Public
When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, Luhrmann 2012; ch4 excerpts:
'The promise of unconditional love is not an inevitable interpretation of the Christian God, despite the emphasis on love throughout the New Testament. For much of the history of Christianity, Christians have feared God. The great scenes that stretched above the church doors of medieval Europe showed Christ presiding in judgment. On his one side, the faithful stream to heaven, while on the other, the wicked are cast down to the demons of hell. The message was clear: Be vigilant and godly, lest you too slide into the abyss. The medieval historian Rachel Fulton points out that for many centuries, prayer practices deliberately set out to scare, humiliate, and shame the worshipper into the love of God through the fear of God's damnation...But the motif of the fear of God's wrath recurs repeatedly across the years. "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" is the title of one of the most famous of American sermons, preached by Jonathan Edwards on July 8, 1741. The thoughtful, sober theologian deliberately set out to unnerve his audience. He told them that their God despised them and held them from destruction on his whim: "The God that holds you on the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked." Edwards told his congregation that they were wicked; that their corrupted hearts were boundless in human fury; and that God should indeed condemn them: "The bow of God's wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation, that keeps the arrow one moment from being drunk with your blood." By the end of the sermon, many in the congregation were wailing, and some had fainted and were slumped upon the floor.4
As a result, the basic task of learning to respond to God is learning to believe that you are truly lovable, just as you are. People spoke of sin at the Vineyard, but what they meant by it was separation. "Goodness, I'd never have stayed if they talked all about sin," Suzanne remarked about her first visit to a Vineyard-style church, as an older woman and a lapsed Episcopalian. Sin is understood not as forbidden behavior but as an inner state of being separated from God. That may be caused by doing something of which God disapproves, but the problem is not that God has withdrawn. The problem is that the sinner cannot bear to be close to God. Sin is something you do that interferes with the possibility of experiencing God's joy, something that drives the peace of the Lord from your grasp. And because a behavior that makes you unhappy is understood as a behavior you cannot control, the exemplar of sin is addiction. That idea is not new to the Vineyard. For Augustine, too, addiction was the prototype of sin. But the late twentieth century is more diagnostically oriented than the late Roman world. Here is Augustine: "This was just what I longed for myself, but I was held back, and I was held back not by the fetters put on me by someone else, but by the iron bondage of my own will."7 At the Vineyard: "We are all addicts!" roared a Vineyard leader at the regional conference I attended at Wheaton College in Illinois. He strode back and forth on the stage, pummeling the air with his fist, insisting that we turn to addiction to fill the emptiness inside, to deal with loneliness, to compensate for our disappointing jobs and marriages.
The "stretching" of Sarah's heart made her feel like she was a different person with other people: "Everything changed. Everything looked different." She felt like she had this private, perfect, almost nonverbalizable relationship with someone who loved her more deeply and more completely than any human. The fact that he didn't have a face to hide behind made him even more intimate, closer, and more personal than a husband. "I feel like there's nobody on earth that knows me, nobody, the way he does," she said.
I remember how startled I was, back in our first conversation, when I asked Sarah whether she felt God was satisfied with her. She told me that God didn't think that way. I had in mind all those medieval damnation images and the angry God in his garden. But Sarah thought of God not in terms of good or bad behavior but as a challenge of recognition. If he was real to you, if you recognized him, you would feel his love. "The effort to be 'good for God'-that's just silly. A rose doesn't wake up in the morning and grunt and try to give off a scent. A star doesn't wake up in the morning and try to shine. The goodness of God is just poured into you. All you do is to reflect it back. It isn't anything you need to create."
Yet Sarah certainly thought that knowing God entailed an enormous amount of work. That's where the concept of developing your heart came in. When you recognize and relate to God, your heart changes, and if it hasn't changed, you do not know him.12
Most therapy focuses on figuring out and fixing the cognitive appraisal that generates the bad feeling, but because those models are often not consciously accessible, this can be hard to do. It becomes the therapist's job to make the client feel inherently lovable: to feel like the kind of person who can be loved because the client is not (as the client usually thinks) worthless, inadequate, condemned. When people feel lovable, they are less likely to interpret a curt tone as an insult. The common wisdom is that for the therapy to work-any style of therapy, for any client-clients need to want to change; to be able to decenter sufficiently to see themselves from a different perspective; and to practice new emotional habits. The cliché is that the client must feel strong emotion during therapy for the therapy to do any good, because only when emotions are strong can old, self-punishing emotional habits be recognized and altered.
It is these therapeutic preconditions-strong emotions, decentering, and an intense desire to change and to practice-that the churches that focus on God's unconditional love seek to create in their congregants. The social life of evangelical churches is rich in specific emotional practices-recognizable patterns in the way people act and express feelings, patterns of behavior and response performed again and again, the stuff of which culture is made. The church does not name these emotional practices directly. No one ever lists them off or describes them as so many ways that people learn to behave in church. Nor do people participate in any of these practices in the same way. But if you go to a church like the Vineyard, you know that these are the kinds of things people do and the kinds of emotions they express while doing them, and they probably come to seem not only natural but like the kinds of things you should do in order to know God. These emotional practices create powerful feelings. They decenter the congregant. They lead the congregant to want to change and to practice the change. In short, they create the conditions for real emotional change to occur. During the time that I spent attending the Vineyard, I identified a half dozen of these emotional practices. They all had the same end. They were all ways of practicing the experience of feeling loved by God. The simplest way of describing them is that just as in therapy, people are pushed to experience powerful, bad, explosive emotions while being told that they are safe and loved. Then they are invited to think about themselves as loved and to practice loving.
1. The first of these practices I came to call "crying in the presence of God." I remember standing in church one Sunday morning, not long after the pastor had finished preaching, when I noticed a large man sobbing in the next section. This was no quiet, embarrassed sniffling. He began with great gulping sobs, and then he began to bawl. The band was playing softly, and the pastor was asking people to come forward for prayer. The big man stumbled up a few yards and then fell to his knees. Members of the prayer team came over and began to pray over him, and as they prayed, his sobs redoubled...To me, the pattern evoked a small child crying in her mother's arms. The child doesn't really believe that her mother can change what happened on the soccer field, but the immediacy and the importance of the mother's love can make the moment on the soccer field seem less powerful. When you are hugged by your mother, the memory of that small disaster, whatever it was, loses it ability to cause you pain. It fades from a catastrophe to a blip. That's what the emotional practice of crying as someone else prays is meant to achieve. It is meant to remind you that you are loved completely by a great and mighty God and that the world, imperfect as it is, is good, and all else is like a child's fumble with a muddy ball. Granted, no one ever said that they thought that this was what the crying accomplished. What they said explicitly was that those who cry are feeling the Holy Spirit.
2. The second emotional practice that I identified I call "seeing from God's perspective." This was a particularly difficult practice for me to grasp because at its center lies a disconnect from the anthropological way of thinking...At first it used to frustrate me to ask someone a question that I thought was clear and direct, and to be given an answer that seemed vague and unspecific. Then I realized that I was thinking like an observer. I was looking at an experience, and I wanted people to put words to it so I could describe it and understand how it differed from other experiences, as if I were a naturalist traveling to another country and trying to characterize the new and different place. But the people I spoke with were not thinking like observers. They wanted to do something with their words; they wanted to make a difference to the person who was listening to them, to make them feel confident that God loved them and that the world was good. Many years ago the philosopher John Austin described certain kinds of phrases as "performative": "I christen this ship the Mary Ann"; "I promise." These kinds of phrases don't just describe things in the world. They act. When you say the words "I do" in a marriage ceremony, you change the world in a way quite different from when you comment that the sky is a brilliant blue.18...Rick Warren never talks about failing the test for good. He never talks about damnation. He never suggests that God will punish you. He identifies those thoughts as the bad thoughts you need to get rid of. In fact, the book reads like a folksy, spiritualized manual for cognitive behavioral therapy, which trains clients to identify and to interrupt specific negative thoughts and to replace them with others. Such therapists often ask their patients to write down the critical, debilitating thoughts that make their lives so difficult and to practice using different ones. That is precisely what Warren invites reader to do. He describes thoughts he thinks readers have but don't want, and offers replacements, which are described as the thoughts readers will have if they really allow themselves to believe that they are watched with great love by God.
3. The third emotional practice, "practicing love, peace, and joy," was a little more familiar and obvious to me. People set out to rehearse the emotions they would expect to have if God were real. It is thought admirable to create a home that is peaceful, even if-perhaps particularly if-the peace comes at the expense of the normal American life. For example, a young primary school teacher at the Chicago Vineyard felt bombarded by the world. So she and her husband decided not to have a television set in the house. They didn't subscribe to a newspaper. They didn't have a radio. She even turned off the radio in the car so she could feel calm when she drove to her school. She thought that if anything really important happened, someone would tell her...The less obvious consequence of this idea that one should practice love, peace, and joy is that performing the emotion can become more important than its outcome. Feeding the homeless can seem more pressing than calculating when the homeless need food. Supporting the young mission team can feel more urgent than thinking about what the mission effort will do. And asserting a stance on some issue-abortion, pornography, stem cell research-can feel more necessary than analyzing the impact of the stance, a difference of perspective that liberal observers sometimes fail to understand.
4. I call the fourth emotional practice "God the therapist." When congregants talk about their relationship with God, they sound as if they think of God as some benign, complacent therapist. Sometimes this is explicit. "It's just like talking to a therapist," Sarah said, "especially in the beginning, when you're revealing things that are deep in your heart and deep in your soul, the things that have been pushed down and denied." And just as you expect your therapist to take the rage and still maintain the relationship, congregants yell at God with a kind of toddler's rage (as they imagine it), and still their God continues to listen patiently, and he understands. He knows why you are so upset, why you needed to kick. Jane, the young lawyer in Chicago, once told me that she and God had gone off to sulk at each other, but she knew that this wasn't "really" what was going on with God: "With God, like I can throw a temper tantrum in front of God, and God can say, 'It's okay to be upset. We'll resolve it one step at a time.' " She can be childish, insecure, irritable, irrational, outraged. She doesn't have to worry that God's feelings will be hurt. The psychoanalyst Roy Schafer once described the emotional style to which the good analyst aspired as the "analytic attitude:" perfectly attentive, perfectly interested, empathic, responsive, focused always on the analysand's needs and not his own, interested in understanding the analysand's psychical reality and not his own.21 Schafer thought of this style as a goal rather than an achievement; so far is it from the everyday mode of human experience that he called the analyst's ability to express it within the analytic session a "second self." But God expresses the analytic attitude perfectly. He is unfettered by the normal human selfishness and petty jealousy that make it so difficult for a human being, however well trained in psychoanalysis, to be perfectly responsive.22...On the other hand, God does offer a collapse into wordless identification that no human therapist provides. Congregants would put time aside to do nothing but talk in their heads (and sometimes out loud) to God. They would talk and talk, and they would daydream in vivid images, and they often felt that they had really learned something about themselves through this time they spent in quiet thinking about their past. But they would also often say that the prayer they enjoyed most was the quiet time when the interaction became nonverbal and they experienced themselves as spending time with God in a happy, soothing, wordless embrace. "I always start off talking," Rachael said, "but then you get into this place where you just feel so connected, and then your thoughts are flowing into God and his response is flowing into you, and then even that gets blurry and you just feel this oneness. And that feels good."
5. I call the fifth emotional practice "reworking God the Father" because congregants were acutely aware that for many people, this was a problem. Admittedly, for some it was not. (I never heard mothers discussed in this context.) David, a successful middle-level manager at a large engineering firm, said that he had a very good dad. "He wasn't a Christian when I was young, but he was a good father. So naturally when I think of God as a father, I don't have a lot of barriers. I'm not thinking of a God who wants to hurt me and is angry at everything, that kind of thing." But most had to set out deliberately to rework their sense of God as father because their own father did not offer an ideal template....Rachael remarked, "I feel like everyone has a different notion of who God is. All are equally supported by the scriptures. What happens is that you reach a point where you feel like God's not responding or something's not going well in the relationship. Then you realize you think of God as being someone who's angry or unforgiving or whatever. So then you realize that you have to modify it." As a result, evangelicals support an ever more thriving community of Christian therapists who described their primary task as working with someone's inner God-concept. This would have horrified Freud, who was notoriously dismissive of those with faith: "Religious ideas are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind."24 Psychoanalysts who are religious, particularly those who are Christian, might be admired within the tribe for their courage, but they are regarded with astonishment by their peers.25
6. The sixth and final pattern I've named "emotional cascades." I consider it an emotional practice because people talked about the behavior in church settings and because they recognized immediately what I was talking about when I struggled to describe it. "Ah," someone sighed, "you mean those precious moments when you suddenly really know that God loves you." But unlike these other emotional practices, these moments are not deliberately chosen behaviors (like knowing you should cry when people pray for you) but overwhelming experiences that just seem to happen. They are rare, powerful instants of happy emotional collapse that demonstrate to the congregant (and to whoever was listening to the testimony) that they had personally experienced the absolute certainty of God's love...I sat with Suzanne, the mature lapsed Episcopalian, in her tidy sitting room as she spoke about how she had come to experience the Bible as alive, rather than as the dull text it had been for her as a young adult. At one point, tears welled up in her eyes. She said that she had been at the kitchen table ("I remember exactly where I was sitting"), waiting for the plumber to finish the job he was doing in the basement. It was a time in her life when she wanted God to be real but when she doubted. That is, she believed in God in a philosophical way, but she did not really experience him as real. She was reading a magazine story about Jesus, and she mused aloud to herself about whether Jesus really existed. Then she heard-she distinctly heard, as if the sound came from outside her ears, the only time it had ever happened-a voice that said, "Yes. Yes." And she began to cry. She has remembered it always...Where do emotional cascades come from? They happen in therapy too. Sometimes a great bubble of feeling wells up in a client during a session, and the client sobs and sobs. The rhythm seems a little different in therapy-cascades occur more often, although when people in therapy speak of moments of great insight, they are also usually rare and emotion-drenched. Emotional cascades might, in effect, be "catastrophes" in which the deliberate and repeated practice of strong emotion suddenly and unpredictably gives way, like the sudden, dramatic shifts that can arise from small perturbations, the way a landslide can be triggered unpredictably by a rainstorm. In therapy, the cascades are usually negative. The client remembers how desperate and abandoned he felt when his parents fought; somehow those feelings are evoked within the psychotherapeutic session, and the floodgates open. But in these churches, the emotional cascades that are associated with God are positive. When people reported specific, singular, emotionally intense moments when they realized that God loved them, the primary emotion they described was "joy."
C. S. Lewis owes his status among evangelicals as a beloved Christian writer in large part to the way he characterized this joy as specifically Christian. Lewis entitled his spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy. Its point is that joy is an intense longing, and its discovery is that the longing is for Christ. As a schoolboy, Lewis had abandoned his childhood faith for skepticism. He first experienced joy as an intense passing emotion, an overwhelming rush as he looked at a little toy garden that his brother had made. "It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me: Milton's 'enormous bliss' of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning to 'enormous') comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire, but desire for what? … the central story of my life is about nothing else." He found that as he grew to adulthood, he recaptured glimpses of the moment through the epics and legends of the European past. Something about the myths of Baldur and Loki enchanted him. But he thought of them as magic, childhood, fairy tale, or romance: "Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless."30...He returned to an undergraduate degree at Oxford, stayed to teach, and was elected a fellow at Magdalene College, where he could focus on the medieval literature that he loved. Slowly, what had seemed to be a wispy "let's pretend" became more real for him. One day while riding the bus (it is an odd but obdurate fact that in my years as an anthropologist, I have heard several people describe intense spiritual experiences that took place on buses) he had a moment of joy and realized that he believed in God....Lewis and Tolkien meant much the same thing by joy, and they saw it at the center of their stories. In an essay Tolkien wrote:
The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending … a sudden and miraculous grace.… It does not deny the existence … of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of so much evidence, if you will) universal defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.32
Joy is the happy fictional ending you believe to be true...Some people always cry when they read The Velveteen Rabbit. They cry because they feel that it should be true. They want it to be true. It is emotionally true. But they know that it is not true, not in the world they know.
It is a profoundly social process. It is the evangelical church that teaches discernment, encourages the play, and models the six emotional practices. It is no easy matter to become confident that the God you imagine in the privacy of your mind exists externally in the world, talking back. In the struggle to give the invisible being its external presence, the congregation surrounds the individual and helps to hold the being out apart from the self, separate and external. It is the church that confirms that the invisible being is really present, and it is that church that reminds people week after week that the external invisible being loves them, despite all the evidence of the dreary human world. And slowly, the church begins to shape the most private reaches of the way congregants feel and know.'
'The promise of unconditional love is not an inevitable interpretation of the Christian God, despite the emphasis on love throughout the New Testament. For much of the history of Christianity, Christians have feared God. The great scenes that stretched above the church doors of medieval Europe showed Christ presiding in judgment. On his one side, the faithful stream to heaven, while on the other, the wicked are cast down to the demons of hell. The message was clear: Be vigilant and godly, lest you too slide into the abyss. The medieval historian Rachel Fulton points out that for many centuries, prayer practices deliberately set out to scare, humiliate, and shame the worshipper into the love of God through the fear of God's damnation...But the motif of the fear of God's wrath recurs repeatedly across the years. "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" is the title of one of the most famous of American sermons, preached by Jonathan Edwards on July 8, 1741. The thoughtful, sober theologian deliberately set out to unnerve his audience. He told them that their God despised them and held them from destruction on his whim: "The God that holds you on the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked." Edwards told his congregation that they were wicked; that their corrupted hearts were boundless in human fury; and that God should indeed condemn them: "The bow of God's wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation, that keeps the arrow one moment from being drunk with your blood." By the end of the sermon, many in the congregation were wailing, and some had fainted and were slumped upon the floor.4
As a result, the basic task of learning to respond to God is learning to believe that you are truly lovable, just as you are. People spoke of sin at the Vineyard, but what they meant by it was separation. "Goodness, I'd never have stayed if they talked all about sin," Suzanne remarked about her first visit to a Vineyard-style church, as an older woman and a lapsed Episcopalian. Sin is understood not as forbidden behavior but as an inner state of being separated from God. That may be caused by doing something of which God disapproves, but the problem is not that God has withdrawn. The problem is that the sinner cannot bear to be close to God. Sin is something you do that interferes with the possibility of experiencing God's joy, something that drives the peace of the Lord from your grasp. And because a behavior that makes you unhappy is understood as a behavior you cannot control, the exemplar of sin is addiction. That idea is not new to the Vineyard. For Augustine, too, addiction was the prototype of sin. But the late twentieth century is more diagnostically oriented than the late Roman world. Here is Augustine: "This was just what I longed for myself, but I was held back, and I was held back not by the fetters put on me by someone else, but by the iron bondage of my own will."7 At the Vineyard: "We are all addicts!" roared a Vineyard leader at the regional conference I attended at Wheaton College in Illinois. He strode back and forth on the stage, pummeling the air with his fist, insisting that we turn to addiction to fill the emptiness inside, to deal with loneliness, to compensate for our disappointing jobs and marriages.
The "stretching" of Sarah's heart made her feel like she was a different person with other people: "Everything changed. Everything looked different." She felt like she had this private, perfect, almost nonverbalizable relationship with someone who loved her more deeply and more completely than any human. The fact that he didn't have a face to hide behind made him even more intimate, closer, and more personal than a husband. "I feel like there's nobody on earth that knows me, nobody, the way he does," she said.
I remember how startled I was, back in our first conversation, when I asked Sarah whether she felt God was satisfied with her. She told me that God didn't think that way. I had in mind all those medieval damnation images and the angry God in his garden. But Sarah thought of God not in terms of good or bad behavior but as a challenge of recognition. If he was real to you, if you recognized him, you would feel his love. "The effort to be 'good for God'-that's just silly. A rose doesn't wake up in the morning and grunt and try to give off a scent. A star doesn't wake up in the morning and try to shine. The goodness of God is just poured into you. All you do is to reflect it back. It isn't anything you need to create."
Yet Sarah certainly thought that knowing God entailed an enormous amount of work. That's where the concept of developing your heart came in. When you recognize and relate to God, your heart changes, and if it hasn't changed, you do not know him.12
Most therapy focuses on figuring out and fixing the cognitive appraisal that generates the bad feeling, but because those models are often not consciously accessible, this can be hard to do. It becomes the therapist's job to make the client feel inherently lovable: to feel like the kind of person who can be loved because the client is not (as the client usually thinks) worthless, inadequate, condemned. When people feel lovable, they are less likely to interpret a curt tone as an insult. The common wisdom is that for the therapy to work-any style of therapy, for any client-clients need to want to change; to be able to decenter sufficiently to see themselves from a different perspective; and to practice new emotional habits. The cliché is that the client must feel strong emotion during therapy for the therapy to do any good, because only when emotions are strong can old, self-punishing emotional habits be recognized and altered.
It is these therapeutic preconditions-strong emotions, decentering, and an intense desire to change and to practice-that the churches that focus on God's unconditional love seek to create in their congregants. The social life of evangelical churches is rich in specific emotional practices-recognizable patterns in the way people act and express feelings, patterns of behavior and response performed again and again, the stuff of which culture is made. The church does not name these emotional practices directly. No one ever lists them off or describes them as so many ways that people learn to behave in church. Nor do people participate in any of these practices in the same way. But if you go to a church like the Vineyard, you know that these are the kinds of things people do and the kinds of emotions they express while doing them, and they probably come to seem not only natural but like the kinds of things you should do in order to know God. These emotional practices create powerful feelings. They decenter the congregant. They lead the congregant to want to change and to practice the change. In short, they create the conditions for real emotional change to occur. During the time that I spent attending the Vineyard, I identified a half dozen of these emotional practices. They all had the same end. They were all ways of practicing the experience of feeling loved by God. The simplest way of describing them is that just as in therapy, people are pushed to experience powerful, bad, explosive emotions while being told that they are safe and loved. Then they are invited to think about themselves as loved and to practice loving.
1. The first of these practices I came to call "crying in the presence of God." I remember standing in church one Sunday morning, not long after the pastor had finished preaching, when I noticed a large man sobbing in the next section. This was no quiet, embarrassed sniffling. He began with great gulping sobs, and then he began to bawl. The band was playing softly, and the pastor was asking people to come forward for prayer. The big man stumbled up a few yards and then fell to his knees. Members of the prayer team came over and began to pray over him, and as they prayed, his sobs redoubled...To me, the pattern evoked a small child crying in her mother's arms. The child doesn't really believe that her mother can change what happened on the soccer field, but the immediacy and the importance of the mother's love can make the moment on the soccer field seem less powerful. When you are hugged by your mother, the memory of that small disaster, whatever it was, loses it ability to cause you pain. It fades from a catastrophe to a blip. That's what the emotional practice of crying as someone else prays is meant to achieve. It is meant to remind you that you are loved completely by a great and mighty God and that the world, imperfect as it is, is good, and all else is like a child's fumble with a muddy ball. Granted, no one ever said that they thought that this was what the crying accomplished. What they said explicitly was that those who cry are feeling the Holy Spirit.
2. The second emotional practice that I identified I call "seeing from God's perspective." This was a particularly difficult practice for me to grasp because at its center lies a disconnect from the anthropological way of thinking...At first it used to frustrate me to ask someone a question that I thought was clear and direct, and to be given an answer that seemed vague and unspecific. Then I realized that I was thinking like an observer. I was looking at an experience, and I wanted people to put words to it so I could describe it and understand how it differed from other experiences, as if I were a naturalist traveling to another country and trying to characterize the new and different place. But the people I spoke with were not thinking like observers. They wanted to do something with their words; they wanted to make a difference to the person who was listening to them, to make them feel confident that God loved them and that the world was good. Many years ago the philosopher John Austin described certain kinds of phrases as "performative": "I christen this ship the Mary Ann"; "I promise." These kinds of phrases don't just describe things in the world. They act. When you say the words "I do" in a marriage ceremony, you change the world in a way quite different from when you comment that the sky is a brilliant blue.18...Rick Warren never talks about failing the test for good. He never talks about damnation. He never suggests that God will punish you. He identifies those thoughts as the bad thoughts you need to get rid of. In fact, the book reads like a folksy, spiritualized manual for cognitive behavioral therapy, which trains clients to identify and to interrupt specific negative thoughts and to replace them with others. Such therapists often ask their patients to write down the critical, debilitating thoughts that make their lives so difficult and to practice using different ones. That is precisely what Warren invites reader to do. He describes thoughts he thinks readers have but don't want, and offers replacements, which are described as the thoughts readers will have if they really allow themselves to believe that they are watched with great love by God.
3. The third emotional practice, "practicing love, peace, and joy," was a little more familiar and obvious to me. People set out to rehearse the emotions they would expect to have if God were real. It is thought admirable to create a home that is peaceful, even if-perhaps particularly if-the peace comes at the expense of the normal American life. For example, a young primary school teacher at the Chicago Vineyard felt bombarded by the world. So she and her husband decided not to have a television set in the house. They didn't subscribe to a newspaper. They didn't have a radio. She even turned off the radio in the car so she could feel calm when she drove to her school. She thought that if anything really important happened, someone would tell her...The less obvious consequence of this idea that one should practice love, peace, and joy is that performing the emotion can become more important than its outcome. Feeding the homeless can seem more pressing than calculating when the homeless need food. Supporting the young mission team can feel more urgent than thinking about what the mission effort will do. And asserting a stance on some issue-abortion, pornography, stem cell research-can feel more necessary than analyzing the impact of the stance, a difference of perspective that liberal observers sometimes fail to understand.
4. I call the fourth emotional practice "God the therapist." When congregants talk about their relationship with God, they sound as if they think of God as some benign, complacent therapist. Sometimes this is explicit. "It's just like talking to a therapist," Sarah said, "especially in the beginning, when you're revealing things that are deep in your heart and deep in your soul, the things that have been pushed down and denied." And just as you expect your therapist to take the rage and still maintain the relationship, congregants yell at God with a kind of toddler's rage (as they imagine it), and still their God continues to listen patiently, and he understands. He knows why you are so upset, why you needed to kick. Jane, the young lawyer in Chicago, once told me that she and God had gone off to sulk at each other, but she knew that this wasn't "really" what was going on with God: "With God, like I can throw a temper tantrum in front of God, and God can say, 'It's okay to be upset. We'll resolve it one step at a time.' " She can be childish, insecure, irritable, irrational, outraged. She doesn't have to worry that God's feelings will be hurt. The psychoanalyst Roy Schafer once described the emotional style to which the good analyst aspired as the "analytic attitude:" perfectly attentive, perfectly interested, empathic, responsive, focused always on the analysand's needs and not his own, interested in understanding the analysand's psychical reality and not his own.21 Schafer thought of this style as a goal rather than an achievement; so far is it from the everyday mode of human experience that he called the analyst's ability to express it within the analytic session a "second self." But God expresses the analytic attitude perfectly. He is unfettered by the normal human selfishness and petty jealousy that make it so difficult for a human being, however well trained in psychoanalysis, to be perfectly responsive.22...On the other hand, God does offer a collapse into wordless identification that no human therapist provides. Congregants would put time aside to do nothing but talk in their heads (and sometimes out loud) to God. They would talk and talk, and they would daydream in vivid images, and they often felt that they had really learned something about themselves through this time they spent in quiet thinking about their past. But they would also often say that the prayer they enjoyed most was the quiet time when the interaction became nonverbal and they experienced themselves as spending time with God in a happy, soothing, wordless embrace. "I always start off talking," Rachael said, "but then you get into this place where you just feel so connected, and then your thoughts are flowing into God and his response is flowing into you, and then even that gets blurry and you just feel this oneness. And that feels good."
5. I call the fifth emotional practice "reworking God the Father" because congregants were acutely aware that for many people, this was a problem. Admittedly, for some it was not. (I never heard mothers discussed in this context.) David, a successful middle-level manager at a large engineering firm, said that he had a very good dad. "He wasn't a Christian when I was young, but he was a good father. So naturally when I think of God as a father, I don't have a lot of barriers. I'm not thinking of a God who wants to hurt me and is angry at everything, that kind of thing." But most had to set out deliberately to rework their sense of God as father because their own father did not offer an ideal template....Rachael remarked, "I feel like everyone has a different notion of who God is. All are equally supported by the scriptures. What happens is that you reach a point where you feel like God's not responding or something's not going well in the relationship. Then you realize you think of God as being someone who's angry or unforgiving or whatever. So then you realize that you have to modify it." As a result, evangelicals support an ever more thriving community of Christian therapists who described their primary task as working with someone's inner God-concept. This would have horrified Freud, who was notoriously dismissive of those with faith: "Religious ideas are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind."24 Psychoanalysts who are religious, particularly those who are Christian, might be admired within the tribe for their courage, but they are regarded with astonishment by their peers.25
6. The sixth and final pattern I've named "emotional cascades." I consider it an emotional practice because people talked about the behavior in church settings and because they recognized immediately what I was talking about when I struggled to describe it. "Ah," someone sighed, "you mean those precious moments when you suddenly really know that God loves you." But unlike these other emotional practices, these moments are not deliberately chosen behaviors (like knowing you should cry when people pray for you) but overwhelming experiences that just seem to happen. They are rare, powerful instants of happy emotional collapse that demonstrate to the congregant (and to whoever was listening to the testimony) that they had personally experienced the absolute certainty of God's love...I sat with Suzanne, the mature lapsed Episcopalian, in her tidy sitting room as she spoke about how she had come to experience the Bible as alive, rather than as the dull text it had been for her as a young adult. At one point, tears welled up in her eyes. She said that she had been at the kitchen table ("I remember exactly where I was sitting"), waiting for the plumber to finish the job he was doing in the basement. It was a time in her life when she wanted God to be real but when she doubted. That is, she believed in God in a philosophical way, but she did not really experience him as real. She was reading a magazine story about Jesus, and she mused aloud to herself about whether Jesus really existed. Then she heard-she distinctly heard, as if the sound came from outside her ears, the only time it had ever happened-a voice that said, "Yes. Yes." And she began to cry. She has remembered it always...Where do emotional cascades come from? They happen in therapy too. Sometimes a great bubble of feeling wells up in a client during a session, and the client sobs and sobs. The rhythm seems a little different in therapy-cascades occur more often, although when people in therapy speak of moments of great insight, they are also usually rare and emotion-drenched. Emotional cascades might, in effect, be "catastrophes" in which the deliberate and repeated practice of strong emotion suddenly and unpredictably gives way, like the sudden, dramatic shifts that can arise from small perturbations, the way a landslide can be triggered unpredictably by a rainstorm. In therapy, the cascades are usually negative. The client remembers how desperate and abandoned he felt when his parents fought; somehow those feelings are evoked within the psychotherapeutic session, and the floodgates open. But in these churches, the emotional cascades that are associated with God are positive. When people reported specific, singular, emotionally intense moments when they realized that God loved them, the primary emotion they described was "joy."
C. S. Lewis owes his status among evangelicals as a beloved Christian writer in large part to the way he characterized this joy as specifically Christian. Lewis entitled his spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy. Its point is that joy is an intense longing, and its discovery is that the longing is for Christ. As a schoolboy, Lewis had abandoned his childhood faith for skepticism. He first experienced joy as an intense passing emotion, an overwhelming rush as he looked at a little toy garden that his brother had made. "It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me: Milton's 'enormous bliss' of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning to 'enormous') comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire, but desire for what? … the central story of my life is about nothing else." He found that as he grew to adulthood, he recaptured glimpses of the moment through the epics and legends of the European past. Something about the myths of Baldur and Loki enchanted him. But he thought of them as magic, childhood, fairy tale, or romance: "Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless."30...He returned to an undergraduate degree at Oxford, stayed to teach, and was elected a fellow at Magdalene College, where he could focus on the medieval literature that he loved. Slowly, what had seemed to be a wispy "let's pretend" became more real for him. One day while riding the bus (it is an odd but obdurate fact that in my years as an anthropologist, I have heard several people describe intense spiritual experiences that took place on buses) he had a moment of joy and realized that he believed in God....Lewis and Tolkien meant much the same thing by joy, and they saw it at the center of their stories. In an essay Tolkien wrote:
The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending … a sudden and miraculous grace.… It does not deny the existence … of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of so much evidence, if you will) universal defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.32
Joy is the happy fictional ending you believe to be true...Some people always cry when they read The Velveteen Rabbit. They cry because they feel that it should be true. They want it to be true. It is emotionally true. But they know that it is not true, not in the world they know.
It is a profoundly social process. It is the evangelical church that teaches discernment, encourages the play, and models the six emotional practices. It is no easy matter to become confident that the God you imagine in the privacy of your mind exists externally in the world, talking back. In the struggle to give the invisible being its external presence, the congregation surrounds the individual and helps to hold the being out apart from the self, separate and external. It is the church that confirms that the invisible being is really present, and it is that church that reminds people week after week that the external invisible being loves them, despite all the evidence of the dreary human world. And slowly, the church begins to shape the most private reaches of the way congregants feel and know.'
Shared publicly