell in love with this approach and came to see it as a tool for empowering marginalized communities. But I never had the anthropologist’s gaze trained on me - on my community. Until now. And wow, is it a surreal experience!

Tanya Luhrmann introduces her in-depth study of American evangelicalism with something she calls “the problem of presence”: How is it that religious believers come to experience a God who cannot be seen, heard, or felt as a real, living relationship? The rest of her book explores her answers to that question. Lurhmann’s writing is erudite yet approachable, and her dedication to understanding her subjects is remarkable. She argues that her findings are compatible with both Christian and skeptical worldviews (in other words, they don’t prove or disprove the existence of the supernatural), and she’s eager to help both audiences see each other accurately - for skeptics to grasp how Christians can believe the things they do, and for Christians to grasp why skeptics might find their beliefs so incomprehensible.

As someone who left religious faith very recently, I’m still wrestling with lots of difficult questions about my many years in the church: Was any of it real? How could I have believed so ardently in realities that I now think are nonexistent? What do I make of “miraculous” occurrences, or experiences where God’s presence and voice felt undeniable? Luhrmann’s outsider perspective enabled me to see the community that raised me with fresh eyes, to reexamine the foundations of my former faith. This book is essential reading for believers and skeptics alike. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

[Matt M · Rating 3 out of 5]

The protestants are at it again!

Raises some interesting questions: how does doubt interplay with belief and practice? For the Christians of the Vineyard, shaken belief is reinforced by practice, and their practice reinforced by their belief. They exist in a constantly shifting relationship with God, as their prayers are or aren't answered they evolve their beliefs to continue to be able to survive in the face of their realities.

This idea links into their understanding of God, which has a distinct phenomenological character closely aligned with the conceptions of God present in Western Mysticism and also in Eastern Orthodoxy - very interesting to see them "come out the other end" per se. Really respect their refusal to force their understandings of God into language. Please somebody show them the Wikipedia page for Gnosticism.

[Lenka · Rating 2 out of 5]

I started to read this book expecting it will explain and help me understand why evangelicals act so 'crazy'. What it really did was to convince me that they really are crazy, and, what's worse, neither them nor the author is willing to admit it. Come on, you are walking around with a voice in your head that you named 'God', you set up romantic dates with him, ask him to help you choose your clothes....and you still think this is normal??? I was disgusted and horrified, especially by the fact that the church *trains* the people to be mentally ill: you can attend a program or buy a book which will teach you to regard some of your thoughts as 'God's' thoughts, even if you were perfectly normal in the first place.
However, everything would still be fine if the tone of the book was if not critical, at least neutral: this was like reading a book on schizophrenia by an author who cheers the patients on their delusions instead of trying to help them.

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 4 out of 5]

T.M. Luhrmann is a psychological anthropologist, and in this book she examines the growing movement of evangelical and charismatic Christianity, and specifically how practitioners come to experience God as someone with whom they can communicate on a daily basis through prayer and visualization. The information in this book is based upon observations made over a four year period during which the author was fully immersed in their prayer and worship activities at a very emotional and heart felt level. In a NPR interview she states:

"... I would say that I experienced God when I was at that church. What does that mean? I don't think I know. I don't think I can put words to that. I wouldn't call myself a Christian, but I did — through this practice of praying and thinking about the stories that were told in church."

The first six chapters describe how she entered into the activities of the churches, their histories, the people she met, the history of various types of meditation and prayer, and her many experiences and observations of the congregates with whom she associated.

I found Chapter Seven to be particularly interesting because in it the author subjects her field observations to controlled analytical tests to determine the relationship between personality and ability to be a "prayer warrior." These tests were performed after the four year period of her embedded involvement with the groups. However, while she was still participating with the groups she gave various psychological tests to participants of the prayer groups. Of the tests, the one she found most interesting was the Tellegen Aborption test. She used the results from that test to determine differing levels of absorption of the individuals in the group (i.e. their propensity to become absorbed in his/her mental imagery). These results were compared with how these subjects said they experienced prayer. It turned out that the more absorption statements they endorsed, the more likely they were to say that they experienced God "as a person" along with other extrasensory spiritual experiences.

(It's interesting to note that the Tellegen Absorption Scale was developed originally to determine a person's hypnotic susceptibility. It's also interesting to note that absorption is a character trait or disposition for having moments of total attention that somehow completely engage all of one's attentional resources--perceptual, imaginative, conceptual, even the way one holds and moves one's body.)

From these observations about absorption scores, she developed a hypothesis for an experiment:

"... that when people believe that God will speak to them through their senses, when they have a propensity for absorption, and when they are trained in absorption by the practice of prayer, these people will report what prayer experts report: internal sensory experiences with sharper mental imagery and more sensory override (sensory experience in the absence of sensory stimuli)."

In order to test her hypothesis she advertised publicly for volunteers (they were paid a small stipend for participation) to be test subjects in what she called the Spiritual Disciplines Project. The test subjects were randomly assigned to one of three spiritual disciplines: centering prayer (an apophatic condition); guided imagination of the Gospels (a kataphatic condition); and an intellectual exploration of the Gospels (the study condition). The volunteers (128 individuals) were given various psychological tests before and after the 30 day test period.

At the end of the test period those who had done the kataphatic practices had scores on the subjective measurers of mental imagery vividness that were significantly higher, compared to their initial scores, than those in the study group. Those in the apophatic group also increased their scores more than the study group, but not nearly as much as the kataphatic group. (She notes that apophatic meditation is a difficult skill, and thirty days is probably not enough time to develop the skill.) In general the test results supported her hypothesis. The author refers to the use of this relationship between training/practice and the learning to hear God speak as "new theory of mind" which I guess is the label given by a psychologist to what some religious people call spiritual growth.

On the issue of the reality of God:

"None of these observations explains the ultimate cause of the voice someone hears ... . This account of absorption training is fully compatible with both secular and supernaturalist understandings of God. To a believer, this account of absorption speaks to the problem of why, if God is always speaking, not everyone can hear, and it suggests what the church might do to help those who struggle. To a skeptic, it explains why the believer heard a thought in the mind as if it were external. But the emphasis on skill--on the way we train our attention--should change the way both Christians and non-Christians think about what makes them different from one another." (p.223)

Chapter 8 explores the relationship between spirituality and mental illness. The sensory override (i.e. hearing/feeling/seeing God) often reported by the deeply spiritual people has some symptoms in common with the hallucinations that define a diagnosis of psychosis. However, the author points out there are usually many differences, and generally speaking most who experience spiritual encounters cannot be diagnosed as mentally ill. The author sites studies that indicate that seeing visions or hearing voices from no apparent source and not necessarily in any religious context is more common in the general public than is commonly thought. However, she goes on to discuss some situations she observed where mental illness and spiritualism did overlap. One story that I found deplorable was that of a woman diagnosed as bipolar being exorcized to remove demons. (The exorcism did not lead to a successful result.)

Chapter 9 discusses how this charismatic faith community deals with the issue of theodicy (i.e. why bad things happen). It would appear to an outside observer that it should be a problem for them because they emphasize that God answers prayers. They even go so far as to say that prayer requests should be specific (i.e. don't just ask for a car, ask for a red car). Needless to say, many of these prayers do not result in delivery of the requested items. Against all logic, this cognitive dissidence results in increased faithfulness to the belief system. The author dedicates over thirty pages of the book trying to explain why. I'll try to summarize it with these two reasons: (1) Their relationship with God is an emotional comfort, not a logical construct, and (2) If they reject God they'll be rejecting the emotionally supportive faith community, (i.e. their closest friends).

Chapter 10 summarizes the book by discussing the dilemma faced by these believers when talking to non-believers about their being able to have conversations with God. They know they are perceived by others as fooling themselves by talking to themselves and calling it talking to God. But they perceive this as part of the tension of living their faith, of "bridging the gap" between the world that is imagined and the world of what is real.

The description of the observed and studied congregates provided by the author makes them appear completely apolitical. There is no mention of any interest on their part in secular politics. When the news media uses the term "Christian Evangelicals" the stereotype that comes to the minds of most people is that this is a group that generally identifies with politically conservative causes. (I know there are exceptions; I'm talking generalities here.) If this group that was studied by the author is indeed apolitical, then they do not match this stereotypical image. But the author doesn't address this point at all, so it may be that she's ignoring the issue. If the term "American Evangelical" is going to be included in the subtitle of the book, it seems the author could have either addressed the issue or explained why she didn't.

The group that was studied by the author goes by the name "Vineyard Christian Fellowship." Its origins seem to have come out of the hippie Jesus freak movement of the 60s. They emphasize a charismatic and emotional style of worship that is generally associated with the Pentecostal Church. It is possible that they don't match the previously mentioned stereotype of American Evangelicals because of their history and roots.

The end of the book includes 37 pages of Notes, 21 pages of Bibliographic Notes, 26 pages of Bibliography, and 17 pages of Index. I guess that qualifies it as academic literature. However, it was easy to read (unlike some academic writing), and it should hold the interests of readers who are interested in the subject. Others will find the narrative verbose and containing too many anecdotal stories.

This is the author's fourth book. T.M. Luhrmann has previously written books about modern-day witches, psychiatrists and the Parsis community in India. She is now a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University.

Here's a link to an article by T.M. Luhrmann that was published in "The American Scholar" magazine:
http://theamericanscholar.org/living-...

Some other reviews of this book are listed below:

NPR's Fresh Air interview:
This interview was originally broadcast on Fresh Air on March 26, 2012:
http://www.npr.org/2012/11/16/1652708...

The New Yorker review:
Seeing and BelievingExperiences with evangelical congregations.by Joan Acocella April 2, 2012
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics...

NYT's Review By MOLLY WORTHEN Published: April 27, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/boo...

When God Talks Back by T.M. Luhrmann, Review by Caleb Maskell
Published in Books and Culture (July-August 2012)
http://www.scribd.com/doc/100378810/R...

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

I couldn’t help being mildly startled that this book’s dedication reads “for Richard.” Though the book wasn’t exactly world-upending in my personal journey, I’m probably better for having read it.

My broad takeaway: Here’s an author trying to talk about religious (specifically evangelical pentecostal) experience from a neutral point of view, as something that may be true or may be false, and certainly something that a reasonable person could believe.

Luhrmann’s thesis seems to be something like: God becomes real to people (even overwhelmingly skeptical moderns) as they train themselves to hear from God through prayer, everyday occurrences, introspective discernment, and even a reasonable use of imagination.

Towards the end of the book Luhrmann’s style changes, culminating in two paragraphs of gigantic beauty, as she shares her experience of opening herself to these beliefs. I share them below because in my current personal journey this is the most valuable part of the book.

“And there is another factor that shapes the way the individual experiences God. That is the real presence of the divine. I have said that I do not presume to know ultimate reality. But it is also true that through the process of this journey, in my own way I have come to know God. I do not know what to make of this knowing. I would not call myself a Christian, but I find myself defending Christianity. I do not think of myself as believing in a God who sits out there, as real as a doorpost, but I have experienced what I believe the Gospels mean by joy. I watched people cry in services, and eventually I would cry in services too, and it seemed to me that I cried the way I sometimes wink back tears at children's books, at the promise of simple joy in a messy world. I began to pray regularly, under the tutelage of a spiritual director, and I began to understand parts of the church teaching not just as so many intellectual doctrinal commitments but as having an emotional logic of their own. I remember the morning it dawned on me that the concept of redemption from sin is important, for example, because we cannot really trust that we are loved until we know that we are loved even with our faults. It was (as my spiritual director put it like believing— really, deeply, believing; believing "in my heart" —that I did not need to lose those ten pounds I always thought I needed to lose before I would be truly lovable. This is, perhaps, not exactly what Paul had in mind, but he would have agreed that unconditional love is hard to understand and that, once grasped, it changes whatever else you thought you understood. It changed me. I came to call my own experience of joy and love, with respect to C. S. Lewis, my furry lion problem.
“In the end, this is the story of the uncertainty of our senses, and the complexity of our minds and world. There is so little we know, so much we take on trust. In a way more fundamental than we dare to appreciate, we each must make our own judgments about what is truly real, and there are no guarantees, for what is, is always cloaked in mystery. On the edge of night, when you can hear the surf crash against the distant shore, and see a white horse upon a silver hill, you reach to touch it, and it is gone.”

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This took me a long time to read, mostly because having the deepest held beliefs of the first half of my life explained in completely rational psychological terms was....disconcerting.

This book will be very interesting to you if you find the evangelical christian cult fascinating, and if you don't it will not be for you.

[Kaylin Verbrugge]

I hate the cover of this book - sorry that you all have to see this.

But seriously— I’m genuinely wrestling with how to make sense of Luhrmann’s presentation of evangelical spirituality. This book felt disorienting, in a needed way.

[Edvald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tanya Luhrmann does anthropology the way it’s meant to be done.

Perhaps a bit of a bold statement but I stand by it. Luhrmann conducted ethnographic fieldwork in two Vineyard congregations – Vineyard being a charismatic evangelical movement. She went to their services, participated in prayer groups, interviewed the congregants, and prayed as they did. As a psychological anthropologist, she was interested in how people started thinking in new ways as they practice spirituality. Because of this, she also conducted a psychological experiment. There she and the team studied how the sensory perceptions of evangelical Christians changed in response to different prayer techniques.

Luhrmann’s findings are absolutely fascinating. I won’t go too much into detail, but the essence is that contrary to popular belief, the religiosity of theologically conservative Christians is not the preserved beliefs of the past but instead strikingly modern. The intensely personal relationship Vineyard congregants have with God, where they experience Him as present, sometimes physically present, has become popular because doubt is so widespread – not in spite of this.

Tanya Luhrmann is also one of the most readable anthropologists out there. If you’re looking for a riveting nonfiction read, she might come off as too academic, but for an academic book, it’s funny and explains everything in depth with clarity without ever being condescending. Definitely a good read for anyone interested in how religion develops in modern societies!

[Laura Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book exemplifies excellent scholarship perfectly tailored for any thoughtful individual outside Tanya’s discipline (or outside academia altogether). At times it reads with the captivating quality of a good novel. And besides being an incredible writer (honestly, HOW did she learn to write academically so... well, un-academically??), Luhrmann manages to convey a deep sense of respect for charismatic evangelicals while maintaining her clear position as an outsider to the evangelical community. I expected to be discouraged by this book, but the opposite was true. Both my understanding of my own faith and of Americans who don’t share that faith were deepened. I’d recommend WGTB to anyone.

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 4 out of 5]

T.M. Luhrmann's "When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God" is a fascinating, in-depth look at the spiritual lives of Christians and how they hear and experience God in their lives. However, the subtitle is too bold. Luhrmann's study is more a study on charismatic Christians (many of whom ARE evangelical), particularly those who are members of the Vineyard, but there are many different streams of evangelicalism. There will be SOME similarities between charismatic Christians and other types of evangelicals, but I expect this study would have turned out quite differently if the congregations studied had been Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York or North Point Community Church in Atlanta. Charismatic Christians tend to focus more on experience than doctrine.

Luhrmann, an anthropologist, focuses a lot on the psychology of charismatic Christians. She notes how the explosion of psychotherapy in the countercultural 1960s gradually entered into American Christianity and how the emphasis on experience has affected this stream of Christianity. God is a God of unconditional love, always present, vulnerable and human and a "buddy," a vast departure from the wrathful God of previous centuries (p. 35). Now, worship songs are not "ABOUT God, but TO God, directly to him in the second person, and with unbridled yearning," with an almost sexual intensity (p. 5). Later she discusses whether or not these charismatic Christians are "crazy" (chapter 8) and in the following chapter she notes that charismatic Christianity (much like ALL streams of Christianity), doesn't offer a satisfying answer to theodicy but instead "They care about transforming their suffering, not about explaining why suffering persists. Their faith is practical, not philosophical. Odd as it may seem to a skeptical observer, it can help to have small, specific prayers go wrong" (p. 299). Believers reinterpret when prayers do not go the way they want through the lens of "spiritual maturity" and insist that if they didn't get that promotion or that relationship, it's because God has something better in mind (p. 274).

Charismatic prayer is also highly imaginative and, in a perhaps unexpected twist, draws deeply from the wells of Ignatian prayer. Believers are encouraged to "pretend" as if they are in biblical scenes; for instance, they imagine themselves listening to Jesus by the Sea of Galilee - what do they smell, what do they see, what is Jesus' appearance? This use of Ignatian prayer demonstrates an openness to ecumenical spirituality that is still not present among many evangelicals. But Luhrmann also points out that "Catholics seem to see more often; evangelicals hear" (p. 184). This makes sense as Roman Catholicism is a more "material" religion with its icons, rosary beads, crucifixes, etc...(see Robert Orsi's "History and Presence" for a study of Catholicism that I think complement's Luhrmann's study on charismatic Christianity). Charismatics train their senses to better experience God, often using "props" to help them (p. 184). The process of absorption is central to charismatic spirituality and allows them to experience what they perceive in their mind as more real than what they experience in this world (p. 201).

Along the way, Luhrmann interviews many individuals and analyzes their responses to her questions about their spiritual lives. She herself participated in a small group and had spiritual direction. Luhrmann also delves into history, in particular chronicling the story of the Jesus People of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Near the very end of the book, on page 324, she seems to suggest that modern excessive individualism has provided the fertile grounds for which this intense, personal, "God-and-me" spirituality could develop in the first place. She follows Robert Putnam in noting that North American society lacks the strong communal bonds it once had in the past. But I'm a bit confused by this as churches are one of the few places were these communal bonds ACTUALLY EXIST AND ARE REINFORCED. Even throughout the book it's clear that charismatic Christianity is lived in community, whether that's through the Sunday worship or through small group participation.

I thought this book could have been a bit shorter. As well, Luhrmann's preaching to the converted (literally, though I'm not a charismatic Christian). She writes well, fairly, even sympathetically, and I can see this as a powerful social-science apologetic and explanation of charismatic Christianity to non-Christians. This is a fantastic study of "lived religion." There are already many other excellent reviews of this book on Goodreads that I commend as more detailed reviews of this book.

[john callahan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book to be entirely fascinating. I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in the history, anthropology, or psychology of religion.

I have heard many people say that, after they prayed about some problem they had or decision they had, God told them what to do. I wondered what they really meant. This book addresses the psychology and anthropology of that experience.

In this book, T. M. Luhrmann, a professor of anthropology at Stanford University, discusses the experience of members of the Vineyard, an evangelical and pentecostal Christian group whose members, like many evangelicals, regularly experience hearing the voice of God. (There are approximately 1500 Vineyard congregations worldwide.)

She spent more than two years of fieldwork with a congregation in Chicago and in California (near Stanford), and intensively interviewed many members of the group.

She describes at great length the practices of the groups that allow them to "hear" God's voice. This involves particular varieties of Bible reading, of prayer practices, and of make-believe. The technical term for the Bible reading is called inductive reading (trying to apply a particular passage to one's own everyday life). They practice prayer as taught by Ignatius of Loyola (a CATHOLIC saint [!] and founder of the Jesuit order [!]), which involves imagining being present at events from the Gospels. They also practice a sort of make believe, in which they imagine having dinner with Jesus, for example, or sitting next to Jesus on a park bench and conversing with him.

These practices allow them to identify a voice in their minds as being from God. Many of them have other religious experiences, such as visions. The group's practices and beliefs allow them to accept an epistemology that identifies the origins of these experiences as being from God.

Of course, the epistemology is exclusive to the group and others like it. She explains how they develop the ability to hear God's voice, but their experiences are entirely subjective.

The author conducted an investigation with volunteers from California who were not members of the Vineyard. Some of the volunteers studied doctrine, while others devoted time to the religious practices of the Vineyard congregations. She determined that the practices of the Vineyard congregations would tend to make people accept the religious experiences that members of the Vineyard experience.

The author is a specialist in psychological anthropology, which involves studying the psychology of groups. I am not doing justice to the depth of her analysis.

The book provides fascinating information about the history of the Vineyard, which goes back to the days of the hippie "Jesus People" movement of the late 1960s/early 1970s. The Vineyard originated in a pentecostal congregation called the Calvary Chapel, that grew incredibly rapidly when its conservative pastor began to welcome the hippie Christians into his church. Eventually, the Vineyard grew out of a split with the Calvary Chapel.

The book also discusses the fascinating career of Lonnie Frisbee, who turned to Christianity during several acid trips, and who was the greatest hippie evangelist of his day. (For more on him, his rise and his terrible fall, rent the 2007 Emmy-nominated documentary "Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher.")

The author shows great respect and humanity to the members of the Vineyard, even though she writes that she is not a Christian.

If you read the book, I recommend that you read the bibliographical essay at the end of the book, which provides more perspective on the issues that the author addresses.

[David Crumm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Explaining Why So Many Christians Pray So Vividly

It’s easy to mistake this new book by Dr. Tanya Luhrmann, an anthropologist with training in psychology as well, for a book that tries to “explain away” religious experiences. She spent four years researching men and women in congregations that could be described as evangelical or Pentecostal. She was looking closely at the reasons these people develop such vivid, expressive prayer lives. How do they come to feel God is so alive in their relationships each day?

Read the entire book to understand the breadth and many nuances of her research, but the bottom line is this: For various reasons, people decide to train themselves on a daily basis to become more attuned to God. After diligent attention to this training, over time, their senses and their minds do indeed pick up convincing assurances of God. They might even pick up actual messages from God.

Is Tanya trying to argue that her research proves that God is real? No, she pointedly argues that the evidence in her book should not be used either to prove God’s existence, or to disprove it. The New Yorker magazine in its review underlines the importance of her research. This is scholarly work that most writers would never touch, the New Yorker reviewer concludes. And, for that, Luhrmann deserves thanks.

I read this book and am recommending it to readers in the same season that I am recommending a new collection of the greatest works by Christian D. Larson, “The Optimist Creed.” That’s relevant to this review because, if you are drawn to Luhrmann’s work, you should be aware of the century-long tradition of such science-meets-religion efforts in book form. Christian Larson didn’t originate the idea. William James was delivering the first lectures that formed his classic, “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” in 1901.

Obviously, a century of advancement in science and a deeper awareness of the varieties of religious experience make Luhrmann’s stories and conclusions a far cry from works by Larson and James. But the basic notion of this twin inquiry connecting science and religion remains the same. Thank goodness for Dr. Tanya Luhrmann’s fresh approach and for this book, which is a highly readable story of her research.

The Optimist Creed
William James: The Varieties of Religious Experience

[Thing Two · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to the Fresh Air interview with the author and immediately put this book on my list. I wasn't disappointed.

http://www.npr.org/2012/03/26/1493949...

A trained psychological anthropologist, T.M. Luhrmann set out to answer three questions: How does God become real for people? How are sensible people able to believe in an invisible being who has a demonstratable effect on their lives? And how can they sustain that belief in the face of what skeptical observers think must be inevitable disconfirmation?

She spent a number of years studying a specific branch of the Evangelical Christian, those who attend The Vinings, and applied her skills as an anthropologist (without ever hiding that fact from her subjects) to collect and analyze her data. She presents her findings well documented.

As a life-long Christian, I learned a number of things from Luhrmann. I learned those who interpret Scripture literally are newcomers to the arena, having come into favor within the past 100 years in the anti-intellectualism movement; that the Summer of Love in 1967 did more than just spread sexually transmitted diseases and drug addiction, but peace, love, and Jesus; and that by Luhrmann's definition, I am not an Evangelical.

I found this book fascinating. I've seen a few reviewers complaining the material was presented in a boring manor, but I found it the exact opposite. She doesn't ever try to sugar-coat the negatives, nor accentuate the positives. She simply presents her findings in a clear and easy-to-read fashion.

She can't and doesn't attempt to prove the existence of God, but when asked why people believe, she asks, "why wouldn't you? There is good evidence that those who believe in a loving God have happier lives."

I'm all for being happy.

[Braden Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who has grown up in evangelical/Charismatic churches, I think Luhrmann has been both generous in her analyses and also insightful into the danger and power that Charismatic prayer practices have on the mind. She comes as an anthropologist looking from a psychological perspective at multiple Vineyard churches in America, her findings are fruitful for me as a post-Charismatic. I would recommend this book to anyone who has wrestled with supernatural experiences, who has been taught to "hear God's voice," or who is just interested in seeing the inner mental life of a Charismatic Christian. What I love about Luhrmann's book most though, is that she does not describe Charismatics as mentally ill, nor does she think that they are crazy. Rather, they have the ability to sharpen their mental imagination in such a way as to see the world in a more beautiful and hopeful lens, but also the potential to be led into dark cognitive dissonance and border-line psychological trauma when it comes to praying against demons. No matter what, the book will make you think about what prayer does to humans.

[Joy Matteson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was incredible. Regardless of your religious or faith affiliation, you should read this book. Luhrmann is an incredibly talented anthropologist and writer, a feat that is probably not mutually exclusive.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Knowing God involves training, and it involves interpretation. Each faith - to some extent, each church - forms its own culture, its own way of seeing the world, and as people acquire the knowledge and the practices through which they come to know that God, the most intimate aspects of the way they experience their everyday world change. Those who learn to take God seriously do not simply interpret the world differently from those who have not done so. They have different evidence for what is true. In some deep and fundamental way, as a result of their practices, they live in different worlds."

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Second read much less satisfying than the first. Luhrmann excels at painting a (possible) coherent psychological picture of charismatic Christian prayer life. Her interview data and psychological takes are extremely valuable. Her narrative is at times witty and charming. For those reasons, it is a book I will come back to for ideas and sources. For instance, it is quite valuable to know and read examples of the spiritual and psychological work required to be able to "hear" from God on any kind of regular basis. The process by which Vineyard Christians are able to "hear" from God so transparently is Luhrmann's triumph. That insight saves the book from its many faults.

The content of Luhrmann's book suggests that she is somewhat uninitiated to not only the academic discourse of evangelical studies, but to the diversity of the landscape of American evangelicalism on the ground in twenty-first century America. A couple of times, for instance, Luhrmann hints that the subjects of her study--which is limited to Vineyard charismatic evangelical Christians--are not a perfect stand-in for American evangelicals as a whole. But throughout most of her narrative, she fails to make any distinction between "evangelical" and "charismatic." Her lack of proper explanation between "evangelical" and "fundamentalist" (she only hints at this in the final chapter) similarly functions as a sloppy elision between two things that are very much not equivalents, even if it is not entirely obvious to non-evangelical, non-fundamentalist observers what the differences are.

The main consequence of these mistakes and mistaken elisions, I think, is to perpetuate the silly overgeneralization that all evangelicals are in fact charismatics, in this case projecting her findings-- many of which are quite worth reading--about Vineyard Christian Fellowship (specific type of charismatic, even) evangelicals out to the entire massive demographic of "evangelicals." Stanford-level academics should be held to a higher standard of not contributing to false monoliths, though this academic practice is, unfortunately, certainly more widely permitted than usual when evangelicals and fundamentalists are the subject. Obfuscating the diversity of a group as widely constituted as American evangelicals frustrates, if not totally prevents, full understanding of evangelicals. Clearly, if you have been paying attention to national political or religious discourse in the United States even occasionally in the last 4 years, understanding, particularly between academics, the left generally, and evangelicals is something we sorely need. Luhrmann's analysis is not very political, but the act of creating a monolith out of evangelicals implicitly renders them not important enough for complexity.

Moreover, Luhrmann does not succeed here in the very tricky work of ethnographic narrative voice. No doubt many of her Vineyard subjects would acknowledge elements of child-likeness in their prayer practices and other spiritual habits. They absolutely can be campy. I do not wish to refute the connections Luhrmann sees between charismatic prayer practices and the psychology of developing children, either, though it should be obvious that making such connections risks creating a mood of condescension. Luhrmann does not effectively monitor or even display much consciousness of such a mood, but fans it into a dominant feature of her narrative. Throughout, Luhrmann comes across as condescending towards the people with whom she no doubt shared much of her life while studying and participating in Vineyard congregations in Chicago and in Bay Area for a few years. This caused a classmate of mine to ask whether it is possible to conduct anthropological work without condescension...Certainly, Luhrmann displays a great deal of humanity, compassion, and relational openness to her participants. But the condescension pervading her accounts of them is hard to read, and disappointing given that many of her readers may already be dismissive of Christians or evangelicals or charismatics already.

[Hannah Notess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone who wants a better understanding of American Evangelicalism should read this book; it's wonderful. Although her fieldwork is done in a Vineyard church, so it's focused mostly on the charismatic strain of evangelicalism, that strain is so influential in the broader evangelical movement - particularly through music and practices of spirituality - that I think it's really worth a good look.

There's something really refreshing to me about talking about spiritual practices in the academic languages of psychology and anthropology – maybe because I find oftentimes the way other Christians talk about their spiritual experiences confusing. I'm not the type of person who hears God all the time, so oftentimes I feel like they're talking right past me.

What Luhrmann finds: Spiritual disciplines and prayer practices really do change the mind and open it to experiences of God. Maybe that could even happen for someone like me.

[Naomi · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a christian Unitarian Universalist who has a strong personal prayer life, I was intrigued by Luhrmann's research. I certainly recommend this book to its intended audience - rationalists who are perplexed why and how other seemingly rational and smart people can have deep mystical prayer lives. My own experiences resonate with many of Luhrmann's insights, including the way mystical experience thrives in a doubting and critical world.

For those seeking greater mystical communion, there are other texts to read, and it is not Luhrmann's project to invite the seeker down that path. But the reader is given a well-researched anthropological study and many reflecting points for the mysticism resistant.

[aberamentho · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a compelling and empathetic anthropological inquiry into the intimate relationship American evangelical Christians, particularly those in the Vineyard movement, cultivate with a personal, present God. Balancing the tools of psychological anthropology, ethnography, and cognitive science, Luhrmann explores not just what evangelicals believe, but how they come to experience those beliefs as real.

At the heart of the book is the idea that prayer and imaginative engagement shape a felt sense of divine presence. Evangelicals, Luhrmann argues, “train” themselves to hear God’s voice—not as a metaphor or symbol, but as an interactive, emotionally responsive being. This “theory of mind” directed toward God becomes an embodied, daily practice. What could easily become a cynical or reductionist account is instead handled with nuance: Luhrmann neither affirms nor dismisses the reality of these experiences, but asks how people learn to live as if God is present—and how convincing that as if can become.

The strength of the book lies in its rich ethnographic detail and the author’s generous, interpretive lens. Luhrmann’s subjects are not caricatures but complex individuals striving for meaning, comfort, and connection in a noisy world. Her engagement with the psychology of absorption and the techniques of inner attention (like imaginative prayer) bridges the spiritual and the cognitive without collapsing one into the other.

Still, the book is not without its limits. While Luhrmann carefully explains how belief becomes experience, some readers may feel the analysis occasionally veers into over-psychologization. The broader theological and sociopolitical contexts of evangelicalism—its relationship with power, authority, and social movements—are touched on only lightly. As a result, the book focuses more on inward spirituality than on outward implications.

That said, for anyone interested in lived religion, cognitive anthropology, or the emotional texture of faith, "When God Talks Back" is essential reading. It opens a window into a spiritual world that many outsiders find difficult to understand—and does so without condescension or sensationalism.


Luhrmann offers a remarkable, humane account of evangelical spirituality. While not exhaustive, it’s one of the most accessible and sensitive portraits of American religious experience available today.

[Summer Seeds · Rating 2 out of 5]

Let me preface with that I really did not like this book, as, I'm sure, is evident from my review below. I mean, honestly, the terrible analogies alone were enough to drive me insane. I'm not very religious, but, coming from a Catholic background, I found a large portion of this book to be absolutely horrifying. Anyway, this is what I had to write for my History of Christianity class.

****

Today, approximately seventy-nine percent of American adults believe in God or a “higher power.” Of these adults, nearly one-fourth are “born-again” Christians, a terminology used to describe the experience of attaining faith in Christ. It is categorized as a direct and personal relationship with God, when everything they have been taught as Christians suddenly becomes real for them. A study found that twenty-six percent of Americans claim they have been given a direct revelation from God. T.M. Luhrmann, a psychological anthropologist at Stanford, begins When God Talks Back by acknowledging these staggering statistics. Despite not being religious herself, Luhrmann sets out to explain to nonbelievers how “the mind allows God to come alive for people” and why a “reasonable person could choose to become and remain this kind of Christian” (Luhrmann xvi). It is an anthropological study of “the American Evangelical relationship with God” which aims to speak to both lay and academic audiences alike.

Luhrmann spent four years as a full-time member of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, a movement rooted in charismatic renewal and historic Evangelicalism. The majority of the members of the Vineyard are middle class, college-educated, white, and moderate. Despite placing “a flamboyant emphasis on the direct experience of God,” they are neither Pentecostals nor are they simply conservative Christians (231). According to Luhrmann, for the members of the congregation, God is their best friend who loved them unconditionally.
These four years are split between two years in Chicago, Illinois and two years in a congregation in Palo Alto, California. During this time, she attended weekly church services at which she prayed, sang, and, at times, cried alongside the congregation. She even participated in smaller “house groups,” which were devoted to Bible readings and discussions emphasizing what the passages told them about God and his character.

Luhrmann did extensive field research and interviewed hundreds of congregants. Their stories were moving and humbling, but also ridiculous and entertaining. Some Vineyard women had a regular “date night” with Jesus where they would serve a nice dinner, set a place for Christ at the table, and chat. Others would ask God what to wear or whether or not they should get a haircut. And yet others begged for divine guidance.

Throughout the book, Luhrmann achieves a tone of objectivity. She leaves aside the question of the reality of God, and instead focuses on the congregants and their stories. Despite one or two minor quips, she avoids belittling what many of readers may feel are laughably illogical ways of interpreting common, everyday circumstances as divine messages from God. One woman, for example, looking for a sign, found God’s message in the full moon in the sky. It is an event that happens every month, but, for her, she knew it was God reassuring her. However, there is little sense of mysticism in the way Luhrmann writes about what she witnesses. She focuses heavily on the psychoanalytic and sociological explanations for people’s beliefs rather than with the theological or spiritual ones. Still, she comes off as largely sympathy, which is to be admired.

When God Talks Back had a few problems. One problem is the term “Evangelical” and how Luhrmann uses it through the text. Luhrmann seems to equate Evangelicalism with the Vineyard. The Vineyard, however, in unlike most Evangelical churches. At the beginning of the text, Luhrmann admits that “Evangelical” is hard to define, and occasionally she amends the word with “experiential Evangelical,” separating those with whom she prayed from what is considered typical Evangelicalism. Most of the book denotes its subjects simply as “American Evangelicals.” While it may be the case that the charismatic elements that define the Vineyard have become more common within mainstream Evangelicalism, her scope appears too narrow, as the two are clearly not the same.

The Vineyard congregation also does not seem to have any theology. Never in the text does Luhrmann talk about what the congregation actually believes or stands for. Politics and social standings are completely avoided. She, at one point, says that the Vineyard “people just didn’t worry about heresy. They worried about making God come alive for them” (92). She completely breezes past the assertion, to most Evangelical Christians, that the Bible is inerrant. Luhrmann seems to assert that the Vineyards, and thus Evangelicalism, is all about feeling and personal relationships with God and nothing about dogma or doctrine. However, religion is a matter of the both the head and heart. The book suffers for lack of attention to implications of the Vineyard’s beliefs, in my opinion. To understand belief, it is also important to understand the principles underlying that belief.

Personally, I feel Luhrmann's main argument is not very compelling. She notes a certain uncertainty when believers talk about their spiritual experiences. More often than not the congregants preface their stories with apologies. Luhrmann concludes that the relationship that these Christians create with God is a kind of “psychological defense” against our culture’s disbelief. These Christians imagine God as “hyperreal” in order to “manage the doubts that surround them” (320). The experiences of this ultra-loving, best friend God is “not-real-but-more-than-real.” According to Luhrmann, it is a way of dealing with religious doubt that is less intellectual and more therapeutic in nature.

[Dan Glover · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. For a review, I would refer you to my friend, Alex Stroshine's review here on goodreads. For what this work is, it is really quite good (I debated giving it four stars). However, I read it concurrently with Hans Urs von Balthasar's work, Prayer, and although the books look at prayer from totally different perspectives (Luhrmann: sociological-psychological-scientific study from a strictly naturalistic, human perspective, trying to maintain strict neutrality about whether or not God actually exists vs. Balthasar: the most comprehensive theology of prayer I know of, written from a committed Christian perspective, steeped in Scripture, church tradition, doctrinal depth, immersed in liturgy and personal contemplation, considered from a "God's eye view" so to speak). Still, this is sympathetic and engaging, and some of her critiques of shallow, individualism within charismatic (and broader Evangelical) American Christianity are insightful.

[Justin Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

The subtitle of Tanya Luhrmann's When God Talks Back describes the book as an attempt to understand "the American Evangelical Relationship with God". Luhrmann's focus on "relationship with God" means that she is not trying to understand evangelicalism as a social-political movement or theological system, but as a particular way of being in the world, a theory of mind. Luhrmann is particularly interested in that section of evangelicalism that takes seriously the claim that Christianity is "a relationship, not a religion", people who are actually trying to cultivate a conversational relationship with a God who is inaccessible to the senses. What she gives us in the end is a phenomenology of Christian prayer.
It is fitting that she immerses herself in the Vineyard Church, a group known for its focus on the Holy Spirit, tangible signs of God's work, and above all, "intimacy with Jesus". Though the Vineyard Church is more doctrinally charismatic than most evangelical churches, I felt as though she could have been writing about any number of the churches that I've worked with, in and around during the last 12 years as a pastor and retreat speaker: Baptist, Presbyterian, , Evangelical Free Filipino, Nondenominational Korean, to name just a few.
Indeed, while reading Luhrmann's account, I often felt an ache in my stomach. Occasionally I felt patronized, but more often I felt known, as if I was reading my own story. I felt an ache because I am one of those who long for the tangible experience of God, one who has spent years trying to learn and lead people to apprehend God's unseen presence, one who longs for God far more often than I experience God. Yet I have had a handful of moments of what Luhrmann describes as sensory override, where God seems more-than-real, moments that have left me breathless. (Upon such breathless moments hang so many sermons, and my current academic pursuits!)
Luhrmann argues that evangelical Christianity is an attempt to develop a theory of mind wherein people are trained "to experience a part of their mind as the presence of God" (xxi). This is not a statement of ontology but of phenomenology. If God is supernatural, she argues, then surely his overtures would come within the natural human processes: "if God speaks, God's voice is heard through human minds constrained by their biology and shaped by their social community" (xxiv). The identification of God's presence and voice amidst the whir of everyday life then sets the stage for a conversational relationship with God, which Luhrmann understands through the rubric imaginative play. This kind of prayer requires the cultivation of imaginative absorption. Here I wish that Luhrmann was a bit more explicit about what theory of imagination she was working with (the Platonic fanciful imagination is much different, than Coleridge's generative imagination, or Merleau-Ponty's bodily imagination) though I suspect that the tension was intentional. The bottom line here is that a person must learn to relate to God "as if" God were a being in this world. The goal of the relationship is ultimately therapeutic: to experience God's unconditional love.
What is amazing about Luhrmann's outsider perspective is the way that she defends the evangelical theory of mind against cheap dismissals. This is particularly pronounced when she refutes the idea that evangelical spirituality is merely individualistic. While there is undoubtedly a (modern) individualism at work in evangelical spirituality, the worshipping community actually plays a critical, almost sacramental role in making the evangelical theory of mind tangible and believable. She writes: “It is the church that confirms that the invisible being is really present, and it is that church that reminds people week after week that the invisible being loves them, despite all the evidence of the dreary human world.” (131)
Luhrmann's work leaves me with many questions. She operates on the assumption that we are living in a disenchanted world, to use Charles Taylor's term, an "immanent frame". The self in modern times is private, buffered, no longer porous to unseen agencies as it was 500 years ago. I think she is right, and I wonder if the evangelicals in her story have found God outside of the immanent frame or within it. The answer to this has implications for how we conceive of the role of worship. Can we really rewire a social imaginary through worship? If so, how? Is our goal in worship to point people to a reality that exists on a different plane than their ordinary, immanent experience? Or is there a possibility of somehow alerting them to God's presence within the immanent frame, within the ordinary? And if we can, will that apprehension resemble what Luhrmann describes in this book?
Unquestionably, Luhrmann does not capture the whole story. Her focus is narrowly on "relationship with God" and thus fundamental markers of evangelicalism like conversion, theology, mission and historicity ("that which we have seen with our eyes and our hands have handled") are ignored. Yet I believe that she has thrown her dart very near the center. The strength of Luhrmann's work is its empathy and compassion; you get the sense that she really understands. If this is the case, it is because she has actually thrown herself headfirst into evangelical prayer practices and tried to learn how to pray. And yet, one wonders how it was possible for her to give herself wholly to prayer while also trying to analyze it as an anthropologist. As another reviewer put it (drawing from C.S. Lewis), it is "like looking through a window and at a window at the same time." I read the book wanting to flip to the final page to see if she had a conversion experience; when I arrived I found that though she does not call herself a Christian, indeed something like a conversion seems to have taken place.

[Jacob Hudgins · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was surprisingly excellent. Luhrmann embedded in the Vineyard church, a kind of charismatic, name-it-and-claim-it nondenominational group. She writes as an anthropologist, which gives her a unique outsider perspective on how churches promote spiritual growth. I found the book enlightening about how modern evangelicalism has shifted from learning proper teaching and practice to a powerful experience of God. This trend runs through much of popular evangelicalism today, but I wouldn’t have known how to label it.

The writing is excellent and engaging.

[Ellie · Rating 4 out of 5]

super interesting and rlly well written
lost a star bc reminds me too much of alevel rs x