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

"Luhrmann’s book is an anthropological study of a charismatic Christian community called the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, which started in California as part of the hippy scene. It was the church Bob Dylan joined. It pioneered a sort of neo-Pentecostal Christianity that believes in the power of the Holy Spirit to heal and perform miracles today. It inspired churches like Holy Trinity Brompton [HTB], in London, where I spent a year. Luhrmann’s main point is that we learn how to lose control. We learn how to access, interpret and integrate ecstatic experiences through our culture—or, in this case, through the subculture of charismatic Christianity. This is why it’s crucially important to live in a culture which has a place, or places, for ecstatic experiences. Otherwise these experiences happen, and people are just like ‘what the f*** was that?’ Or they happen to people in unsafe contexts, in abusive or exploitative cults or gangs. “These experiences happen, and people are just like ‘what the f*** was that?’” Luhrmann studies how charismatic Christians learn to encounter and experience God in their lives. And she realises they’re taught how to hear the voice of God. They’re taught to go into a contemplative state—a state of trance or absorption—in which they’re more open to the subliminal mind, and they’re taught to identify certain thoughts as messages from God. They’re also taught to imagine and sometimes visualise God, or Christ, as a figure of love, and then to engage in a deep personal relationship with Him. It’s an emotional and imaginative practice—God becomes more real with practice. One thing I noticed at HTB is it’s also very much a communal practice. How do you believe in a God-filled world when you’re in a disenchanted culture which hardly mentions God? You surround yourself with people who also believe in a God-filled world, and you constantly talk about God and all the amazing things He’s doing in people’s lives. You make it real in your words, your relationships, your acts. It’s a form of collective improvisation, a ‘let’s pretend’ game which then becomes ‘really real’ in people’s lives. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . When I was researching medieval mysticism, it reminded me of modern fan fiction. The mystic Margery Kempe, for example, reads up on the Bible and the tradition of female mystics, she becomes a huge fan and soaks her memory in the imaginative world of the Bible, and then she spontaneously starts imagining Jesus appearing to her and saying: ‘Margery, you are my favourite of all the mystics.’ And she writes her own book, tells her own story and adds it to that fan fiction universe. That’s the first autobiography in English, by the way. People have pretended that Jediism is a religion—kind of as a joke, but they kind of mean it as well. They’ll get Star Wars tattoos, memorise the films, buy the toys, go to conventions and dress up as their favourite characters. They may emulate the moral qualities of their heroes, ask themselves: ‘What would Yoda do?’ They may really believe in The Force as a theological concept. They will make the fictional world real in their lives. I think we all do this. We all shape our reality through our imagination and our expectations. Reality is a consensual hallucination. As the historian Yuval Noah Harari insists, we all exist in shared fictional worlds—capitalism is a fiction in which we become deeply absorbed, for example. “We all exist in shared fictional worlds—capitalism is a fiction in which we become deeply absorbed” The question is, are the imaginative universes we’re constructing and immersing ourselves in healthy and good for us, or not? Do they lead to flourishing? Do they lead to a better world? Do they predict or shape the future in useful ways? Of course, this raises the question of how do we morally evaluate different experiences of ecstasy. Kempe, for example, was widely considered an irritating oddball in her own time, because of her habit of howling with tears every time she thought of the crucifixion, which was often. I think we can follow William James and ask whether an ecstatic experience leads to increased well-being or flourishing for a person and their community. And also whether an ecstatic world-view is interesting, useful, beautiful. That’s quite hard to assess objectively! But there are some obvious cases where one could say, no, probably not—such as the Jonestown Massacre, or the Heaven’s Gate cult, in both of which the cult members killed themselves. They would say that their deaths did lead to flourishing, just in another dimension. Well, that’s where we get to the limit of the scientific method. But I’m fairly confident they’re wrong, that they were unfortunately taken for a ride by psychopath gurus. We need to balance our capacity for absorption with a capacity to say, wait a minute, are we giving our lives to a power-hungry, abusive lunatic?"