Book Reviews 255

Luhrmann, T.M. 2012 When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. Vintage Books. $28.95/$15.95.

Despite continued attention on the supposed decline of modern religion and the rise of religious “nones,” millions of people continue to pursue a fully immersive engagement with a personal God. God matters to ordinary people—not just as an abstract idea but more importantly as a personal pres- ence that speaks directly to anyone willing to hear his voice. T.M. Luhrmann, an anthropologist sensitive to intra-psychic processes, sets out the ambitious task of demonstrating through social scientific methods how humans learn to experience God. She uses interviews and observations at the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, a Charismatic wing of evangelicalism. As white, college-educated, and middle class mainstream Americans, Vineyard members are characterized as “normal,” generally reasonable, mentally healthy people who nevertheless have regular, vivid, individualized, and seemingly irrational experiences of God. Luhrmann posits a simple question: How does God become real for these people? In an astonishingly sympathetic analysis, she asserts that God speaks to the minds of people, yet people need to learn to recognize him. But before decod- ing the God-experience among these contemporary, Charismatic-tinged Christians, Luhrmann traces their “experiential spirituality” back to post-1960s expressions of faith found in new paradigm Protestant Christian congrega- tions (first described by sociologist Donald E. Miller in Reinventing American Protestantism). Rather than invoking religious rituals that shift from the mun- dane to the transcendent, these evangelicals act on the conviction that the experience of God is intended to be utterly ordinary and everyday. God is not only present but immediately available and fully accessible. The expectation of spiritual intimacy fuels and legitimizes their distinct religious activity, includ- ing expressive worship styles, casual dress for corporate gatherings, and a liter- alist preaching of the that anticipates highly individualized meanings from the text. Connected to developments in the People movement, the growth of Charismatic ministries, the expansion of contemporary Christian music, and the streams of para-church efforts reaching out to young adults, the growth of this now pervasive religious orientation is especially rooted in the innovations of Southern ’s and Lonnie Frisbee at , Costa Mesa; these religious entrepreneurs in turn influenced , founder of the first Vineyard in Anaheim. The common sense spirituality found in their neo-Pentecostal churches readily affirm miracles,

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256 Book Reviews healing, ecstatic utterances, and (significantly for this study) a more immedi- ate, mystical connection to Almighty God. A basic goal for experiential Christians is to recognize the presence and voice of God. Yet, the teaching Luhrmann found among the descendants of these neo-Pentecostal churches indicates that believing in God is not an easy task. Creating the conviction of God as an intimate confidant is tied to a care- fully cultivated internal mental framework that is simultaneously hidden and strategically managed by believers. It involves great affectivity. Faith is deeply emotive, oriented toward the body, and immersed in a willingness to step away from straightforward empiricism. Great focus in books, bible studies, and con- ferences is placed on “the heart,” the core of emotional work. Understanding God involves reshaping emotional responses and engaging practices that invoke powerful emotions. Acting on emotions (whether felt or not) is impera- tive for being able to experience God as truly alive. Luhrmann repeatedly emphasizes that experiential Christians must “learn” how to have a relationship with God. She describes the achievement of hearing God as a learning process, one that is similar to learning a foreign language. Religion is learning to do, not to think. More specifically, churches teach inter- active connections to God to their members as a “skill,” one that is especially oriented toward prayer and Bible reading. Prayer means paying attention to internal experiences and distinguishing between self-generated thoughts and God-generated thoughts. Members are taught to see thoughts are really per- ceptions, i.e. stimuli that come from an external source. Reading the Bible is also a skill that involves interacting with God. Hearing God through scripture involves the skill of reading a shared text in such a way that it generates a pri- vate, individualized message. Believers come to pay attention to different types of experiences as forms of evidence for God’s intimate presence. Of course, obtaining proficiency in this skill implies levels of expertise (often called “dis- cernment”), such that some believers are better than others, and these can teach methods of discernment to others. Rationality is not the goal of their religious life; emotional satisfaction is. This is why “relationship” is emphasized rather than simple belief. Moreover, God is not distant, and he wants to be close to each one of us, but these believ- ers must constantly reaffirm that this is so. As a consequence, faith in an inti- mate, ever-present, and personally real God “demands constant vigilance from those who follow it” (312). And because God is available at any moment, believ- ers seek to pervade their religiousness into their everyday life. Remember— this is a responsive God, an interactive one that depends on proper interaction with him. Luhrmann calls him a “high-maintenance” God. A person must pay attention to proper cues in themselves and their world to experience; as such,

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