How do Evangelical Christians respond to T.M. Luhrmann's characterization of their relationship with God?

Question

I'm referring to T.M. Luhrmann's book When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God.

The book's synopsis states:

A bold approach to understanding the American evangelical experience from an anthropological and psychological perspective by one of the country's most prominent anthropologists.

Through a series of intimate, illuminating interviews with various members of the Vineyard, an evangelical church with hundreds of congregations across the country, Tanya Luhrmann leaps into the heart of evangelical faith. Combined with scientific research that studies the effect that intensely practiced prayer can have on the mind, When God Talks Back examines how normal, sensible people—from college students to accountants to housewives, all functioning perfectly well within our society—can attest to having the signs and wonders of the supernatural become as quotidian and as ordinary as laundry. Astute, sensitive, and extraordinarily measured in its approach to the interface between science and religion, Luhrmann's book is sure to generate as much conversation as it will praise.

Have Evangelical Christians published reviews of this book? If so, how do they respond to the way Luhrmann describes and theorizes about their relationship with God?

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Appendix - A big quote from When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, Kindle Edition

I grew up among all these good people whom I loved, and I saw that some of them took there to be something in the world that the others did not see, and their mutual incomprehension seemed deeper and more powerful than just knowing different information about the world. Later on, when I became a professor and taught a seminar on divinity and spirituality, I saw again the blank incomprehension that had startled me when I was young—decent, smart, empathic people who seemed to stare at each other across an abyss. The skeptics did not understand the believers, and the believers did not understand the skeptics. They did not even know how to get from here to there.

I set out many years ago to understand how God becomes real for modern people. I chose an example of the style of Christianity that would seem to make the cognitive burden of belief most difficult: the evangelical Christianity in which God is thought to be present as a person in someone’s everyday life, and in which God’s supernatural power is thought to be immediately accessible by that person. The Vineyard Christian Fellowship is a new denomination, a few decades old, and it represents this shift in the American imagination of God. These Christians speak as if God interacts with them like a friend. He speaks to them. He listens to them. He acts when they pray to him about little mundane things, because he cares. This kind of Christianity seems almost absurdly vivid to someone who grew up in a mainstream Protestant church; when I first encountered it, I imagined that people thought of God as if he were a supernatural buddy with a thunderbolt.

The Americans in this church are ordinary Americans. They are typically middle class, but one finds very wealthy and very poor people in the congregations. They are typically white, but the congregations include many minorities. Most participants are college-educated. The church took form in California, but there are now more than six hundred churches across the country and as many as fifteen hundred around the world. The Vineyard is arguably the most successful example of what one sociologist has called new paradigm Protestantism, the infusion of a more intensely expressive spirituality into white, middle-class Christianity. This style of spirituality has also been called neo-Pentecostal because it represents the adoption of a Pentecostal ethos, and its flamboyant emphasis on the direct experience of God, into a form acceptable to the white mainstream. Another name is renewalist. According to a recent survey, nearly one-quarter of all Americans embrace a Christian spirituality in which congregants experience God immediately, directly, and personally. The Vineyard typifies this powerful new impulse in American spirituality.

For over two years, I went to weekly services at a Vineyard in Chicago, attended local conferences and special worship sessions, joined a weekly house group for a year, and formally interviewed more than thirty members of the church about their experience of God. That is the anthropological method: we anthropologists learn, or at least we try to learn, from the inside out. We observe, we participate, and we converse, for hours and hours on end. After several years in Chicago, I moved to California and found another Vineyard to join. Again I joined a small group that met weekly, and again I went to conferences and retreats, and I interviewed congregants willing to talk to me about God. I was there for over two years. Members of these churches became my friends and confidants. I liked them. I thought they liked me. They knew I was an anthropologist, and as they came to know me, they became comfortable talking with me at length about God. I have sought to understand what they said.

What I have to offer is an account of how you get from here to there. The tool of an anthropologist’s trade is careful observation—participant observation, a kind of naturalist’s craft in which one watches what people do and listens to what they say and infers from that how they come to see and know their world. I am, more precisely, a psychological anthropologist: I add to my toolkit the experimental method of the psychologist, which I use to explore the constraints on the way people make meaning. At one point I ran a psychological experiment, to test whether my hunch that spiritual practice had an impact on the mind’s process was true. (It was.) But mostly I watched and I listened, and I tried to understand as an outsider how an insider to this evangelical world was able to experience God as real.

It didn’t have much to do with belief per se. 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.

In fact, what I saw was 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. More precisely, I will argue that people learn specific ways of attending to their minds and their emotions to find evidence of God, and that both what they attend to and how they attend changes their experience of their minds, and that as a result, they begin to experience a real, external, interacting living presence.

In effect, 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. Then they turn around and allow this sense of God—an external being they find internally in their minds—to discipline their thoughts and emotions. They allow the God they learn to experience in their minds to persuade them that an external God looks after them and loves them unconditionally.

To do this, they need to develop a new theory of mind. That phrase—theory of mind—has been used to describe the way a child learns to understand that other people have different beliefs and goals and intentions. The child learns that people have minds, and that not everything the child knows in his or her mind is known by other people. Christians must also learn new things about their minds. After all, 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. These psychological expectations are fundamental. To override them without going mad, people must develop a way of being in the world that is able to sustain the violations in relation to God—but not other humans. They do it by paying attention to their minds in new ways. They imagine their minds differently, and they give significance to thoughts and feelings in new ways.

These practices work. They change people. That is, they change mental experience, and those changes help people to experience God as more real. The practices don’t work for everyone, and they do not work for each person to the same extent, but 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. These skills and practices make what is absent to the senses present in the mind.

To say this is not to say that God is an illusion. I am pointing out the obvious: 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.

Luhrmann, T.M.. When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Answer 1

There are many reactions to Tanya Luhrmann’s book, "When God Talks back."

The book’s intent was to examine how people perceive “hearing from God.” Tanya Luhrmann has preferred to keep a professional distance from what she has studied.

An evangelical Christian critique is that she is like a swimmer up on a cliff ready to jump into a great flowing river telling others that the water may not be an illusion or mirage. It may in fact be real in an ontological sense. However, as a social anthropologist, she does not see it as her role to tell others that “the water is fine - go ahead and jump on in.”

Tanya is loved by evangelicals, who are sympathetic to charismatic manifestations, as her work has helped to somewhat demystify the supernatural. But she is like a wine connoisseur that swills her glass, sniffs, smells and spits out what she tastes – lest she gets intoxicated by what is really in the glass.

Evangelicals might be most troubled by her article Magic and the Mind where Luhrmann discussed her research on Druids and their religious training. She writes:

They practiced the exercises and read the books and participated in the rituals and then, out of the blue, they had seen something. They saw the Goddess, or a flash of light, or a shining vision of another world. They saw these as things in the world, not phantoms in the mind, although because the image vanished almost immediately, they knew that what they had seen was not ordinary. They said that their mental imagery had become sharper. They thought that their inner sense had become more alive.

However, one does not need to become a rationalist and reject out of hand paranormal experiences of others. My thought is that perhaps the Druids, in a distorted sense, did see into another world. What C.S. Lewis once remarked, comes to mind:

It is a serious thing,…to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. (The Weight of Glory)

Answer 2

I am providing two answers in one because at first read it seemed she is trying to basically argue that people are experiencing God as a psychological trick upon themselves. On a second read I think she is saying something more to support the reality of God and a person can experience God. She feels she can provide natural explanations that bridge the natural psychological with the spiritual.

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Assuming she is promoting the real existence of God, one evangelical reaction is to say her goal is futile.

The experience of God is not natural, nor can natural tactics of mind or purposeful introspective reassigning of internal experiences to God increase the experience of God. This is not a scriptural way to ‘practice the presence of God’ and not how it actually works psychologically.

Any experience of God based on introspection is folly.

All experience of God is based on walking in his light by faith.

Heb 11:1 (KJV) Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

It is faith in Christ, to forgive us of all sin, impute his legal righteousness to us, and reconcile us to God that creates the experience of that reconciliation. There is no other way to experience God but by faith. It is the mind’s awareness of these truth, the light of the gospel that creates a sensation of mind of his excellencies and love. All our thoughts outside of the light of the gospel is darkness and evil.

Psychologically or rather the spiritual emotions experienced and produced by our faith, we can say it is believing his love for us in the gospel and filling our hearts with love for him in return.

Therefore the scripture says that faith is the subsistence or experience of our hope. That is an experience of future glory now. This experience is evidence of the invisible.

Psychological explanations of how God communes with his children by his Spirit through faith in His Word provides no valuable instruction but rather turns the mind from the gospel into an observation of self. This is not beneficial but merely a distraction of what truly gives experience.

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This previous answer is in case my current interpretation is invalid:

She is like those in Acts 2:13 who thought the Christians drank too much wine when the Holy Spirit fell on them. She notices something but blindly attributes false causes.

I scanned the question and find her thesis basically a straw man argument. First she tries to say what people believe doesn’t really matter (patently false). Then she proceeds to try and explain spiritual experience from psychological philosophy around natural experiences. The Devil in the method is that she skips God and starts with feelings and mere human existence in the physical realm.

This method may have some value to expose certain kinds of false spirituality but even in that scenario it is filled with false assumptions and neither does it take into account the real evil.

To get to her core premises I would quote this part:

After all, 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.

These are all false premises, doctrinally speaking. God’s mind is clearly not private for ‘we have the mind of Christ’ and God specifically chose to share his mind with us who have believed in our justification by faith apart from works. Next contrary to her premise God is not visible but specifically declared to be invisible. She makes the fake illusion that people need to bypass these ‘barriers of realities’ through ‘psychological gymnastics’ tricking themselves to remap a normal experience to its spiritual parallel, retagging it, as it were, from (for instance) something relaxing like a sunset to something spiritual. However these so-called subconscious barriers are consciously broken and their opposites believed in, based on reasoned faith in the doctrines of scripture. There is no actual psychological barriers as described with respect to faith in the gospel, as though if we were to consciously break them our common sense would not allow it! We consciously believe that breaking them is necessary to follow conscience and reason, as well as to avoid divine punishment. This notion of psychological barriers is simply false with respect to God and described merely the confusion of an unbeliever in their own introspection and analysis of their folly. In simple terms, these ‘barriers’ are merely a subjective description of stubborn unbelief that has existed since the time of Cain and not a new discovery of science.

Finally the false premise that ‘love is conditional’ is entirely misplaced, and false. It strikes to the root of all genuine experience that God’s love is not conditional and our salvation rests only in receiving his love made manifest in the death of his one and only dear Son.

Essentially, she promotes the continuing meme of psychobabble where her poor ability in math has resulted in weak touchy feely arguments around truth, neglecting the substantial level of seriousness and logic that more abled sinners can serve the Devil with.

Of course we can’t blame her directly for ‘the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ’. This is the problem: she clearly has not seen God’s glory so she must have tried to explain away anyone's claim to have seen it. Her skills would have been better used to explain how atheists transfer the realities of God made manifest in the universe, obvious to any objective person, to ‘create barriers’ and fortify the mind from truth. I wonder what all the psychological terminologies are for that transference?

In summary, those are unpersuasive musings of a bystander who cannot understand why the Apostles appear to be drunk with wine, because she doesn’t have a clue. It’s about doctrine believed. It’s about Christ being able to rescue from sin, guilt, death and misery. That is the fountain where fellowship with God arises by faith in his atonement, taking the penalty of the law on himself and proving free righteousness to hell-bound sinners without a clue. Making psychological observations of the Apostles while ignoring their message, ignoring their conscience, and denying their death, is a pretext for rationalizing one's choice to rebel against God; this is simply the babbling of a child.