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Book Reviews / Pneuma 35 (2013) 87-156
T. M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012). xxv + 434 pp., $28.95 hardback; $15.95 paper.
Cultural anthropologists often maintain a peculiar relationship with people who take for granted that life is animated by agents seen and unseen. On one hand, they strive to take seriously the native point of view of reality. We are trained to listen empathetically to cul- tural others, and to generate written accounts that enable readers to walk a mile in the shoes of those same people. Conversely, we generally eschew making claims about the ontological status of the beliefs that cultural insiders sustain. An ethnographic study may systematically describe how some people attribute mental illness to spirit possession. However, as Edith Turner has noted, anthropologists often rely on metaphor to explain the way the natives see it, and accordingly, avoid the question of whether spirits exist in the first place.
In the opening pages of When God Talks Back, Tanya Luhrmann embraces this peculiar tension by reminding the reader that her research cannot ascertain whether God “may be reaching back to communicate through an ordinary human mind” (xxv). Nevertheless, a skillful ethnographic study can succeed — and does so admirably in this case — in making intelligible the varied concepts and practices that believers learn in order to decipher the voice of God among the busy stream of thoughts that occupy their minds. This is both a meticulous and highly readable account. It systematically presents the reflections and expe- riences of ordinary people who invest considerable energy into mastering a complex reper- toire of learning practices that retrain how their minds comprehend and their bodies experience God. Luhrmann swiftly traverses the modern American religious landscape in the opening chapter, and associates the emergence of Vineyard churches with other 20th century evangelical groups that invite people to experience God as an intimate and “happy companion” (15). The historical account is thoroughly researched, but narrow in scope. Luhrmann does not query whether the experiential spirituality promoted by Vineyard and other Pentecostal-Charismatic groups resonates with historically-black and Latino Pente- costal churches in the US, for example. Luhrmann’s closing remarks on the gospel of Mark are thought-provoking and drive home her claim that the Vineyard Christology is one that presents an “American Christ” who is at once “concretely present and curiously untheolo- gized” (38).
Chapters two through seven are the ethnographic heart of the book. In them Luhrmann painstakingly details the work and words of pastors, popular Christian authors, and ordinary prayer warriors who apprentice adherents in experiencing God in the warp and woof of life. In a thought-provoking discussion of the Vineyard’s “theory of mind” she weaves together her observations of prayer training classes with the reflections of church members who recall the first time they discerned God’s voice. These chapters ably demonstrate the merits of an inductive approach to explaining cultural phenomena. So even as Luhrmann cata- logues the unique discourse of the supernatural “breaking through” or of a Bible passage “grabbing my heart,” she also fleshes out a more comprehensive “theory of attentional learn- ing” (xxi) to explain how late moderns learn to discern a voice that has its source in the invisible domain of the non-empirical. Each chapter concentrates on detailing how people employ the faculties of their mind and the movements of their body to better attend to God, and to the inner experience of God in their own thoughts, feelings and mental images. In
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/15700747-12341287
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Book Reviews / Pneuma 35 (2013) 87-156
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chapter three she draws on the insights of development psychology to explain how Vineyard congregants use their imagination to cultivate an intimate friendship with God. There she compares the “play frames” that children utilize with their imaginary friends to the “date nights” that some Vineyard congregants schedule with God. Luhrmann clarifies that few of her interlocutors characterized their interactions with God as “make-believe” and “imagi- nary” (74). Although divine date nights are not wholly comparable to a childhood game of “let’s pretend”, they are a conscious and playful practice of learning to interact with God like you would with a girlfriend in the “hair products aisle” of the grocery store (76). Various read- ers will react critically to her larger claim that the Vineyard group is a cultural world unto itself. This is an anthropology that posits that human groups inhabit multiple and distinct worlds (226). And the spiritual disciplines practiced by Vineyard congregants play a funda- mental role in generating one such world.
Two of the most fascinating chapters appear at the end of the study. If millions of us are expressing our everyday concerns to an immaterial being and then await his voiced response, is it possible that a few of us have gone mad in the process? To answer this Luhrmann care- fully distinguishes the findings of extant psychological research on psychosis from the “voice-hearing” experiences of her Vineyard consultants. In the penultimate chapter she details how congregants confront the question of theodicy. For Luhrmann it is understand- able why Vineyard folk don’t give up on God when unexplainable personal tragedy strikes. Theirs is an experiential spirituality that does not “need religion to explain anything at all” — they simply “want a God who helps them to cope when the going gets tough” (295).
The Vineyard movement, then, is a thoroughly modern phenomenon, and the God who adherents strain to hear is an “expression of what it is to be modern” (301). This closing argu- ment calls attention to the capacity of anthropological research to illuminate how human beings actually make sense of and interact with the divine in real time and space. However, it illustrates again the limitations of the craft. Luhrmann’s circumspect, and particularly per- sonal final remarks remind the reader that the complex practices and concepts human beings create are not solely determinative of their experience of God. The numinous main- tains its mysterium, and for Luhrmann, a real presence in human affairs that evades conclu- sive anthropological explanations.
Reviewed by James G. Huff
Associate Professor of Anthropology Vanguard University, Costa Mesa, California [email protected]
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