[00:00:00] STANLEY BRANDES:
Good afternoon, everybody. I’m Stanley Brandes. I’m a member of the Department of Anthropology here at Cal, and a chair, and the chair of the Foster Lectures Committee.
Along with the Graduate Council, we are pleased to present today Tanya Luhrmann, this year’s speaker in our lecture series. As a condition of this bequest, the Foster bequest, we’re obligated to tell you how the endowment supporting the Foster Lectures on the Immortality of the Soul came to UC Berkeley. It’s a story that exemplifies the many ways this campus is linked to the history of California and the Bay Area.
In 1928, Ms. Edith Swaybrook established the Foster Lectureship to honor the memory of Agnes A. Foster and Constantin E. A. Foster. Edith was a public school teacher in San Francisco for many years, and the teaching profession was, to her, an opportunity to develop true knowledge and love of the spiritual values of life in the young minds entrusted to her care. Edith’s beloved sister, Agnes A. Foster, shared her high ideals and hopes, as did Agnes’s husband, Constantin E. A. Foster.
A lawyer by profession, Foster was a man of high intellectual achievements and rare personal charm. Although he passed away at the age of 37, he had achieved an enviable place at the San Francisco Bar and was considered one of its most highly respected members. For several years prior to his death, Foster was a law partner of Alexander F. Morrison, one of the most prominent of San Francisco attorneys for whom our Morrison Memorial Library is named.
In her last days, Ms. Edith Swaybrook expressed her deep and abiding interest in spiritual life by creating this lecture series on the immortality of the soul, or similar spiritual topics. She believed that through the medium of a great university and the words of scholarly lecturers, she might bring new light upon a topic that has interested the world for centuries. Thank you, Edith Swaybrook.
Okay.
(applause)
That concludes the formal requirements of the donation of the endowment. And now about our distinguished lecturer. Tanya Luhrmann is a very well-known and influential anthropologist.
Her work focuses on the ways that objects without material presence come to seem real to people, and how ideas about the mind affect mental experience. Her previous studies have analyzed phenomena such as witchcraft, charismatic Christians, and psychiatrists. Her widely acclaimed third book, Of Two Minds, offered an ethnographic study of the American psychiatric community and examines how disciplinary and ideological pressures that accompany psychiatric training shape the experiences of psychiatrists and patients alike.
Of Two Minds was awarded the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing and the Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology. In her most recent book, When God Talks Back, Luhrmann looks at the ways in which practitioners within American evangelical Christian communities come to experience God as a being with whom they can engage in direct communication through acts of prayer and visualizations. When God Talks Back was named both a New York Times notable book and a Kirkus Reviews Book of the Year.
Tanya Luhrmann is Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department. She earned her BA in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University in 1981 and a PhD in Social Anthropology at Cambridge University in 1986. She previously taught at the University of California San Diego and the University of Chicago before joining the anthropology faculty of Stanford University in 2007.
She is a recipen– a recipient of fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Templeton Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and she’s been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Many of you might also know her through her past several years. She’s been an occasional op-ed contributor to the pages of the New York Times, where most of her work that I’ve read, anyway, has dealt with the evangelical Christian experience.
The title of today’s talk is The Quest for Heaven is Local: How Spiritual Experience is Shaped by Social Life. Please join me in welcoming Tanya Luhrmann.
(audience applauding)
[00:05:19] TANYA LUHRMANN:
Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here. So this is great.
I’m gonna present some new work to you, and I thank you for joining me on this journey. I’m beginning to understand what trying to begin, trying to make sense of the material that I’m coming to know. All right.
Let me begin with my usual caveat, which is that I’m gonna talk about God, but nothing that I say is an argument for or against God’s real reality. What puzzles me is that God is invisible. And so the question is, how do people come to feel confident of God’s existence?
About 10 years ago, I set out to understand the major shift in American spirituality since 1965, towards a more direct, immediate, and personal experience of God, arguably, a quarter of all Americans are involved in this kind of renewalist Christian spirituality, and I found myself doing research in a Vineyard Christian Fellowship. So there are about 600 of these churches in the country and thousands of more that are like them. These are sometimes called New Paradigm Protestant Christian Churches.
They combine a conservative social theology with a liberal social style. They’re more likely to meet in gyms than in churches. They’re likely to use a rock band rather than a choir.
They are evangelical, by which people typically mean that they see a personal relationship with Jesus as the only route to personal salvation, and they treat the Bible as literally true or near literally true, true in all that it affirms. So the age of the Earth, maybe that’s not so important. The miracles described in the Gospels really took place.
This is the church where I spent time as an anthropologist for two years, over two years really, in Chicago. This is on a summer morning along the lake. I went to Sunday morning gatherings.
I was a member of a house group for a year, where we met weekly to pray, and to talk, and to read the Bible. I hung out with people. I had coffee with people.
I interviewed people. I went to all kinds of regional, national conferences, and events. And then I moved to California, here to the South Bay, and did it all over again with another Vineyard Church.
So let me tell you a little bit about the God that I saw in this church. This is a God who is deeply human. God is high and mighty and distant, but also a person among people.
He will hang out with you. He will chat with you. He is also deeply supernatural.
So as you hang out with God, he can intervene in the things, in the little things that you talk to a friend about, like getting a good haircut, or where you wanna go on your vacation, or, you know, the argument you had with your spouse last night. He cares about all that stuff, and he can make a difference in your life. To give you a feel of the way that people talk about this God, this is a book by, I’m quoting here from a book by Dallas Willard, who’s sort of a evangelicals’ intellectual.
And he says, “God’s face-to-face conversations with Moses are the normal human life that God intended for us,” which is really quite a claim. This next quotation comes from my favorite ethnographic artifact, Bruce and Stan’s Pocket Guide Towards Talking with God. And Bruce and Stan tell us, “It’s really important to understand that God is not an impersonal force.
Even though He’s invisible, God is personal and He has all the characteristics of a person. He knows, He hears, He feels, and He speaks.” These, you can understand these engagements with God, these prayer practices, as imaginal dialogues.
This is a term that Mary Watkins uses to describe a set of conversations that we have. She says, “We may find ourselves speaking with our reflection in the mirror, with a photograph of someone we miss, with a figure from a dream or a movie, with our dog, and even when we’re out, outwardly silent, with the ebb and flow of our thoughts. We talk with critics, with our mothers, our gods, our consciences.”
So these are ordinary human events. You have these inner voice conversations in your mind. Someone like Mary Watkins uses the word imaginal because she’s pointing out that we use our imagination, but the person having the conversation does not necessarily experience the conversation as imaginary.
And in a church like this, people are really encouraged to pray with these imaginal dialogues and to experience themselves as talking informally to God about whatever matters to them, the little ordinary things in your life, and to experience God is talking back to you about those experiences. In these churches, God is also a substance, a force that comes into your life through the form of the Holy Spirit. So the Holy Spirit may make you feel electric, may make your skin tingle.
You may feel goosebumps. The Holy Spirit can move through a circle of people and lead to the healing of the person in the center of the prayer circle. The Holy Spirit can sweep down the aisle and knock somebody over.
And the Holy Spirit can twist your tongue so you speak with a language-like sound that’s not actually a language, but is understood to be a language that God can understand and the devil cannot. This is what I was interested in as an anthropologist. The task for a congregant in this church is to experience the imaginal dialogue as not merely imaginary, but as somehow rooted in the world outside the head, as being in some part real in the world.
The the person in a church like this must also learn to experience God’s immaterial presence to some extent in a material way. More important to experience the imaginal dialogue, but there’s also this yearning to feel the sense of God’s presence in an empirical way. I knew that this involved training, because when I hung out at these churches, people would sometimes arrive as a new member of the congregation and say something like, you know, “Please would so-and-so, would you pray to God for me?
Because I know that God talks to you, but God doesn’t talk to me.” And six to nine months into their experience of the church, they would formulate sentences like, “I recognize God’s voice the way I recognize my mom’s voice on the phone.” So the book that I wrote basically did three, I’m gonna say it did three things.
First of all, I could see that people, in order to learn to experience God as interacting with them, people had to learn to interpret their thoughts or to make sense of their mental experience in new ways. And people had to ask the question that God’s speaking to me? And they would pick out thoughts that they might have attributed to themselves, but that they learned to experience and understand as not their own thoughts, but God speaking to them.
In other words, that their thought, that thought was not self-authored, it was other authored. And people would do this by identifying a thought that was louder than other thoughts, more spontaneously pop into their mind. It took them by surprise.
And then they were meant to ask themselves, and the church would invite them to ask these kinds of questions, was, “Is this consonant with Scriptures? Is this the kind of thing that God would say?” And then, “How did you feel when you had that thought?
Did you feel as if it gave you peace? Did you feel good?” Because if a loving God talks to you, you should feel pretty good about that.
And they would ask people to see if they could confirm that that was what God was saying by other means. I also described in this book what I call inner sense cultivation, and I made the argument that the prayer practice people use when they’re really intensively trying to use their imagination to allow God to come alive had psychological effects on their mental experience. So when people began to pray like this, and they talked formally to God, and they tried to imagine that God was present, and they would throw themselves into the Scriptures, so that when they tried to understand blind Bartimaeus, they tried to see him as he sat by the side of the road.
And they tried to imagine the color of his cloak and what it was like when he flung it away to follow Jesus. They really wanted to see it as if they were there. And I argued in this book, using some experimental work, I’ve got a foot in psychology as well, that this actually did change something about the quality of your mental experience.
It made your inner mental world come alive, feel more real, feel more external to you. I also saw in this church a striking use of imagination. So congregants in churches like this are invited to have a cup of coffee with God, to go for a walk with God, to have a beer with God, to go on a date with God.
People would talk about cuddling with God on a park bench. They would talk, there was a lot of, you know, C.S. Lewis is really important in churches like this, and God as the big fluffy lion. Aslan is a very important imaginative vehicle for representing the experience of God.
People valued spiritual experience. All of these things were important. One of the things they did was that the coming to use your imagination to experience God, it enabled God to feel real to you.
It also enabled these Americans to hold God in a special complicated way. Because if you are imagining that God is walking by your side, you know that’s God, but you also know that, to some extent, you’re imagining that this is God. And so it becomes cognitively and epistemologically really complicated and sophisticated, and I thought it kind of helped these Americans to manage their own complicated views about living in a secular society, in a world in which many other people had different views about God, didn’t think that God existed at all.
And so if you make God really, really imaginatively present, you get your God, but you also learn to hold your God in a way that is somewhere between the material and the immaterial, available to you, but also marked in, different kinds of ways. So, all of that seemed to me to reflect a particular and local theory of mind. And now we’re moving into the larger project that I’m gonna describe today.
It seemed to me that as Americans talked to me, as these Americans talked to me about their experience of God, one of the things that I heard was a common American experience that the mind is bounded, private, that there’s a wall between your mind and the world. It was hard for these Americans to learn to come to terms with the idea that God was speaking back to them in their mind. It took them time to adapt to the idea that there was this external being, talking in their mind.
These Americans also seemed to me to exemplify an American tendency to treat feeling as really, really important. That feeling, can people hear me? Okay.
To treat Americans treat emotion as terribly important. We live in a world in which sadness can make you sick. It justifies you going to the doctor.
It justifies you staying home from work. We treat our internal experience as worthy of attention, and in fact, many of these Americans that I saw in the Vineyard Church, they would talk to God about their feelings. What they wanted to know when they talked to God about a fight with their spouse is why they felt so riled up, and what they were gonna do about it, and how God could help them feel a little bit more comfortable.
It was also clear that there was a complicated story about realness. That when people used their imagination to experience God, they took their imagination to be important. And in fact, we spend an inordinate amount of time cultivating imagination in the lives of our children.
But imagination is not real to Americans. It’s mere imagination. It’s not the stuff in your head.
It kinda comes and goes. It’s flimsy. It’s not of the world in the same way that the table and chair is part of the world.
So, I decided to find out what the experience of God was like in a place in which people thought very differently about, about their minds. And so the project that I now embarked on is the project to compare the way people experience invisible others in new charismatic evangelical churches, and also folks who struggle with psychotic illness and hear voices, but I won’t talk about that in this talk. I’m looking at churches in Accra, Ghana, West Africa, in Chennai, India, and in the Bay Area, and obviously here.
And the question that I’m asking, if I see differences in the experience of God, does that have anything to do with different ways in which the mind is real for people? There are different ways in which people understand the experience of the mind. The specific questions I’m gonna ask today are, how do congregants in, actually, two culturally different, but theologically similar settings represent the aim and experience of imaginal dialogue and prayer?
What specific spiritual experiences do congregants in these different settings recognize, elaborate, and report? And do any of these differences that I find reflect differences in local theories of mind, different ideas about the mind? And so, I’m gonna talk to you now about my experience of going off to Accra, and what I found when I talked to people in the new charismatic churches there, of which there are many, many such churches.
70% of Accra is Christian. About half of that population belongs to these churches that, in many ways, are very much like the American churches. They are very recognizable.
So these are big new buildings. They have thousands of people in their congregations. They have tons of international connections.
There’s streaming media all over the place. There are billboards everywhere. These churches become a kind of social life for the middle class.
They provide medical treatment and social events. And there’s a hair salon, and you can do banking. You can live your entire life, if you like, within the confines of these huge churches, and everybody speaks English.
These are, which means basically that, for most people, this is a venue for the middle class, and sometimes they’re understood as places where the middle class will come and meet each other. And it’s a good way for a man to meet a woman. They are very much like the new charismatic evangelical church that I studied, the Vineyard.
Their theology presents you with a personal relationship with a god who’s gonna talk back. This god, people will tell you, is unconditionally loving. So, turns out it’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s what people will tell you.
People will tell you that this god is supernaturally efficacious, and he deals with their particular concerns, with their own ill health. He gives them stuff. He is concerned with your personal experience.
People dress casually for middle-class Africans in Accra. These are happy cla– what the British would call happy-clappy churches.
Everybody’s cheering and dancing and singing and speaking in prophecy. It’s fun to go to these churches. And these are churches that are chock-full of American books on Evangelical Christianity.
So you walk in the bookstores, and down one wall, there are all of the American books on Evangelical Christianity that I come across in this culture and that are sitting on my bookshelf by American authors. And down the other wall are all the books in English by African authors about the same topics. If you just look at the church, it looks like there’s a lot that’s similar.
This is not a full ethnographic study that I’m doing. I’m trying to do a comparative study in which I look at three different settings, so I’m not going to spend four years in Accra and four years in Chennai. So far, this is the package of data that I’ve collected.
But what I wanna talk to you about today are my interviews with pastoral students at a school attached to one of the big churches. So these are lovely young people. They’re a lot like the people that I saw in The Chicago Vineyard.
Many of the folks that I saw in the Chica– that I spent time with in the Chicago Vineyard, there are eight Vineyards in Chicago. A lot, the people that I spent time with were mostly in their middle 20s. A lot of them went off to do pastoral work.
They took their Christianity very, very seriously. These 15 students that I spent time with in a recent trip to Accra all intend to be pastors or to work in some way in the church. They were all in their middle 20s.
They their schooling had been conducted entirely in English. Some of them prayed in English. They were immersed in the thinking of this church.
I knew that they in one, in many ways, were very Vineyard-like. They’d taken a class, actually, on how to experience God as talking back to you in your mind, and they were quite happy to explain to me all about this, this class and how it enabled them to experience God intimately. This is the interview that I, the structure of the interview that I did with them.
And of course, these are loose, semi-structured interviews, but with each of these young people, I asked them about the way they experienced prayer. I asked them how they prayed, and I asked them, in effect, to whom did they pray? How did they understand God?
How did they understand the way that God heard them speak? How did they understand the interaction? And then I asked them a whole set of other questions about classic spiritual experiences.
So these, we know to be psychological phenomenon in the world. We know that people hear audible voices periodically. We know that people sometimes have visual experiences, as if they’re seeing with their eyes.
We know that there’s something, we don’t understand this, but there’s some sense that some other person is near tangibly present, as if they’re sitting right next to you. We know that people could have that experience with a non-God person. You would see people shake in church, weep uncontrollably when they were experiencing God, or shake, you know, they’d become all weak and they’d fall over, or they’d act as if a thunderbolt had gone through them, this, or a bolt of lightning.
You could see people do that. We know that there are out-of-body experiences. You can generate them in the lab.
We’ll talk a little bit more about those. And we know that there are these phenomena in which people wake up and they can’t move. They have an experience of sleep paralysis.
And you might imagine, this is the kind of the straw dog argument that I’m arguing against, you might imagine that these experiences of the body, they’re a result of a kind of a God spot, and they happen to people more or less in the same way, more or less everywhere in the world. And I was curious to know whether that was really true. So, let me first tell you about the experience that I heard from these students about talking to God in their minds, and having these imaginal dialogues in which they’re talking to God and they’re waiting for God to talk back.
So, in many ways, if you read only the first 10 minutes of the, of my interview, or you were with me for the first 10 minutes, these young people sound exactly like congregants in the Vineyard. They tell me that God is their best friend. They tell me that they can talk to Him about anything.
I mean, they talk to Him about dinner. They talk to Him about their dates. They talk to Him, they, they talk to Him about everything.
They say that God will talk back. They also say that God loves them in– unconditionally. And they’re very clear when I ask them this.
They, they, “Absolutely, God loves us, you know, without end. He just loves us the way that we are. And we, we have to do stuff too, but God just loves us.”
They also describe discernment in remarkably similar ways. So, a thought will pop into your mind. In order to qualify as a good candidate for something that God may have said to you, you’ve got, it’s, you’ve got to make sure that it’s consonant with scripture, it’s the kinda thing that God might say, and you’ve gotta feel good when God is speaking to you, because God is good, so you should feel a sense of peace.
It gets a little more complicated than that if God is telling you not to do something, but basically, God is your friend and God loves you, and so you should feel good. I actually think this is kind of a tangent, but there’s something; universal is a strong word to use in an audience that includes anthropologists, but I think there’s a kind of topography of mind in which there’s kind of a continuum of thought phenomena which are better candidates for being non-self-authored thoughts than others, dreams, we know, are good candidates for not coming from yourself, but from coming from some other source around the world. And I think this sense that when a thought pops into your mind, or it’s spontaneous, or it’s loud, I think we will find that that is very common around the world as being a candidate for a non-self-authored thought.
But in any event, this is the way they talked. And people, it was very clear that people were doing imaginal dialogue. So this is the guy in Accra who was, seemed to be most comfortable with imaginal dialogues.
And he says, “So I’m lying on my bed and then I start talking to Him. It’s awesome. I can talk to God like I’m talking to you, and as you’re responding, even though I don’t hear your voice, it comes.
It follows a train of conversation of what you’re talking about. So, like, I tried to find out if it’s true.” So, here, he’s trying to do discernment.
And I’ll ask a question and then God will point me to a scripture I’ve not thought about. So, He leads me to this scripture I’ve not thought about. I wasn’t thinking about a scripture.
It wasn’t in my mind. It pops into his mind. I go and the scripture answers what I was asking, meaning it’s really God.
I was just lying in my bed and I was laughing and I heard everything. And then I really try to make sure that it’s a back-and-forth experience. He is very clear it is.
So, here is his counterpart in the Chicago Vineyard. She’s talking to me about talking to God. I would go get some food, go out and sit by the lake, and eat my food, and just God and I would have conversations about, like, I like to say His children.
Like, if we were dating and He had children and I didn’t, I’d want to know how His children were doing. And so, you know, I’d ask Him, ‘Well, how is such and such going with Drew? How is such and such going with, you know, Christie?’
You know, those sorts of things. ‘I really, really hope that you’re saving up for their college tuition,’ kind of idea. ‘Because, you know, I really hope you’re doing that in their lives.’
And then, you know, got on to this relationship with me as His child, she talks with Him. So, those are both clearly imaginal dialogues, and in ways, they’re very similar to each other, but then also, they’re quite different. And it seemed to me that the differences between the two of those echoed the differences I found between the Vineyard congregants in general and the Accra and the Daniel Institute pastoral students in general.
In general, in Accra, the back-and-forth dialogue was less playful. It was less, literally less back and forth. God would talk less frequently.
He would less, people modeled it less like, ‘Well, I went to the movies,’ nuh-nuh. Or, ‘I talked to,’ you know, “I wanna talk to you about the kids, and what is Christie doing? Okay, you tell me what Christie is doing.”
They didn’t really talk like that. God seemed more distant, in some sense. The sense of hierarchy and authority was more starkly modeled.
Now, that’s also very clear in the Vineyard, but the Vineyard congregants, the mightiness of God seemed to co-exist with this intimate buddy-buddiness. That was less true in Accra, and no one ever pretended to to experience in order, nobody ever pretended that God was present in order to experience as real. One of the things that C.S. Lewis does in Mere Christianity, which is one of his best, most widely read books about Christianity, widely read by Evangelical Christians, is he says, ‘Pretend in order to experience as real.’
I never heard that sentiment expressed in Accra. Instead, when people talked about imagination, they were much more pragmatic. So this man says to me, “What you see is what you get.
What you see yourself do, it’s what you can achieve. If you can imagine, what you imagine is what you become.” And there’s a sense of, imagination is very important, because you can imagine yourself as a better and more successful person.
And there is a line in the Proverbs, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” I heard that from, I’m gonna guess, two-thirds of my Accra pastoral students at some point. It just courses through my interviews with pastors and with other people.
I never heard it expressed in America. Doesn’t mean it’s not important. I was just struck as, by the sense that the way you think, it really is important.
It wasn’t, the mind is not this ephemeral fluff as it is as it’s more represented in this country. So it seemed to me that imagination was not about fostering creativity. It was about who you wanted to be in the world.
It was also true that, in general, the goal of prayer in Accra was much more pragmatic. People talked about money, they talked about the health of their family. Americans talked about feelings.
And just to give you a feel of these differences, this is a young man in Accra who says, ‘Basically, I pray concerning needs.’ ‘What kind of needs?’ “Probably maybe my family’s going through a hard time, so I seek the face of God and I ask God to intervene.”
“So do you pray for your own emotional needs?” I say. “I want to be rich, so I ask God for wisdom, knowledge, understanding, and knowing how to be good to go about things which will promote the productivity and result in it.”
So this, as a contrast, this is the kind of thing that the Americans said to me. “It’s just like talking to a therapist, especially in the beginning, talking to God, in the beginning when you’re revealing things that are deep in your heart and deep in your soul, things that have been pushed down and denied.” Somebody else, “You have all these thoughts and they get all tangled up.
Prayer is almost like housekeeping, like your room’s really messy and you’re cleaning it. It’s like you gain a perspective.” One of the things I want to draw your attention to in that description is that this young woman doesn’t think that she wants to take thoughts out of her head.
She thinks she has many complicated, tangled thoughts, she wants to get them a little bit more orderly so they don’t arouse such anxiety in her. The Accra Christians will talk about this quite differently. Evil was much more important in Accra.
And in, in, in, when you see people in church, this is evident. Prayer becomes not only a way of connecting to God, but a weapon with which you can fight evil. And to give you a feel of this, I thought I would share with you a chunk out of my field notes from something called Jericho Hour.
So Jericho Hour is a three-hour event for Thursday mornings, 9:00 to 12:00, every, every week at one of the big evangelical churches, one of these new charismatic churches. And the whole point of the church is to break the, the, the bonds of ancestral oppression and to prevent witches who might, or evils, or demons or bad things in the world that might be oppressing you from getting into your lives. So here are my field notes, and I’m just–
This is the pastor who says, “In the name of Jesus today, I declare any demonic being, spirit, or witchcraft who wants to take from me my name, I destroy in the name of Jesus today.” People are intensely speaking in tongues. And the pastor says, “Don’t stop, don’t stop.
Pray. Let the Lord show you his power. Pray.
Don’t stop, don’t stop. Let the Lord deliver you.” And we all said together, “In the name of Jesus, every strong enemy by witchcraft resisting, I defy by fire.
Out, out, don’t stop.” And, you know, “Out of my marriage, out of my business, don’t stop.” And the crowd was, like, there are 5,000 people, they’re jumping up and down, they’re shaking their fists, they’re shouting this.
“Let the Lord deliver me from any strong enemy by witchcraft, enemies in the marriage, or the house, or the business. Witches will die, die, die.” So this doesn’t happen, in my experience, in the Vineyard.
It is true, it’s complicated about this and sort of hard to wrap my mind around, that evil is actually really important in Evangelical churches in American Christianity. It’s, and people, if you’re gonna take the Gospel seriously, you have to take demons seriously, because Jesus spends a lot of his time getting rid of them, and people will tell you that demons are real. But in my experience, although my churches were on the edges of university communities, people in the American setting, that evil wasn’t so salient, where it is extremely salient in these churches in Accra.
In fact, people will make the argument that the reason that the churches are doing so well is that they give people tools to fight the presence of evil in their lives. When I talked to the students in Accra, they were clear that thoughts could damage the world at a distance. It wasn’t that thoughts were mere stuff that passed through your mind and was ephemeral.
Anger and envy, they could leak out of your minds and cause people real damage, and they could cause this damage even if you weren’t intending to cause damage. The folks who did intend to cause damage could really cause a lot of damage. So there was this model that, and this is a man who says, “These witches or sorcerers, they project in their minds.
They can even close their minds, and they’re so powerful that the thoughts will leave their minds and go out and hurt somebody.” The first time I sat with my research assistant and said, ‘So, what do you do when you pray?’ She said, ‘I take bad thoughts out of my mind,’ as if she could sort of physically pick them up and take them out of her mind, as if they were almost physical things in the mind that she could remove.
And the man who I quoted on the top continues, “I want the kind of mind that’s very positive and a kind of mind that’s very conscious of God’s presence, knowing that God is beside me.” One of the things that is really striking in these interviews is that not everybody, but many, people believe that if you were a good Christian, many people in Accra, if you were a good Christian, you could get envy and anger out of your mind. You would just pop it out.
Whereas the Americans, that’s so antagonistic to our sort of this kind of widely shared Freudian model that we have, that we are full of conflicting negative feelings, and our challenge is learning how to manage in the face of you know, complicated contradictory feelings. The Vineyard Christians in the United States also thought very differently about sin in my experience. So here is Easter morning at The Vineyard.
This is the associate pastor who says, “Shame comes when we become aware of our own sin and also the sin that’s done to us, the wrong things done to us that hurt us. When I feel shame, it feels like I’m a dirty little crow in a room of fancy flamingos, marked by whatever is dirty and bad and worthless.” That’s quite a striking image, “I feel dirty when I feel shame.”
So how does the resurrection of Christ reverse that within me and within you? And her basic answer was, “If you believe, it’ll happen. When, when I see the shame and guilt within me and I ask Jesus for help, he takes it for me and he dies it on the cross.”
That’s what Jesus does, that he enables you to take these bad feelings that you have inside of you that make you feel so dirty in a room full of fancy flamingos, and he helps you to get rid of them. So I was thinking about meeting the expectations of the Foster les– Lecture and talking about immortality, and I thought I would, I would share these two representations of heaven in the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in, in, in Chicago, well, actually, in the United States and in Accra. So what does the Vineyard, what does Vineyard Prayer deliver the prayer towards?
When I joined the church in, in the South Bay, and I joined a year-long prayer group in which we were going to pray systematically together and talk about the experience of prayer, I was given a story called The Monk and the Samurai, and some of you may know the story. A, a Samurai, a warrior comes to a monk, and he asks the monk, “Tell me about heaven and hell.” And the monk says, “You disgusting Samurai warrior.
You just fill me with, with contempt. I can’t believe you’d ask me about this question.” Samurai is filled with rage.
He lifts up his sword to strike the monk, and the monk says, “That’s hell.” And the Samurai then lowers his sword. He feels moved and amazed and overwhelmed with a joy that a monk would possibly sacrifice his life to teach him about heaven and hell.
And then the monk says, “That’s heaven.” So this was given to me as a way of representing what I would experience as a result of participating in this prayer group. And the way that I caricature it is by saying, and this is not true, this is not what the pastor would say, but I would caricature this by saying that heaven and hell are within you, and that if you know Jesus rightly, you, your feelings would be soothed.
You will be delivered into a state of comfort and ease on earth today. I don’t know that this is exactly– that this actually takes place in Accra, but it’s a scene that I saw in these Accra churches. This comes at the end of the service, and a congregant, a member of the congregation, people are holding up envelopes filled with money, and they are marching to the front of the sanctuary to hand over the money, and they are seeding a ritual seeding a miracle.
They’re giving over this money, and then it’s gonna come back a hundredfold. And one of my lasting memories of going to church services, and you can see that, it’s easy to see this on YouTube as well, pastors will prophesy over the group, and they’ll say, “I see 11 sets of car keys that are coming to people in this room. I see people owning their own houses.
I see one of you owning all the houses on your block.” And so this is often described and is caricatured from, from the American perspective as a prosperity gospel. Come to church.
Jesus will deliver stuff to you. And that’s certainly truly present. I think of this, though, as a way of more asserting that if you go to church and if you take Jesus seriously, it will change who you are in public space.
There was a sense that you were asked in a church like this again and again to present yourself as a choosing agent. You choose Jesus. You stand for Jesus.
You believe in Jesus. And this constant choice is what protects you from evil, galigns you with God, and delivers to you comfort on earth. But it is more a social comfort.
It is a way about being a person of authority and stature in the world rather than a feel-good happiness. And again, I’m sure the pastors would not–be comfortable quite with the way that I framed it, but that’s what I saw in, in these, in these interactions. You could say that these differences have to do with socioeconomic and political differences, and you would absolutely be correct.
There there are some very concrete reasons why people in Accra would want money. They don’t have a lot of money. It’s a very poor city.
Even though this is a middle, these are middle class communities, it makes sense that people want jobs. It’s also true that, that these are congregants in desperate need of a better political order that I think back–I, I, I think when Ghana became independent, it had as, its economic standing per capita was on the same level of Singapore’s, and obviously, those countries have diverged. There are good reasons to feel that people are reaching out for a better political order.
And one very straightforward way of explaining the appeal of these groups is that the traditional African religion is a religion which highly highly valorizes and s– and s– and bo– leads your attention to the presence of evil in the world. One of the things that these new charismatic churches do is to give you the tools to fight that evil so you are protected and you do not have to suffer what other people who are without jobs are suffering. And that’s all true.
But I also think there’s a story about the way in which people think about their minds and the way that shapes their spiritual experience. So compared to the US sample, I thought that what I saw was that the mind world boundary was more porous, that bad feelings move out of your mind and in the world and zap people. I thought I saw that feelings were the interiority that we just celebrate and cherish in this country.
It was just much less salient for these students unless it’s envy and anger, and people are really interested in envy and anger. And the fantastic imagination, walking with a f– with a great fluffy lion by your side just was not important to these these Accra students and in, to anything I could see in the, the story of the new charismatic churches. Imagination achieves a practical outcome in the world, and there’s a sense in the act of prayer that words are not fluff.
They are, in some ways, more real in the world. Your choice of Jesus is more real in the world than it is in the American setting. So just to persuade you that there is something about the mind that shaping spiritual experience going on, I thought I would walk you through four of what I’m gonna call William James experiences.
Hallucinations, the bodily experience of God, out-of-body experiences, and sleep paralysis, and talk to you about the ways in which congregants in the two different communities talked about these experiences when I asked them questions. And my comparison set here is from, eh, some experimental work I did in the Bay Area where I brought 34 well, I brought over, well over hundred people into my office and randomized them to prayer versus non-prayer practices and saw what happened. But before I did that, I talked to them at, we, we talked to them at considerable length about their spiritual experience, and 34 of that group came from a Vineyard fellowship.
And so I, I’m gonna compare what they said to what the pastoral students said. And in the back of my mind, I have my experience with the Chicago Vineyard, and I also am the kind of professor that hands out surveys and questionnaires to my undergraduates. And so I have a lot of little pieces of data to compare.
So let me begin by talking about hallucinations. It seems to me pretty clear that the audible, that the audible voice, hearing a voice when you’re alone or hearing a voice when nobody else is present is, is more common in Accra. At least that’s what the evidence suggests.
So when I sat with people in a in, oh, wait, sorry. Sit with people, we, we sat with people in the United States and said, “Have you ever heard God speak audibly?” You know, roughly, roughly a seventh of our Vineyard sample said yes.
Six out of the 15 folks in Accra said yes. Not only that, but three out of the 15 said that they heard God’s voice audibly several times a week. That’s pretty unusual.
They were not psychotic. They were more willing to describe themselves as having this hallucinatory experience. I gave people a pen and paper.
I gave people surveys, questionnaires to fill out. And in my Accra sample, at my Daniel Institute folks, 60% of them said that they had heard a voice when alone. Or 50% of my US sample did.
Oh, I gave these questionnaires to undergraduates. Even more striking diff– uh, difference because I had, I had my research assistant go into the University of Legon and hand out questionnaires. Many more people willing to say that they had heard an audible voice.
I gave people a different kind of questionnaire that asks in many different kinds of ways about whether they’ve had unusual auditory experiences. Much more likely to be the case in Accra that people said yes. And I wanted to share with you a snippet of one of my interviews.
This is with a young woman, and we’re talking about hearing God speak. “have you ever heard God speak in a way that you can hear with your ear– with your ears?” “Yes,” she said.
“Yes, many times as His word confirmed to meare– me. I hear somebody say the word in my ears.” And so, you know, here’s your, anthropologist, “Okay, how commonly does it feel that that’s actually auditory so that you would hear it with your ears?”
And she does something very interesting. She says, “As soon as I’m conscious of it–” And, and so I leap in, assuming this, this is, like, the way Americans talk, “It stops.” And she says, “No.
As soon as I’m conscious of it, when I’m conscious that I’m hearing God speak, I hear it.” And then I say, “Oh, then it pops out and becomes more auditory?” And she says, “Yes.”
So these unusual sensory experiences are really interesting. I cannot say to any of you, “Hear God speak audibly,” but I can invite you to have that experience. I can invite you to pay attention to your unusual sensory experience.
You know, and after a while, over the next six months, couple of you, maybe five or six will have some kind of odd auditory hearing voice experience. There’s something that’s involved in learning in the way that people come to report these experiences, and there seems to be more willingness to pay attention to them and to report them in, in my Accra group. Bodily experience of prayer.
So these are three kinds of phenomena that often travel together. People are overwhelmed by emotion. They start praying.
They start crying, crying, crying. They can’t stop. Or they feel really, really weak, and they have to sit down.
Or they feel like there’s an adrenaline rush, and sometimes people do more of the crying, and sometimes people do more of the shaking. But there are things that you see happening in a congregation. So the Americans like to do this stuff in a church like the Vineyard.
They loved to do it in Accra, so it was visibly evident to me that people did more of this bodily experience of God stuff in these congregations when I, in which I saw, you know, thousands of people worshiping God. In Accra, it was clearly evident in the interviews that people really liked doing this stuff. And what I found really striking also was that the more people talked about, the more people talked about loving to experience God in their body, the more they reported a vivid back and forth imaginal dialogue with God, and that relationship did not hold up.
That was not true in my American sample. There’s something much more physical about the experience of God in Accra. Out-of-body experience.
So, technically, these are these experiences that you can generate by stimulating the brain when somebody’s on a laboratory table. These are experiences when people feel themselves not in their body, and sometimes they turn around, and they see themselves. So one of you has probably had one of these experiences.
We don’t know exactly how common they are in the general population. But it was really clear that there was a different degree of interest in having those experiences in the Accra, among the Accra students and the Vineyard group. So, with the Accra, so like, with my Americans, the idea that your mind should leave your body and and that you turn around and look at yourselves, my Americans thought that was a totally neat idea.
40% of them said that they’d had an experience like that. That’s pretty unlikely. But looking at what they said, maybe 20% had had an experience that was like an out-of-body experience.
My Accra students were horrified by the idea, and only one of them had said that they’d had such an experience, and to her, it was a sign that she was dying. And in fact, ethnographically, leaving your body is associated with death in this world. Sleep paralysis, being awake but unable to move.
So this is an event in the world. Roughly a quarter of Americans report this experience at some point. These are these moments where you wake up.
It’s the middle of the night. Typically, you’re sleeping on your back, and you can’t move. It’s pretty freaky.
You feel as if there’s a heavy weight on your chest. Often, there’s something clutching your throat, and you feel, and some, and often you feel as if there’s an evil presence in the room. These experiences are reported in at least 30 cultures.
We know they’re out there. About a third of the Americans in my little sample reported that they’d had such an experience. Again, it’s about the American rate.
And, and half of them dismissed it. Yeah, I was overtired and, you know, it wasn’t, It was kinda trippy, but it wasn’t anything spiritual. If the American identified it as the presence of a demon, then the American went on at much, at much greater length, and they would talk about it.
Accra, over two-thirds of the sample report sleep paralysis, and this is, and there are a couple of other sources of data that will support this. And they talk about it at length. So here is a man who says, “I laid down one night.
I felt a heavy presence in the room. It was so heavy it fell on me. The thing held,” oh, this is a woman, actually.
“the thing held my neck down, held my bellybutton like that. The thing was like this, and I felt a finger in the thing, and it was pressing me down. I sensed the room became e– it became heavy, and, you know, I said, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,’ and it just lifted.”
So this is one of the shorter examples because it’s, you know, the others wouldn’t fit on the page. So, I think that there’s a story here. I think this is the, there’s a story about a different theory of mind, and by this I mean a local set of ideas about how the mind is constituted and whether it’s separate from the world and whether thoughts are real in the world the way the tables and chairs are real, and I think that helps to explain these phenomena.
So I think the fact that there is this, the mind bound, mind-world boundaries more porous and anger can, anger and envy can leak out and cause damage, I think that helps to explain the fact that, an outta, so the mind in Accra, I think, is more connected to the body. So the idea of losing the mind and having the mind separate from the body, I think, is just freakily scary, and to these Accra students in a way that it’s not to Americans who are just, like, totally happy with the idea that their mind can go zipping around and going hunting on the astral plane or doing whatever else. Americans, they really talk about their feelings.
In Accra, it makes sense that the bodily exper– that the bodily sense of experience of God is so much more important, because the body, in some sense, counts more than the feelings. There’s something that makes sense about the sense of evil being more important, more salient, and feeling the evil more in your body, and maybe reporting more sleep paralysis experiences. And I think that hallucinations are more common, because there’s more, I think that people are less committed to this idea of the radical that radical boundary between the mind and the world.
They’re also a little bit more committed to the sense that the words are somehow real in the world and maybe they have their own dimension or own realness. In any event, I think there’s a story here about the anthropology of mind and imagination that I know that there Charles Hirschkind and others on this campus are involved with. I see them as part of this general project.
My goal is to identify dimensions of this cultural phenomenon, which is the local theory of mind, the way in which you could think about the structure of your mind. And I think there are real psychological consequences from this, from these different ideas about the mind. And the way I frame this, or the way I’m seeking to frame this is in terms of social or cultural kindling.
So we know that psychiatric illness, for example, is varies according to the way that this culture imagines psychiatric symptoms. It also varies according to whether you have had an experience before, you’re more likely to have it again. So one of the classic example where the term social kindling actually arises from is depression.
The first time that somebody has an experience of major depressive disorder, chances are something lousy has happened in their life. They’ve gotten divorced. They’ve lost a job.
Something really bad has happened. The next, it doesn’t take as much blow for that person to develop major depressive disorder the next time. It’s as if the pathways and their neural pathways are more tightly connected, so there’s more of an invitation to respond again the way you responded the first time.
And psychiatric anthropologists have been able to demonstrate that there are different patterns in the way that people, for example, feel depression in their body, that maybe people are more likely to feel joint pain rather than sadness. I think that the story of spiritual experience is gonna come out in a similar kind of way. The way that we think about our minds will shape the way that we pay attention to mental events, and that the way that we attend to these events will change the way we experience them, and that there will be sort of a cascade effect in which people are more likely to report these powerful, unusual experiences in ways that are shaped by their expectations about the mind.
So let me leave it there. Thank you very much.
(applause)
Right. I’m happy to take questions if you have any.
[00:58:36] STANLEY BRANDES:
Please keep your questions short and to the point so that as many listeners as possible will be able to have a chance to do it.
[00:58:50] TANYA LUHRMANN:
Please come up to the microphone.
[00:59:02] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Thank you very much. Very stimulating–
[00:59:04] TANYA LUHRMANN:
Thank you.
[00:59:05] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
And more to follow. Um, it seems to me with the Accra sample, one can imagine that the people joined this community for the same social reasons, as you said, that they also underwent their spiritual experiences.
[00:59:20] TANYA LUHRMANN:
Mm-hmm.
[00:59:21] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
They joined the social community because these were a community of, as you said, middle-class people, possibly upwardly mobile, very good network contacts there, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What is the identification that the Americans would have to join a much more amorphous sort of community, like the Vineyard or something like that? Do people go around wearing their puzzling feelings on their sleeves so that they know how to join it or whatever?
What’s the comparable attraction there?
[00:59:54] TANYA LUHRMANN:
I mean, it’s a great question. I think it’s kinda the same. I mean, so people sometimes go to churches in order to find somebody to marry.
They like these lay, like these social churches where they can hang out. The church services are sometimes like, you know, a good disco experience. Um, it’s, and it gives you this intimate experience of God.
The numbers are really pretty high. So if you know, something like a quarter to, a quarter or more of– Everyone in Accra goes to a church like this, and something like a quarter of all Americans join these renewalist churches. And of course, they’re all, you know, any individual church is different from any other individual church.
People go to churches for all kinds of reasons, but they choose this all-encompassing church.
[01:00:56] INTERVIEWER:
I would say that in Accra, my sense is that there is a stronger push for social respectability that lies behind the join the new charismatic churches than in the American setting, but the numbers are really pretty big, so pretty large, so it’s ballpark comparable. Yes. I’m wondering what I well, I, my impression is that American evangelism has come to Africa.
rather late in the game, and that there were other Christian or Catholic missionaries in Accra before. Right. Do you know what was there before?
I the reason, I have a reason. So, there are, I don’t know the history intimately yet. Okay.
I would say, you know, one of the scholars says that there are five different kinds of Christians and there are the. You know, missionary-imported Pentecostal churches, there are the indigenous Pentecostal churches. And there are different kinds, Bruno might know the answer to this question, but there are bunches of, there are, there are a variety, the, the Catholics are there.
These new charismatic churches are products of the ’80s and they, while they were shaped by the, a wave of American evangelicals who did come through, they are, they present themselves as very, as indigenous creations, and they’re often very, I mean, the particular church where I was spending time is very proud of being African church. Well, the reason I mentioned this is because having been a product of a good Jesuit education, I recognize one of the statements in there, “As a man thinks, so he will be.” Yes.
And I was wondering, Jesuits had come into Africa at various points. My mother was supporting them, the missionary work in Africa, and I was wondering if perhaps it might be interesting to see if there had been a Jesuit influence, and that, that is pretty much a very strong chunk of their theology. I’ll explore that.
And it, it may, certainly may be relevant. I mean, I think there’s something that is so strikingly different about the way that the imagination is imagined, that it is, reaches beyond a Jesuit education, but that’s, it’s a great question. It, just that phrase, yeah.
[01:03:38] STUDENT:
It seems that religion is somewhere between fairly and highly culturally, culture-specific. And it sounds like your research at least bore that out in part.
[01:03:46] TANYA LUHRMANN:
Mm-hmm.
[01:03:46] STUDENT:
What would you say are the features of religion that would translate or travel well across culture language?
[01:03:53] TANYA LUHRMANN:
So, one of the things there are many, many answers to that question. I certainly think that, you know one of the answers to that question is that religion is about explaining the world, that there’s a, that’s a good answer. Another kind of explanation is that religion is about making sense of the experiences we have in our bodies.
One famous answer says that it’s really dreams that generate the idea of, an idea of religion. Another famous answer says that religion is about ordering the world to improve your chance of being healthy, happy, and kind of being good in the world, and keeping that which is disorderly and destructive away. I actually think of religion as one of the stories about religiosity, which is sort of self-evident, but not so sharply presented as an explanation in many of our introduction to religion courses.
I think that religion does a lot, that is a sort of mind management system. It helps you, a mind management and an emotion management system. It has a different form if you highly valorize the interior life compared to if you don’t.
But I think both, both in Accra and, America, in these churches, you can see people trying to order their emotional lives, to quell the anxious voices of anxiety, to quell the voices of anxiety. To bolster your sense of attachment and security, and to give you a greater sense of comfort in the world.
[01:05:35] STUDENT:
Thank you.
[01:05:38] TANYA LUHRMANN:
Hi.
[01:05:38] STUDENT:
Hi, Thanks very much for the talk. I had a question. I guess, one of, it seems like one of the differences between sort of the African case and the American case is one of method.
[01:05:51] TANYA LUHRMANN:
Mm-hmm.
[01:05:51] STUDENT:
And it, sort of–
[01:05:54] TANYA LUHRMANN:
My method or the–
[01:05:54] STUDENT:
Your method.
[01:05:55] INTERVIEWER:
In the sense– in it allows me to ask a question that I sort of also finished the book with, in the sense that your book is, one of the things that I admire very much about it is it’s a very empathetic portrayal of the worldview of these, Uh, American evangelicals, which requires spending, you know, going to prayer groups for two years, and, and there’s something that you end up not talking that much about in the book. Right. Your own sort of personal experience in sort of doing the ethnography.
And I wonder how much, you know, having the opportunity to do that in the American case, and then, you know, not having, not participating in, in two years of prayer groups, how much that difference i– i– is part of the, the explaining what you find. Yeah, you know, it’s a really important question. So what I didn’t, what I felt that I didn’t do enough in the ‘When God Talks Back,’ about, is I didn’t-
[01:07:11] TANYA LUHRMANN:
Sketch out as clearly as I wanted to, although I spent many pages doing this. But I wanted to think again about the way in which people manage their minds. That the way in which people, I, you know, enable themselves to experience thoughts they might have attributed to themselves, to authorship by somebody else.
I think that’s a fascinating process. And so, but the, the Vineyard book became more personal and richer because I knew people so well. One of the things that this book will enable me, or this project will enable me to do, is to think more clearly and in a more structured way about differences between groups that might be attributed to different ways of thinking about the mind.
So the data for this, for this project, is very much, “Okay, I’m gonna collect these 15 interviews, and I’m gonna collect those 40 interviews for a comparison set. And I’m gonna do a set of 30. Then I’m gonna get, this packet is gonna be filled out by 30 people in this setting, and this packet is gonna be fi– filled out by 50 people in this setting, and I wanna see whether, you know, and I, I wanna see what compares to what.”
Time in each place and, I don’t know anybody like that. And so, it’s not gonna happen unless I do it this way. And there are things I can build on.
So I can borrow the ethnographies of people who’ve worked in this area of the world before, and have them enter the work. You know, mostly when anthropologists read other ethnographies, they enter the work as footnotes. “I read this as my calling card, see how much I read.”
And you know, I think that I will probably want to use them as characters in the story, and talk about what they saw and how they experienced. But, you know.
[01:10:30] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Hi. Thanks for a very interesting talk.
[01:10:33] TANYA LUHRMANN:
Thank you.
[01:10:34] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Your idea about the boundedness of mind reminds me of some stuff on spirit possession. Janice Bodie in ’94 wrote this piece about basically this idea that the– the mind being more porous is part of how she explains, you know, the movement of spirits into and out of bodies, and their very like, freeform movements, and speaking as gods, as deities, and how in Western model of self, we can only think of that as insanity basically, and also, it strikes me that attitudes toward witchcraft as another sort of indigenous religious belief obviously impact the way that people are praying as a ways of warding off evil. So I’m wondering what you think is the importance of syncretism and other sort of compounding religious beliefs in the Ghanaian case that might influence their ideas of self and mind.
[01:11:23] TANYA LUHRMANN:
Oh, I mean, in the background, great question. The background of this story about the new charismatic churches is traditional African religion. And so, you know, when you’re early on in a project, you’re so excited about what you’ve collected, you want to show that and, as time goes by, what I’ve showed you will shrink and I’ll tell you more about traditional African religion.
But that’s clearly very much in the background. A world in which people live in a world in which they are at threat of attack by enemies, people are so closely bound that in some sense, you are part of other people, and they can destroy you. And one of the overwhelming ideas that comes out of the ethnographic literature of West Africa, and in fact, Sub-Saharan Africa, in general, is witchcraft.
The idea that other people can hurt you at a distance, that the mind can work at a distance to destroy you, and you need to be protected against that. And so it’s a terribly important part of the story. Hello.
[01:12:30] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Thank you for your wonderful talk and your wonderful body of work. Uh, as a member of the Foster Committee, I’m required to ask you, is the soul immortal?
(laughter)
[01:12:43] TANYA LUHRMANN:
Oh, my goodness. One of the many questions that I attempted to duck when talking to people. Um, you know, one of the things that I would say is that s–
So when I was 22, I set out to study people who call themselves witches and magicians, and you know, and in London. So these are middle-class people who were practicing magic, and my Cambridge supervisors just, like, were beside themselves with the thought that I might become a witch and disappear into the wilds, and– and these weren’t real anthropological subjects, because they were in London, and they were– you know? It was like, everybody was very anxious.
And so I, as a self-protective mechanism, I had to be really, really clear that I did not believe in magic. That was just– I did not believe in magic.
There was a line in the sand. That was just the way that it is. And I have to say that the more time I spend talking to people about God, the more I feel like, huh, you know?
It’s– these issues ab– about the way that you think about the soul, the way that you think about God, are intensely private issues. They change for people over time. You tend not to generate your answer to that question on– at a podium.
But I would say that I am certainly sympathetic to the view that the mind is a whole heck of a lot more complicated than we can imagine in our little universe.
(applause)
[01:14:14] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Again, thanks for the nice lecture. The two groups which you describe seem relatively benign in comparison to the evangelicals whom I know– Mm-hmm. Who are rabid zealots, you know, ready to kill Obama and, and the rest kind of thing.
So I was wondering if these are typical of African Christians. Because isn’t there a character in, in Uganda or Nigeria called Charles Taylor, who’s something of a lord, runs around and kidnaps kids and massacres people?
[01:14:51] INTERVIEWER:
Is that a Christian sect?
[01:14:57] TANYA LUHRMANN:
Many people probably wouldn’t use the word Christian to describe his theological commitments.
(audience laughs)
I, in my writing, but also in my work I think it’s more interesting to talk about evangelicals who rattle the academic community, because they make evangelists look different and evangelicals are much more varied than the academic prototype imagines. So, even, sure, 80% of the evangelicals voted for the Republican ticket in the last election. That means that one in five evangelicals voted for Obama.
That’s a pretty significant number of people, and I would say that there’s a much broader and messier array of political positions. I am quite unsympathetic to some of those positions, but I think that there is a remarkable array. Because I wanted so much just to focus on spiritual experience, I didn’t talk so much about the political and social commitments of these churches, and so the particular church where I’m spending time is in Accra.
Very powerfully committed to a certain vision of Accra, and a certain vision of Accra as a new nation which will rise up and throw off the remnants of its colonial overlords, and create Africans who will enter the world, and lead Africa to a new destiny. And so there’s this very nationalistic quality to the language. And one of the fascinating things about the church is that, whereas you go into the Vineyard, you really hear the Gospels.
I exaggerate. I’m being a little too caricaturing, but really, when you go to a Vineyard Church, it’s the Gospels. You’re really not paying much attention even to Paul, let alone the Hebrew Bible.
In the Accra, in all of the Accra new charismatic churches, it’s the Hebrew Bible. It’s the Israelites in the desert who are marching for their survival to found a new land, and that’s the vision of what these churches are gonna bring to Ghana.
[01:17:34] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Thank you very much. Fantastic lecture. And I wanted to ask you about the psychological theories of self-construal.
I think, like, maybe 20 years ago, they were really up and running, and then there was this idea of independent, interdependent self, and individualism, and collectivism. In connection with that, do you work at all with those concepts, or did they just die out on their own? And do you find them applicable, or.
[01:18:03] TANYA LUHRMANN:
Oh, I think absolutely. So, Hazel Marcus is a good buddy of mine. She was, in some ways, one of the architects of the independent/interdependent kind of model of the self.
And I would say that those concepts have now been naturalized, so that many, many anthropologists, for example, one of the slides I cut out was a slide in which I talked about the other people who have written about Ghana and Girish Daswani’s account of the dividuals. And the way in which the self in Accra is more, people imagine themselves more as part of other people than in the United States. This is not a psychological claim.
It’s a cultural claim. That in America, as Geertz said, we imagine ourselves as, you know, as a set out, apart, and different from other people. We contrast, we are set out as contrasting to others.
And in Accra and Malaysia and India and, like, the West, and this is why anthropologists can’t stand some of these psychological claims, there you know, there is much more of an emphasis on the way in which the self is imagined in relationship to other people. One of the nicest examples of the way this comes out is not in this work, but in my work on, when I talk to folks with psychosis who hear voices. So when Americans, so I compared 20 folks in San Mateo, criteria for schizophrenia, hear voices, and 20 folks in the Accra General Psychiatric Hospital, 20 folks in Chennai, all of them same, more or less the same kinda people.
And I asked, ‘What is your experience of voices like?’ Americans in general don’t name their voices. They don’t like their voices. They don’t interact with their voices, and it’s like, you know, in Accra, this is a caricature.
In Accra, half the sample hears God speaking, and God tells them not to pay attention to those nasty voices that they hear. And in Chennai, people hear their relatives telling them to clean up and do chores. And so there’s a much more evident construal of your experience in terms of other people.
[01:20:19] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
You know, it just came to mind that one of the alternative techniques we’re using with voices in America is to you know it’s just a psychological technique, to develop relationship with the voice–
[01:20:32] TANYA LUHRMANN:
Absolutely.
[01:20:32] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
And turn it into an experience of channeling.
[01:20:35] TANYA LUHRMANN:
Absolutely.
[01:20:35] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
So that just–
[01:20:37] TANYA LUHRMANN:
Absolutely. I actually think that the hearing–
[01:20:38] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
It fits, yeah.
[01:20:39] TANYA LUHRMANN:
I think the hearing voices method is actually potentially quite promising. And, you know, it’s more or less what cognitive behavioral therapy has been teaching as well.
[01:20:48] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Thank you.
[01:20:52] INTERVIEWER:
Thanks a lot, Tanya. That was really fascinating. I love the comparison in that framework, and the ethnography is terrific.
There has to be a certain number of people who are attracted to these groups in both, Ghana and the US who become disillusioned. For whom they have to learn, of course, there’s that kind of secondary socialization process. You learn how to listen to God.
You learn how to behave properly at the meetings. What to say, how to interpret your thoughts. But for some people, it doesn’t work.
[01:21:35] TANYA LUHRMANN:
Right.
[01:21:36] INTERVIEWER:
And could you speak a bit about that? And how many people leave? When, at what stage of life they leave these groups?
[01:21:45] TANYA LUHRMANN:
Oh, well, the last question is hard to answer. So the because I don’t see the people who leave, per se. I did have this woman, it was on the radio and somebody it was one of these talk shows, and somebody called up and said, “I was raised as an evangelical Christian, and for all my life, I made judgment, I made decisions because God told me what to do, and I’d stopped being a Christian when I hit high school, and I was terrified that I would not be able to make decisions again.”
And then she said, “You know, and it was only after a while that I realized that what I was really consulting was my conscience, and so this is, and then I became comfortable.” But it was just, she was really quite, she described herself as really quite flustered, which I thought was quite interesting. So I would say that about a quarter of the church in Chicago had a rough time doing the back and forth thing with God, and “I had a rough time hearing God speak.”
And of course, does that mean that their experience was different from other people who had an easier time? Hard to say. But they’ve had it, they found it very uncomfortable to, themselves as hearing God interact with them.
So one of the things that I did was, turns out you can pick these people out with a questionnaire. So, I, ’cause I’ve got a foot in this, this psychological world. I gave people the Telgen Absorption Scale.
So, this is a scale that asks you, it’s 34 items, and you say, “True or false, is this true for me? Sometimes I feel and experience things the way I did as a child. Sometimes when I’m watching a play or a movie, I can be, I can be so caught up that I forget that it’s on– that it’s only a play and that it’s not really happening.
I like to w– watch clouds change shape in the sky.” So, questions, who knows what the scale picks up? I think that it’s picking up your comfort with imaginative play.
So, and there’s a pretty clear, significant relationship. The more somebody’s a– the more truths somebody answers on that questionnaire, the more likely they are to say that they have a back-and-forth dialogue with God, the more likely they are to say that they have heard God speak audibly, and had a variety of other cool, weird spiritual experiences. So, one of the explanations that you can offer for folks who don’t hear God speak back is that they are temperamentally disinclined to be comfortable with their imaginations in a way that would let them do that.
So, why are they in that church? One answer is that they’re married to people who like the church, or because they grew up in the church, or because the church has great music and they really like it, or they like the pastor. I mean, I thought that the looking back at the people I knew in the witchcraft covens, in the high magic groups, in the groups that I knew when I was doing my doctoral work, I would say that everyone in that group was high absorption.
You don’t end up in a magical group unless you really wanna be there and you can do the magical stuff that makes it fun. People end up in churches for all kinds of different reasons. And so I was struck by that.
It, one of the reactions that the Vineyard has had to my work is somebody said at one of these big events, “We should stop kidding ourselves. John Wimber, who founded the church, said it was all about doing the stuff, but not all of us do the stuff, and we’re, we’re making people who can’t do the stuff, feel badly. We need to figure out how to incorporate them more.”
[01:25:48] INTERVIEWER:
Well, Thank you very much, Tanya, for a very stimulating and interesting session.
(applause and cheering)
