"When God Talks Back, Do You Feel Like a Heretic?"
One of the real frustrations of being a priest in the 21st
century is that the press no longer understands what it is we religious people
do and believe. In this respect, most
religious reporting is akin to science reporting: the reporters usually don’t understand the
story they’re writing. Religion and
science, after all, are not the premiere beats.
The only good stories you ever hear about the Episcopal Church come when
we’re fighting each other.
Usually, theologically thoughtful people have to look
elsewhere than the newspaper to find informed discussions of religious
questions. But last Sunday, The New York Times Book Review disproved
my theory by running two articles discussing books on religion. The first was a review of When God Talks Back: Understanding the
American Evangelical Relationship With God by T. M. Luhrmann. The second
treated Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics.
Together these new books provide a window into the American religious landscape
usually invisible both to reporters and those of us who talk about God for a
living.
The first book, When
God Talks Back, is the result of a long study by T. M. Luhrmann, a
psychological anthropologist at Stanford.
Luhrmann studied Evangelical spirituality by joining two Megachurch
congregations—one in California, one in Illinois. What she discovered was a world in which
pastors encourage congregants to make dates with God—pouring an extra cup of
coffee in the morning, walking down to the park and sitting with Jesus in the
evening. Far from being dismissive of
these practices, Luhrmann says (in the reviewer’s words) that Evangelicals
“believe in an intimate God who talks to them personally because their churches
coach them in a new theory of mind. In these communities, religious belief is
‘more like learning to do
something than to think
something. . . . People train the mind in such a way that they experience part
of their mind as the presence of God.’” The review goes on,
Evangelical
prayer is much more than mumbled grace at dinnertime. As Luhrmann writes, “God
wants to be your friend; you develop that relationship through prayer; prayer
is hard work and requires effort and training; and when you develop that
relationship, God will answer back, through thoughts and mental images he
places in your mind, and through sensations he causes in your body.”
Evangelicals have drawn on the insights of modern psychotherapy and ancient
traditions of spiritual formation to learn to pray in a way that transforms
their minds and — they believe — has astonishing power in real life. [“A Great
Awakening”by Molly Worthen, The New York Times Book Review, April 29, 2012]
When God Talks Back
should be of interest to all of us attempting to develop an ongoing, deep
relationship with God. While I’m not the
kind of person likely to have coffee or a jog with Jesus, I do find something
appealing about the straightforwardness of the Evangelical approach to conversations
with God. We Prayer Book Episcopalians
tend to think of prayer as our speaking (in very felicitous phrases, of course)
and God listening. But prayer is as much
about our listening as it is about God’s talking. It’s a relationship. My own relationship with
God coheres around the liturgy and Bible reading (Eucharist and the Daily
Office). I want to say “yes” to the
Evangelical practice of personal intimacy with God, but I want to raise a
yellow flag of caution: absent a disciplined liturgical, biblical structure,
how do I know that the voice I hear talking back to me is really God’s?
The second book, Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion, treats a different set of questions. Two thirds of it is a cranky lament for the
good old days when mainline (Christian) churches dominated the religious landscape. Those days are gone forever, and the picture
Douthat paints of them is rather rosier than what obtained at the time. There never really was a mainline
consensus. The reviewer reminds us that
Reinhold Niebuhr snubbed Billy Graham’s crusades, that Billy Graham avoided Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., and that for all his popularity in the 1950s, even
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen couldn’t stop right-wing Protestants from expressing
anti-Catholic sentiments when John F. Kennedy ran for President in 1960. Nevertheless,
Douthat is on to something when he laments the way spirituality has been
personalized and “interiorized”. In the
reviewer’s words:
The
plunge into heresy, Douthat believes, can be traced to theological developments
like the revisionist Jesus Seminar and the unlikely trinity of Elaine Pagels,
Bart Ehrman and Dan Brown. Douthat accuses them of discrediting Christian
orthodoxy in the interests of remaking Jesus in their own image, often for
political ends. Debunking the debunkers, Douthat concludes that “they speak the
language of the conspiratorial pamphlet, the paranoid chain e-mail — or the
paperback thriller.” The currency of these ideas has given rise to what the
author calls the “God Within” movement. “A choose-your-own-Jesus mentality,”
Douthat writes, “encourages spiritual seekers to screen out discomfiting parts
of the New Testament and focus only on whichever Christ they find most
congenial.” [“Breaking Faith” by Randall Balmer, The New York Times Book
Review, April 29, 2012]
I disagree strongly with Douthat’s illusory picture of a
happy, consensual bygone American religious landscape. Even in the 1950s and 1960s, you and I would
have been considered “heretics” by most hyper-orthodox (Catholic and Evangelical)
Christian establishments. So to call us
a “nation of heretics” now seems more like revanchist name-calling than
thoughtful analysis.
Nevertheless, these books remind us both of the breadth and
depth of contemporary American religious experience and of the need we always
have to ground our experience in openness to voices from outside
ourselves. When I go for coffee with
God, is it all about me, or do I hear anything about my need to love, care for,
and forgive others? When I choose my own
Jesus, do I hear him telling me to sit down at the table with lepers,
prostitutes, and the outcasts of the world?
If all I hear in my personal prayer life is about me, then
perhaps it’s time I picked up the Bible and the newspaper. The next time you make a date with God, bring
more than a cup of coffee or your nostalgic dreams of a glorious Christian
past. Open the Bible, open the
newspaper, and open your heart to the One who speaks in and through the pains
and joys of the world.
Gary Hall
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