by ANDREW BROWN
An anthropological study of charismatic Christians reveals a belief system at once childish and sophisticated
I went last night to a marvellous talk by an American anthropologist who has been studying Californian charismatic Christians. Tanya Luhrmann’s enquiry into how these people construct their idea of God will result in a book eventually, but in the meantime her talk on her work with the Vineyard churches was full of insight, sympathy, and deadpan humour.
The Vineyard churches are a loose international network of mostly white, mostly middle class, very charismatic churches. They aren’t exactly fundamentalist but they see the Holy Spirit everywhere and talk to God every day. They were the source of the “Toronto Blessing” – a craze which swept through the English charismatic network in the 90s where people fell on the floor and made animal noises. Luhrmann is interested in how you get to talk to God like this. After all, most churches for most of history, haven’t done anything like that.
Her answer is that you need a certain kind of temperament, one which makes you good at make-believe, and then you need to work at it. The personality traits which make it easiest to talk to God are those measured on the Tellegen absorption scale, which she summarises as the ability to focus attention on a non-instrumental subject: in other words, some thought interesting for its own sake, whether or not it is obviously useful. It’s the facility you need to construct compelling daydreams.
If you have this talent, or temperament, in the first place, these churches will nourish it. By treating God as real, you come to detect his presence more easily; and the God for whom the are searching is one just like another person. “People learn about God by mapping onto Him what they know about persons; then they map back what they suppose about God onto the world around them.”
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