There was a burst of appreciative laughter: an evangelical joke for an evangelical Christian audience. Van Riesen then segued to the main event. "Have people been asking you about the book?" he asked the group. "I've been getting lots of email about it."
The book in question is When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God (Knopf), published to plenty of fanfare in religious, academic and mainstream circles. Terry Gross interviewed the author, Stanford anthropology professor T. M. Luhrmann, on NPR's Fresh Air. Stellar reviews included ones in the New Yorker and the New York Times.
In essence, the book and the hoopla around it are about the people in this very room. On the makeshift stage next to Van Riesen sat Tanya Luhrmann, certainly no stranger to the attendees. Having spent two years studying this Vineyard church and another two years at a Vineyard church in Chicago, she knows these believers well.
In the name of research, Luhrmann attended Sunday church where members danced, swayed, cried and raised their hands as a sign of surrender to God. She attended weekly home prayer groups whose members reported hearing God communicate to them directly. She hung out, participated, took notes, recorded interviews and "tried to understand as an outsider how an insider to this evangelical world was able to experience God as real and personal and intimate." So real, in fact, that 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.
After being introduced jokingly by Van Riesen as Professor Luhrmann to people who have known her for so long as Tanya, she told the group her book does not weigh in on the actual existence of God. Rather, her research focuses on "theory of mind," how we conceptualize our minds and those of others. In this case, she investigated how the practice of prayer can train a person to hear what they determine to be God's voice.
"I do think that if God does speak to someone, God speaks through the human mind," she explained. "As an anthropologist, I feel I can say something about the social, cultural and psychological features of what that person is experiencing. I came into this project wanting to understand the question: How are rational, sensible, educated people able to sustain faith in an invisible being in an environment of skepticism? That is fascinating to me."
Luhrmann's provocative theory is that the church teaches pray-ers 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 into 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.
And because Luhrmann knows this evening's audience so well, she made sure to answer the question that was, no doubt, on the minds of most of them: After all the time she spent in their church, after trying to tune into the voice of God, did she finally hear it, too?
by Jill Wolfson, Stanford Magazine | Read more:
Illustration: Kathleen Kinkopf
