When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, Luhrmann 2012; ch 10

THIS BOOK BEGAN with the nonbeliever's puzzle: How can sensible, educated people believe in an invisible being who has a real effect on their lives? The puzzle sits in the middle of many relationships. Maybe your running partner is a woman your age who shares your taste and humor, but every so often she says something that just stops you in your tracks. Or the guy in the next cubicle tells you that God wanted his neighbor to survive a terrible car accident to give him time to accept Jesus, and you react with stunned perplexity. At those moments, the nonbeliever can feel-and however kindly, convey-that the believer is simply out of touch with reality. And yet the believer and the nonbeliever may share so much. They may have similar educations, careers, and hobbies. They may vote the same way, or share a lawn mower or child care. They live in the same world and yet in very different worlds. How are Christians able to hold on to their faith despite the frank skepticism that they encounter again and again?
The answer is that they understand their God in a way that adapts to the skepticism. The God described in these pages, the vividly human, deeply supernatural God imagined by millions of evangelical Americans, takes shape out of an exquisite awareness of doubt. In fact, in the course of doing this work, I came to believe that the very features that seem so irrational to skeptical observers-God's right-here immediacy, the insistence that the worshipper should pray specifically and that God will answer every prayer, no matter how trivial-actually help Christians to manage their own doubts and the doubts of others. This God is not, as some people have argued, a rejection of modernity-a refusal to embrace the modern or a denial of modern ways of thinking. This near-magical God is an expression of what it is to be modern.

What is it about this moment in time that supports the enormous growth in belief in a personal God? After all, in the mid-twentieth century, most social scientists thought spiritual faith would simply disappear. This was widely known as the secularization hypothesis: that modernity gradually leads to a widespread collapse of the plausibility of traditional religions.2 The cause was largely attributed to what the philosopher Karl Popper called the "open" society, a society with science and religious pluralism. In an open society, the remarkable success of science and medicine made it possible to explain reality without recourse to the supernatural, while knowledge of the astounding variety of ways to understand the supernatural could make any particular religion seem more like culture-like speaking French, say-than like an account of what is real and true. In scientifically oriented and culturally diverse societies, these scholars argued, religious allegiance became voluntary. There were alternate religiosities, alternate ways of doing things, alternate ways of making sense of life. Spirituality was thought to have become a consumer good that adherents would sample and discard as if they were buying cosmetics in a department store aisle.
And so these midcentury scholars assumed that faith would soon diminish or disappear. They identified liberal Protestantism-perhaps Unitarianism-as the natural outcome of faith in a scientific society. They anticipated a church retracting its claims to supernatural miracles and pulling back its commitments to God's creation, in the face of geology and evolutionary theory. They predicted that in an open society, Jesus would become understood as a wise but human teacher whose life story had been embellished by myths and metaphors.
We now know that those scholars were wrong. There are pockets of liberal Christianity left in America and in Europe, but Christianity around the world has exploded in its seemingly least liberal and most magical form-in charismatic Christianities that take biblical miracles at face value and treat the Holy Spirit as if it had a voltage. This book has been about that kind of God in America. This kind of vividly present God is at the center of the many forms of Pentecostalism, and Pentecostalism is among the fastest-growing religions in the world. From Melanesia to Africa to Latin America, this kind of supercharged God is the vehicle through which Christianity spreads most easily, and it has been stunningly successful.3
But for part of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth in America, it looked as if the secularization thesis was accurate, and as if the liberal Christian God would become the kind of God most Christians would follow.

The belief that the Bible was true to the letter was a direct response to these currents.9 Prior to the late nineteenth century, Christians did not insist that every word of this complicated, sprawling text was literally true and historically accurate. Centuries of interpretation had emphasized that the book was a text of mystery and symbol. It was not until the last decades of the nineteenth century that there emerged a "scientific" approach to the Bible that explicitly set out to derail this critical approach. "Religion has to fight for its life against the large class of scientific men," wrote one of the founders of the new approach, Charles Hodge, author of Systematic Theology. His son Archibald Hodge, together with Benjamin Warfield, set out the tenets of the approach in 1881: "The scriptures not only contain but are the Word of God, and hence all their elements and all their affirmations are absolutely errorless and binding on the faith and obedience of men."10 They argued that this approach was rational; that it was scientific. It was as modern as historical criticism but came to entirely different conclusions.

The fundamentalists understood their primary struggle to be with those who rejected traditional Christianity because it was irrational. They set out to prove that fundamentalism was perfectly rational and to win back the modernists through reasoned argument.
Over the span of barely more than a generation, from the 1890s to the 1930s, they failed. All major denominational seminaries became more liberal, and none (except in the South) hired Bible-believing scholars. The huge battles in the North American Baptist convention and the (northern) Presbyterian church fell to the modernists. Entire denominations, like Congregationalism, became liberal.18 Public opinion abandoned the antimodernists. The Scopes trial became a public humiliation of the attempt to claim biblical inerrancy with intellectual integrity. As The New York Times drily remarked, "Mr. [William Jennings] Bryan's complete lack of interest in many of the things closely connected with such religious questions as he has been supporting for many years was strikingly shown again and again by Mr. [Clarence] Darrow."19 Prohibition, an enactment of conservative Christian policy, had been a colossal failure. Fundamentalist Protestants had almost no presence in politics, in mainstream media, or in major universities.
So the antimodernists retreated.

One evening as women gathered for prayer group, all of them long-standing and firmly committed members of the church, Susan regaled us with a description of her afternoon. She told us that she had seen her five-year-old daughter outside in the pool without her floaties, those air-filled pillows that beginner swimmers wear on their arms, and ran to yank her out. "She said to me, 'Mom, if I had gone down to the bottom of the pool, God would have whispered into your heart and told you I was down there.' " Gales of laughter from the women. "I wanted to say," Susan went on, " 'Honey, I know this God. You wear your damn floaties.' " More riotous laughter. A woman who had recently dumped her boyfriend for bad behavior gasped that we all need floaties. A different woman, finding this vaguely sacrilegious and deliberately ignoring the up-yours irony in the daughter's retort, said piously that we should all believe in God like that little girl. But another woman responded, "Yeah, I dunno, I think those floaties aren't a bad idea." Nor was that kind of laughing ambivalence so uncommon. After a bad week, the woman who had convened the group-a deeply devout woman-opened the evening with this: "I don't believe it but I'm sticking with it. That's my definition of faith."

John Wimber was so clear that reason was the biggest stumbling block for contemporary Christians that he used the term "power evangelism" to title his major theological statement. "Power encounters" was an old term, used by missionaries to describe a visible, practical demonstration that Jesus was more powerful than the local spirits, a supernatural shootout for pagan souls. Writing of his twenty years in the South Pacific in 1971, one evangelist said, "They did not doubt the power of the God about whom the missionaries spoke … but the superiority of that salvation had to be proved by practical demonstration. Somewhere there had to be an actual encounter between Christ and the old god."36 Wimber expanded that concept more broadly into the encounter of a Western Christian with the Holy Spirit, and for him the real enemy was not a pagan faith but reason, which leads people to doubt God's supernatural power. One of his followers told this story:
    Melinda [was] a young person who manifested all the signs of demon possession. When John Wimber first encountered Melinda-he had been called late one night by a scared friend of hers-the demon said through Melinda, "You can't do anything with her. She's mine." Eventually the demon left Melinda, but not until first putting up a fight. An event like this is a remote village in Africa would result in many members of the tribe converting to Christianity. In the United States it only raises questions about the relationship between mental illness and demonic delusions.37
In Power Evangelism, Wimber spelled out his understanding of the impoverished framework that is so basic to Westerners that they cannot even see the assumptions as assumptions but rather as fundamental truths about the world. Westerners, he said, assume that we live in a material universe closed off from divine intervention, in which we find truth only through empirical study and rational thought. We feel confident in our ability to control our environment, and we feel little need for any help from anything outside ourselves. We assume that only that which has been tested and proven is true. And finally, we accept reason as the only and highest authority in life.38 This secular, self-reliant, materialist, and rational culture is, Wimber argued, the greatest impediment to a Christian's authentic personal encounter with Christ. Now, he argued, we live in a world in which most intellectuals have abandoned the hope that we have a purpose for being, and we live in a moral crisis and a miasma of existential doubt.39

Presumed atheism-atheism as a social identity-is a postindustrial Western phenomenon, an odd blip in the long history of our species. As the psychologist Justin Barrett puts it:
    The markers of societies in which atheism seems to be able to spread and develop a noticeable following seem to have emerged late in history. Before the industrial revolution, atheism almost did not exist. People might have rejected organized religions, but they did not cease to believe in God or gods of some sort, including ghosts and spirits. The industrial revolution opened the door, but few walked through until after World War II. The distinctive characteristics of societies in which atheism seems to have a foothold include urbanization, industrial or postindustrial economies, enough wealth to support systems of higher education and leisure time, and prominent development of science and technology.43
The clerics who doubted that the late medieval visionaries had truly seen Jesus did not doubt that Jesus existed. The early modern skeptics who challenged the idea of the presence of any particular spirit usually did not doubt that spirits were real. In 1628, for example, an ill woman in France was visited by a ghost who came all in white to clean her house and to care for her and her newborn baby. She came every day for forty days. The author of the long contemporary pamphlet reporting on the events described how many people came to examine the ghost, to determine whether it was godly. He reported the strange sightings that indicated that something supernatural was afoot (the cradle moved without assistance; things put purposefully out of place were tidied up), but most of all, he described the way people tested the spirit to see if it was good. They made the spirit touch crosses and rosaries; they made the ill woman (the only one who could actually see the spirit) examine its feet and smell it; they taunted the spirit and asked it trick questions. They wondered whether the ill woman was making the whole thing up. But neither the pamphleteer nor the people he reported upon dismissed the idea of ghosts as nonsense.44

And then there is what one might call the attenuation of the American relationship. A great deal of sociological data suggests that the American experience of relationship is thinner and weaker than in the middle of our last century. Robert Putnam's massive analysis of the decline of civic engagement in the United States argues powerfully that American citizens have become increasingly disconnected from friends, family, and neighbors through both formal and informal structures. Union membership has declined since the 1950s. PTA membership has plummeted. Fewer people vote in presidential elections (except in the South). And with data collected since 1975, one can see that people have friends to dinner less often (and they go out with them no more often). Time diary studies suggest that informal socializing has declined markedly. Between 1976 and 1997, family vacations (with children between eight and seventeen) nosedived as a family practice, as did "just sitting and talking" together as a family. Even the "family dinner" is noticeably in decline. Putnam uses this data to argue that social capital is on the wane in late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century America. It also suggests, however, that Americans citizens might feel more lonely. They are certainly more isolated. More Americans live alone now than ever before: 25 percent of them do, compared to 8 percent in 1940 and none in our so-called ancestral environment, when we roamed as hunter-gatherer bands on the open savannah and no one slept alone.54

I would not call myself a Christian, but I find myself defending Christianity. I do not think of myself as believing in a God who sits out there, as real as a doorpost, but I have experienced what I believe the Gospels mean by joy. I watched people cry in services, and eventually I would cry in services too, and it seemed to me that I cried the way I sometimes wink back tears at children's books, at the promise of simple joy in a messy world. I began to pray regularly, under the tutelage of a spiritual director, and I began to understand parts of the church teaching not just as so many intellectual doctrinal commitments but as having an emotional logic of their own. I remember the morning it dawned on me that the concept of redemption from sin is important, for example, because we cannot really trust that we are loved until we know that we are loved even with our faults. It was (as my spiritual director put it) like believing-really, deeply, believing; believing "in my heart"-that I did not need to lose those ten pounds I always thought I needed to lose before I would be truly lovable. This is, perhaps, not exactly what Paul had in mind, but he would have agreed that unconditional love is hard to understand and that, once grasped, it changes whatever else you thought you understood. It changed me. I came to call my own experience of joy and love, with respect to C. S. Lewis, my furry lion problem.