Books - Seeing and Believing - Experiences with evangelical congregations

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/04/02/120402crbo_books_acocella


One person reported without irony that if you slow down the sound of a cricket you can hear it sing Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus.


The United States, as we know, is a very religious country, but the figures still have the power to amaze. Since 1996, according to Gallup polls, between thirty-five and forty-seven per cent of Americans have described themselves as “evangelical” or “born again”; two-thirds mostly or wholly believe that angels and devils are at work in the world. Given these figures, skeptics would do well to find out what is going on in evangelical churches, and that is what T. M. Luhrmann tries to explain in her new book, “When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God” (Knopf). Luhrmann is a well-qualified guide: an anthropologist specializing in esoteric faiths. Her dissertation was on witch-and-warlock cults in contemporary England. Later, she wrote a book on the Parsis, a Zoroastrian community in India. Her most recent book was the highly praised “Of Two Minds,” a study of psychiatric residents and their handling of patients who had visions, among other problems. Almost always, Luhrmann has written with sympathy, not scorn, for these convinced people.

Nevertheless, she is a scientist, and believes in evidence. She spent two years as a full-time member of an evangelical church in Chicago, and another two years in a congregation in Palo Alto. (Those are the cities where she was teaching during that period, first at the University of Chicago, then at Stanford.) Both churches were part of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, which came together in California in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, and now has about fifteen hundred congregations around the world. Most of the members of the churches that Luhrmann attended were white, middle class, college-educated, and centrist. They weren’t Pentecostals (that is, most of them didn’t speak in tongues or heal the sick). But neither were they just conservative Christians. In Luhrmann’s words, they placed “a flamboyant emphasis on the direct experience of God.” If you made contact with him, they believed, he would become your intimate, someone “who loves and cuddles you.”

How do you find this God? First, you train yourself to recognize the evidence of his operation in your life. One Vineyard parishioner, Augusta, described feeling “goosebumps and just warm all over and just very peaceful, and I know that he’s there.” Or if a thought pops into your head that’s not the kind of thought you normally have, and, above all, if it strangely matches something else in your recent experience, that is likely to be God speaking. Sarah, a member of the Palo Alto congregation, told Luhrmann that one morning, when she had finished her prayers, she went on sitting in her prayer chair and let her mind wander. She kept seeing a picture with boats in it. Then the phone rang. It was the pastor. She asked him why he was calling. “And he said, ‘I don’t know. I just felt like I was supposed to call you.’ And it clicked then, that the picture I had seen wasn’t a distraction from my prayers but was connected to my prayers, I told him about this picture that I’d gotten. And he told me . . . that several people had gotten the same picture, and that it was about Jesus with his hands on the wheel of a ship.”

In the second step, worshippers, when they recognize that God is with them, must learn to treat him like an intimate. This injunction, probably more than anything else in Luhrmann’s book, will puzzle readers who were raised in other religious traditions. The Vineyarders have no interest in God as a figure of majesty, or of judgment. They wear shorts and sneakers to church on Sunday. In Chicago, the service begins with “free time,” during which you needn’t sit down. You can dance or sway in the aisles, Luhrmann says, or have doughnuts and coffee from the snack table. Once you do sit down (you can bring your coffee with you), you hear a sermon augmented by a PowerPoint presentation.

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