A reaction to secular marginalization of the "religious experience"
As I was sitting and thinking at one of my favorite coffee shops downtown, I happened upon a magazine. I don't typically like to read magazines, but I started flipping through this one (an issue of "The Week", from August 24th-31st, 2012) and my eye was attracted to an article cheekily named "Hearing the Voice of God -
Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, says Jill Wolfson, studies how evangelicals experience their connection to Jesus". My curiosity piqued, I started to read through the article. Apparently, Luhrmann decided to conduct some studies among a select group of evangelicals to "
[try] to understand as an outsider how an insider to this evangelical world was able to experience God as real and personal and intimate." Expecting that evangelicals would be shown to be merely some misguided "freak-show", I read on skeptically. Luhrmann focused on what she terms "theory of mind", meaning the way in which we as humans conceptualize our own minds and the minds of others. She went on to look specifically to prayer as an example of the way that evangelicals experience God. Although I don't usually like to quote paragraphs of other articles
en masse, this segment is essential in understanding the approach and agenda Luhrmann arrived at for this study.
"Luhrmann's provocative theory is that the church teaches those who pray to use their minds differently than they do in everyday life. They begin by holding conversations with God in their heads, modeled on the kind of chummy conversations they'd have with their best friends. As they talk to Him, tell Him about their problems, and imagine His wise counsel and loving response, they are training their thoughts, much as people use weights to train their muscles. The church encourages them to tune in to sounds, images, and feelings that are louder or more intense or more unfamiliar or more powerful - and to interpret these internal cues as the external voice of God."
The article then goes on to talk about a study that Lurhmann performed in this theory of mind. In a 2007 study, she had a group of randomly divided Christian volunteers split into two separate groups. One group listened to iPods with lectures on the gospels for a month, the other group listened to lectures on imagination-rich prayer for a month. "
Their recordings invited them to see, hear, and touch God in the mind's eye, to carry on a dialogue with Jesus." After the month of listening to the different content, she found that the second group "
... used mental imagery more readily and had somewhat better perceptual attention, and the reported more unusual sensory experience. In short, they attended to their inner experience more seriously, and that altered how real that experience became for them." This study supported one of the main affirmations of the article: namely, that evangelicals simply train their cognition to "participate with the divine".
Though not as militant as many similar articles these days on the 'religious experience', the article definitely does embrace some "freak show" techniques, with such wording and examples as "
Luhrmann attended Sunday church where members danced, swayed, cried, and raised their hands as a sign of surrender to God" and "
Members told her about having coffee with God, seeing angel wings, and getting God's advice on everything from job choice to what shampoo to buy." Evangelicals are shown in these examples to be emotional, irrational people, depending on the strength of some unknown force to even make choices as simple as shampoo. Almost worse, Christians are "patted on the head" as some sect of lovable, but misguided fools - simply reacting to stimuli that we have been trained to interpret as the divine. The experience of the Christian in prayer is effectively reduced to a system of cognition. Furthermore, our worldview is thus formed by thought and affections produced only by a function of our training. Evangelicals receive "religious" input, their training interprets this, and they engage in emotions and decision making as a result. They have, in effect, been shown as "Pavlov's Penitent" - a simple working of behaviorism.
As I finished the article, I couldn't help but have my thinking stimulated. This view of prayer, relationship with God, evangelical cognition - it all begs further thought. This view of Christian antics is quickly becoming the majority among the secular society in which we live. If we as Christ-followers are not attacked openly, we are very often marginalized and endured by those around us. Granted, we as Christians often do just that to our secular friends. However, blame-game aside, is this behavior correct?
With God being theorized by modern "scientific" studies as a chemical experience or as cognitive training, is it not important to examine these arguments? All of these studies rely upon one truth claim - everything that is knowable or real is accessible only through what we can see, hear, touch, examine, etc... The whole of modern Western society has espoused this extreme version of empiricism, from which they conduct these studies and form these viewpoints. What if, however, empiricism is at fault? What if, as I believe, the real extends beyond that which can be touched, smelt, tasted, seen, or heard? And what if, furthermore, the real is held together by an immaterial Person who gives life and meaning, substance and theory to all things living and dead, material and immaterial?
In the words of one of my favorite songs,
But our hearts tell a different story;
our hands feel a different pulse.
Something fathomless, deeper than our pride can dive;
numinous, higher than our hearts can rise,
transcendent, further than our thoughts can reach;
immanent, closer than the air we breathe.
("Treading Paper" by Thrice)
So, I've talked about what my thinking has exposed about Luhrmann's studies and theories, but what good is criticism without an alternative? It is useless. I propose that we participate with God not simply by training our minds to react to 'religious stimuli'. I propose that we are beings that are both material and immaterial, created by God for fellowship with Him. For those of us who have had immaterial, spiritual eyes given sight by the livening work of Christ, we engage the spiritual reality of Christ
in us when we pray, live, and think. There is nothing that we do that is not affected by this sight and participation with Christ who has partnered with us. There is a way that we participate in Him that is transcendent - a way that is not the direct of a cognitively knowable or empirically observable input. This way is not simply the result of a "function box" on top of our shoulders that takes in stimuli and vomits out religious responses.
I do wonder, though, if we as Christians give fodder to this prevalent theory. When I think of the examples from this article, I wonder if we as Christians are shirking the responsibility we have for acting as mature men and women in our transcendent participation. The concept of asking God which shampoo to use is simply repulsive to me! What do people think that God is - a "20 Question" game or some sort of faerie that you have to answer every trifling question? I wonder if we don't look for guidance "every step of the way" to a fault. Has He not placed His Spirit in us, enabling us for fruitful thinking and training us in wisdom and judgement? He has called us sons, dear brothers, friends, and future judges over weighty matters in times to come. What judge feels the need to ask his King which shampoo to buy? Outrageous. It's time for many evangelicals today to seek maturity and wisdom in addition to faith and childish "desperation". The youth heroism and fanatical obsession with "childlike faith" has in many ways distorted and destroyed the fulness of our identity in Christ as it was designed.
I wonder also if we are too flippant in the way we either participate, or assume we participate with God. Do we simply make prayers in the mode of
"the kind of chummy conversations [we]'d have with [our] best friends"? We have lost a reverence and an awe for God, my dear brothers and sisters. Yes, we have intimacy and vulnerability, but are we supposed to simply emote to God and vent all of the thoughts on our mind as they present themselves? Are we not told
"Be not rash with your
mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God
is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few"? (Ecclesiastes 5:2)
There is a multiplicity of voices in our world today seeking to attack and marginalize the way we participate with God. There are scads of evangelicals today that provide fodder for criticism and ridicule by their immaturity. There is an epic struggle between empiricism and the immaterial. Be thoughtful, my friends, and be consistent. Listen with patience, interpret with love, respond with insight.
"If anything means anything,
There must be something meant for us to be,
a song that we were made to sing.
There must be so much more than we can see."
("Treading Paper" Thrice)
