#147 – The “personal relationship” with the divine

A social anthropologist, with decades of scholarship on people striving to connect to another dimension, gives us her perspective on the Evangelical version of this phenomenon.

“It’s not a religion … it’s a relationship!” 

Many Christians claim this is what separates their faith from all others. 

There was a time when I myself made this claim.  I don’t anymore.  Not because “we broke up.”  But because, by any definition of the word “relationship” in every other context in my life, it was never there to begin with.  What I mean is, I do have many other relationships where there is a back-and-forth engagement … a sharing of presence, and even of ideas …. perceptible or even tangible exchanges.  But despite decades of sincerely trying to make any kind of connection with the Divine, I have essentially nothing to show for my efforts: any evidence that I might present to substantiate that relationship pales in comparison to the other ones I have with other people, with organizations, and even with my pets.

I know I’m not alone in feeling like this.

And yet others claim they have been and continue to be successful: they “hear from the Lord” and “sense his presence” all the time.  

As a wannabe-Christian, it’s hard not to feel left out.

We’ve already done one episode talking about this solely from our own perspective (Episode #42). In this episode, we talk to a social anthropologist — Dr. Tanya M. Luhrmann — who studied this phenomenon in detail, and wrote the book When God Talks Back: understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (2012).  She has done numerous studies of people groups around the world who believe they have a special connection to another dimension of reality that is not usually accessible to most other people.  But it was a conversation she had with an Evangelical Christian who claimed to “have coffee with Jesus all the time” that began her in-depth study of my own in-crowd.

And she noticed a recurring theme running through all those claims of spiritual experiences, whether they came from people practicing dark magic (aka: witchcraft, Wicca, Naturists) in England, or local religions in five different countries in Africa and Asia  …. or from Evangelical Christians on the western coast of the USA.  She kept hearing that it takes a lot of work and effort … that time and practice changes you and makes it easier … and that some people are better at it than others. It seems that Christians aren’t the only ones who have a proverbial “prayer warrior” in their midst!?

And she wasn’t just watching all these practitioners from a distance.  She entered their worlds, went to their meetings, practiced the rituals with them, and got to know them on a personal level.  And she did find that doing so began to change her … to alter how she thought, her experiences, her sense of reality. She saw visions, and felt “warm fuzzies”!?

Our conversation covered a wide variety of points:

• she grew up in a diversified religious context (Baptist; Fundamentalist Evangelicals; Christian Science; conservative Judaism), but does not claim any religious affiliation of her own
• she not only observed druids & witches in England, but she immersed herself in their world, and learned their rituals and beliefs
• much of their training involved focused meditation, envisioning things happening, and imagining the sensations that accompanied those happenings; as she practiced this, she felt she was being changed inwardly, that she was seeing the world through new eyes (sometimes literally …. she recounts one vision of druids appearing in her backyard); for me, it was uncanny how much this all sounded like Ignatian prayer, which many Christians practice
• are some people just wired differently in order to have these experiences?
• can we adjust our brain’s wiring through mental practices (have you ever heard of cognitive behavioral therapy?)
• her work with Evangelical Christians in USA “having coffee with Jesus” …. “imagining that Jesus is right there” … setting an empty chair for Jesus at the dinner table
• she spoke of their meditative/prayer practices, which were, again, very much like Ignatian prayer
• she remarked again how often she heard the same phrases from the Evangelical Christians that she heard in her earlier studies with the Wiccans: “it takes a lot of time and effort (going to worship services, weekly study groups, practice at home) … it takes work and dedication … some people are better at it than others … people who practice a lot, they change.” 
• the Jesus movement of the 70s and 80s: people giving up LSD for speaking in tongues
• this tendency to develop a spiritual/religious paradigm seems to be a universally human phenomenon.  Is it an adapted trait?  What might be the evolutionary advantage? Is it a mechanism for gaining a feeling of control over a scary world?  Or is it because we humans are such social animals that the concept of “God” serves as a social bonding agent.
• humans have evolved a tendency to see Agency everywhere (the “Hyperactive Agency Detection System” that we talked about in Episode #78). 
• psilocybin mushrooms provide a comparable religious experience

Luke then asked Dr. Luhrmann for her expert opinion on his new understanding of why some Christians might claim to have those “God moments.”  After spending so much time and effort in prayer, meditation, going to weekly meetings (or even multiple times per week) and actively looking for a spiritual connection with the Divine, they’re essentially curating an ever-expanding database of experiences, and are then developing cognitive skills aimed at looking for ways to “connect the dots.”  Through confirmation bias, and massaging the data, and loosening the boundaries around certain words and ideas, it becomes easier to find ways to connect those dots.  A somewhat crude analogy is the “Texas Sharp-shooter Fallacy”: someone who sprays dozens of rounds into the side of a distant barn, then paints a bulls-eye around the densest concentration of bullet holes … and then claims to be a sniper.

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Find more about Dr. Tanya Luhmann at her personal webpage or her institution’s faculty page, and these links to her book When God Talks Back: understanding the American evangelical relationship with God (2012) and her more recent one How God Becomes Real: kindling the presence of invisible others (2022).

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like our first episode on the “personal relationship” that Christians claim to have (or not have), or our episode on prayer, or a series of episodes on the neurobiology and psychology underlying spiritual experiences.

Episode image used by permission.

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