When God Talks Back

TM Luhrmann (When God Talks Back) wants to explain believers to contemporary unbelievers. How can orthodox believers withstand the pressures of the secular world and have what they can describe as a personal relationship with God? Luhrmann emphasizes that this experience doesn’t come overnight:

“Skeptics sometimes imagine that becoming a religious believer means acquiring a belief the way you acquire a new piece of furniture. You decide you need a table for the living room, so you purchase it and get it delivered and then you have to rearrange everything, but once it’s done, it’s done. I did not find that being or becoming a Christian was very much like that. The propositional commitment that there is a God—the belief itself—is of course important. In some ways it changes everything, and the furniture of the mind is indeed distinctively rearranged. But for the people I spent time with, learning to know God as real was a slow process, stumbling and gradual, like learning to speak a foreign language in an unfamiliar country, with new and different social cues.”

Nor is it simply adoption of a set of beliefs. It is also a set of practices that develop a habit of attention to the facts and circumstances of life. Through her anthropological study of evangelicals, she discovered that “coming to a committed belief in God was more like learning to do something than to think something. I would describe what I saw as a theory of attentional learning—that the way you learn to pay attention determines your experience of God.”

She describes the process in more detail: “people train the mind in such a way that they experience part of their mind as the presence of God. They learn to reinterpret the familiar experiences of their own minds and bodies as not being their own at all—but God’s. They learn to identify some thoughts as God’s voice, some images as God’s suggestions, some sensations as God’s touch or the response to his nearness. They construct God’s interactions out of these personal mental events, mapping the abstract concept ‘God’ out of their mental awareness into a being they imagine and reimagine in ways shaped by the Bible and encouraged by their church community. They learn to shift the way they scan their worlds, always searching for a mark of God’s presence, chastening the unruly mind if it stubbornly insists that there is nothing there.”

This involves overriding certain assumptions about the way our minds work, and the adoption of a new theory of mind: “to become a committed Christian one must learn to override three basic features of human psychology: that minds are private, that persons are visible, and that love is conditional and contingent upon right behavior.” And the adoption of this set of skills, practices, and habits does have its effect: ““These practices work. They change people. That is, they change mental experience, and those changes help people to experience God as more real. . . . . there are real skills involved here, skills that develop a psychological capacity called absorption that perhaps evolved for unrelated reasons, but that helps the Christian to experience that which is not materially present.”

All this sounds reductive, but Luhrmann adds that she doesn’t mean to imply that God is an illusion. Rather, her point is that “the supernatural has no natural body to see, hear, or smell. To know God, these Christians school their minds and senses so that they are able to experience the supernatural in ways that give them more confidence that what their sacred books say is really true.”

Or, to put it more traditional terms: Keeping the faith in a secular world involves the practice of the presence of God.

(Photo by Paul Baker.)