How do American evangelicals read the Psalms? Psychological anthropologist, Tanya Luhrmann, uses Psalms to study evangelical spirituality. She describes how psychological absorption in the sensory imagery of Psalms makes “God” real for evangelicals.

In 2012 Tanya Luhrmann published her psychological study of American evangelical spirituality, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. With this book, she added to her body of professional work that seeks to understand how diverse minds interact with and understand invisible beings. Although Luhrmann has studied schitzophrenia, dissociation, and other “exotic” mental processes (2001 & 2016) — and she worked through her own professional heritage in American psychiatry (Of Two Minds, 2001) — it was primarily her work with witches in Great Britain (1991) and Evangelicals in America (2012) that informed her most important theories on cognitive psychology, anthropology of mind, and cultural spiritualities. In these latter efforts, Luhrmann has often returned to the question: how can “rational” people come to believe in and interact with invisible beings?

Her most recent book, How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (2020), she extends her question about rational minds and invisible beings beyond Evangelicals, reflecting her more concerted efforts to study how people sense “the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths” (2021).

How do gods and spirits come to feel vividly real to people—as if they were standing right next to them? Humans tend to see supernatural agents everywhere, as the cognitive science of religion has shown. But it isn’t easy to maintain a sense that there are invisible spirits who care about you. In How God Becomes Real, acclaimed anthropologist and scholar of religion T. M. Luhrmann argues that people must work incredibly hard to make gods real and that this effort—by changing the people who do it and giving them the benefits they seek from invisible others—helps to explain the enduring power of faith. Drawing on ethnographic studies of evangelical Christians, pagans, magicians, Zoroastrians, Black Catholics, Santeria initiates, and newly orthodox Jews, Luhrmann notes that none of these people behave as if gods and spirits are simply there. Rather, these worshippers make strenuous efforts to create a world in which invisible others matter and can become intensely present and real. The faithful accomplish this through detailed stories, absorption, the cultivation of inner senses, belief in a porous mind, strong sensory experiences, prayer, and other practices. (How Gods Become Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others, 2020).

I want to accomplish three things in this brief on Luhrmann — in outline form:

(1) Describe how she used Psalms in her research with American evangelicals

(2) Summarize her psychological approach to cultural spiritualities

(3) Begin a critique of her definition of “religion” as overly imbricated with American “spirituality” and evangelical learning practices.

(1) The Psalms in Luhrmann’s research with American evangelicals

In When God Talks Back, Luhrmann ran a study asking volunteers (drawn from four evangelical churches in Northern California) to practice the kinds of spiritual disciplines fostered in evangelical churches. Her subjects agreed to spend four weeks in almost daily practice of an assigned spiritual discipline. They also agreed to take notes and to sit for several rounds of interviews before, during, and after their month-long spiritual training.

Luhrmann describes several experiences her study subjects and research informants had while engaging the Psalms:

• Psalm 23 — one study subject heard robotic voices that prompted her to go turn on the lights. She saw things out of the corner of her eye several times. And she had one more intense, memorable experience where an angel woke her up, impressed her with a “loud and vivid” presence, and gave her a sense of peace.

• Psalm 42 — one evangelical informant led a women’s prayer group that began with her teaching a lesson on Psalm 42. She encouraged prayer group members to visualize and personalize the metaphors in the Psalm, especially the sensory experience of being thirsty like the deer - which she generalized for them in several scenarios where one might feel “dry.” She ended the lesson with an invitation for women suffering from dryness to come forward and receive prayer while the rest of the group laid hands on her — a community support-action that was likened to quenching thirst.

• Psalm 73 — one informant described an emotional evening where she had to listen to her husband get ready for a date after they had recently agreed to divorce. She was so murderously angry that she prayed for God to immobilize her until he left the house, which she reports experiencing. Then her anger broke into action — she dramatically attacked his belongings.

When her husband left, the storm erupted. She took all his clothes out of the bed room and threw them in to the other room. She took everything he owned from the closet, the dressers, and even the walls and threw it out of the bedroom. She was breathing hard, worried that she would explode with the rage and the passion. I said, “God, you have to get ahold of me.” And I dropped—this was bizarre. I dropped to my knees, and there was a Bible that was open and it was Psalm 73. It was so bizarre. I remember dragging it over, and I just opened it up. It says in there,“ Even though I behaved like a beast before you, you took ahold of my hand and you led me.” And I was sitting there and I’m reading this and I stuck up my right hand and I felt something grab my hand and it shot through my body and I went, “Thank you,” and all of a sudden I just calmed down.” (Luhrmann, ch. 9 of When God Talks Back).

Notes:

• Her study involved asking volunteers (drawn from four evangelical churches in Northern California) to practice the kinds of spiritual disciplines fostered in evangelical churches — 6-7 times a week for four weeks, taking notes about their experiences each time. The Bible was central to two of the three spiritual disciplines:

  • for the practice of kataphatic prayer: the participant listened while “a biblical passage was read to background music, and then reread while inviting the subject to use all his or her senses to participate in the scene.” — One of the four biblical texts (and the only text from the Hebrew Bible) was Psalm 23 —> Luhrmann writes “Here is an example of the recorded instruction from the track on the 23rd Psalm: ‘The Lord is my shepherd... see the shepherd before you... see his face... his eyes... the light that streams from him...he turns to walk, and you follow him... Notice his gait...see the hill over which he leads you... feel the breeze over the grass... smell its sweetness... listen to the birds as they sing... notice what you feel as you follow this shepherd.’ On each track there were long pauses that invited the listener to carry out a dialogue with the shepherd.” Of this particular exercise, Luhrmann almost bragged: “They were lovely tapes, if I do say so: people cried, and sometimes they played them again and again.”

    • “The 23rd Psalm track went over the best, but not with everyone. “The word that immediately comes to mind is annoying,” one person commented.”

    • One of the subjects who listened to the 23rd Psalm — Luhrmann summarized her experiences: “She didn’t love the kataphatic discipline, at least at first. But it changed her. In the month when she listened to the tracks— usually late at night, so that she was drifting in and out of awareness as she sat (in her mind) on the grass with the shepherd in the 23rd Psalm track— she had a few funny, odd sensory experiences. Once she heard a robotic voice so vividly that she turned on the lights (in her real room) to see if any one was there. A couple of times she saw something out of the corner of her eye, turned, and found that there was no one. Then early one morning an angel woke her up. The angel was loud and vivid, and in its presence she felt what she called immaculate peace. “This was what I was hoping for in the first place, to be more in touch and more in tune with the Lord, and to hear his voice. To hear him, you know, speak to me.”

    • Luhrmann describes how a Vineyard pastor taught her to read the 23rd Psalm for sensory experience and trained perception (ch. 6) — “The Vineyard pastor Ken Wilson makes this point clearly in Mystically Wired:“ Words are useless without the imagination... So imagine that you are part of the scene the words invite you to imagine. Notice the greenness of the pasture [in the 23rd Psalm]. Feel the texture of the grass as you lie down on it. Stay there for a while in the grass. Notice the smells. Feel the warmth of the sun.”

  • for the practice of study: “we gave people thirty-minute lectures from the Teaching Company. We started out having people listen to lectures on the philosophy of religion but soon shifted to lectures by Luke Timothy Johnson on Jesus and the Gospels. (For the record, I bought thirty copies of these lectures, one for each iPod.) I had listened to these lectures myself and loved them; they taught me how to read the Gospels.”

Luhrmann, When God Talks Back — ch. 9 on darkness: — on Psalm 42 in the Sunday teaching in a women’s prayer group one winter morning.

• “She spoke on Psalm 42: As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God? My tears have been my food day and night, while men say to me all day long,“ Where is your God?” Sometimes, she said, it feels like God destroys hope. You’re so dry that the only wet thing in your life is your tears, and they are running out. Perhaps your prayer for healing hasn’t worked; perhaps things are not happy in your marriage; sometimes, she said, it’s something like wondering why, fifty years after segregation, kids still go to all-black schools. The psalmist is asking one question, the when question — “When will God come through?” Those around you are asking the where question — “Where is your God anyway?” It had been a hard time for her, she said; she felt like a deer dying of thirst. How, in the face of the intense thirst and emptiness, did you retain your hope in God? she asked. She did not invite us to remember Jesus’s suffering. She did not suggest that we seek for ways that we had sinned. She told us that we needed each other and to stay in fellowship — to keep coming to church and to house group and to men’s ministry and women’s ministry — and to cling to God anyway. Then she asked everyone who felt parched to come forward so that other people could stand around them and lay hands on them in love and pray for them. The concept of dryness naturalizes the failure to feel God’s intimacy, just as the concept of spiritual maturity naturalizes prayer failure. These concepts allow people to hang on to a belief that the world is good by giving them a way to acknowledge the excellent evidence.”

Luhrmann, When God Talks Back — ch. 1 on Vineyard peeps reading the BIble:

• when evangelicals say that God speaks to them through the Bible, they mean that when they are reading, they will have a physical, emotional response to a passage: the passage “grabbed their heart,” “wouldn’t let them go,” “stuck in their minds.” Jane explained: “I was reading in Judges and I don’t even know why I was reading it. There’s a part where God talks about raising up elders in the church to pray for the church. And I remember, it just stuck in my head and I knew that the verse was really important and that it was applicable to me. I didn’t know why. It was one of those, let me put it in my pocket and figure it out later.” How, I asked, did she know that it was important? “Because I just felt it. I just felt like it really spoke to me. I don’t really know why. And a couple of days later a friend asked me to be on the prayer team, and it was like, wow, that’s what it was.” “God is always talking to you,” Sam told me. “You just have to learn to listen. He always talks to you through theBible. When you read his word, something will grab your heart.”That process turns the act of reading a text into a two-way conversation. The literary critic Stanley Fish has argued that there are no texts, only readers, because each time you read a book, it is in effect new for you; each time you read, you bring to the text a new perspective, and you are, to some extent, a new person. When he made the argument, Fish was thinking only of the reader’s responses. Vineyard congregants read their Bibles in a conversation with God as if both they and the Bible were changing—not the words on the page but the way the words intentionally ead them to respond. They describe reading as if they were conversing: they look for the way God answers, inspires, consoles, enlightens by changing the way that the text reads. God is understood to be communicating when, as one congregant put it,“ a verse just jumps out at me, ”or when you have a powerful bodily feeling — you feel peace, or intense joy, or suddenly you feel very tired, as if a burden has been lifted and now you can sleep.

• (from ch. 9 on darkness): “It is tempting to look at this modern evangelical experience of God and see it as profoundly individualistic: me and my relationship with God. And that view certainly captures something real. But it takes a great deal of work for the community to teach people to develop these apparently private and personal relationships with God.”

Luhrmann, When God Talks Back — ch. 9 on darkness — Reading Psalm 73

• “she told God that she wanted God to pin her to the bed, because otherwise she would kill the man. She seems to have really considered killing him. And then she found that she could not move, that she was physically immobilized. When her husband left, the storm erupted. She took all his clothes out of the bed room and threw them in to the other room. She took everything he owned from the closet, the dressers, and even the walls and threw it out of the bedroom. She was breathing hard, worried that she would explode with the rage and the passion. I said, “God, you have to get ahold of me.” And I dropped—this was bizarre. I dropped to my knees, and there was a Bible that was open and it was Psalm 73. It was so bizarre. I remember dragging it over, and I just opened it up. It says in there,“ Even though I behaved like a beast before you, you took ahold of my hand and you led me.” And I was sitting there and I’m reading this and I stuck up my right hand and I felt something grab my hand and it shot through my body and I went, “Thank you,” and all of a sudden I just calmed down.”

(2) Luhrmann’s psychological approach to cultural spiritualities

Luhrmann’s “absorption hypothesis” (2010 with Nusbaum and Thisted).

Luhrmann, When God Talks Back

• “absorption is the mental capacity common to trance, hypnosis, dissociation, and to most imaginative experiences in which the individual becomes caught up in ideas or images or fascinations. That is not to say that absorption is equivalent to hypnosis or dissociation or trance: manifestly it is not. But absorption seems to be the basic, necessary skill, the shared capacity of mind that allows what we choose to attend to become more salient than the everyday context in which we are embedded. It is the ability to use a book to take your mind off your troubles. That cuts both ways, of course. Some people use novels to keep the world at bay long enough to recover and regain the strength to return. Others use novels—or soap operas, or reality television—to escape and ignore the troubled marriage or the needy child. In both cases, individuals use their mind to change their relation to the reality they perceive. That is why absorption is central to spirituality. “ (Luhrmann, When God Talks Back) —

Luhrmann concluded from this study that such practices of absorption:

• “proclivity for absorption seems to make a difference”

• “To my mind, the most intriguing results from the experiment were about sensory overrides, those odd moments when you hear a voice when you are alone, or you see something that isn’t there—not in a table-and-chairs kind of way—or when you feel or taste or smell the immaterial.”

• “absorption and training seemed to work together” —> (recall ch. 1: “Learning to taste wine is all about training perception.”)

• “Why should training the imagination lead to unusual sensory experiences?”

• “the kataphatic practice seemed to give people more of what the scriptures promise those who turn to Christ: peace and the presence of God. In the kataphatic group, people were more likely to say in their follow-up interviews that they felt they had slipped into an intensely focused state during the month. They were more likely to say that the month was more intensely emotional but less stressful for them; in fact, for those people who had been praying for less than half an hour a day when they came in, their stress dropped significantly more over the course of the month than those who listened to the lectures. Those who did the kataphatic exercises were also significantly more likely to say that they had had a near-tangible experience of God’s presence during the month; that God had become more of a person in their life; that they had had more “loud” thoughts and images that seemed different from everyday thoughts and images, even though they were still thoughts and images in their minds. And they said that God had spoken to them (as some of them put it) at last.”

(3) Critiquing Luhrmann’s definition of “religion”

as overly imbricated with American “spirituality” and evangelical learning practices

Religion vs. Spirituality in America

As an American herself, Luhrmann’s theories have developed alongside major sociological shifts in American religion.

I increasingly see a popular and even academic (esp. in psychology) distinction between religion and spirituality. This traces perfectly with American religious demographics. There seems to be a deeply under-theorized/analyzed vernacular about how psychologists refer to “religion” — my impression is that they are themselves embedded in, and responding to, the demographic shifts that have seen Americans shed “the chains” of religion (its rituals, laws, institutions, and traditions).

• In 2013, the American Psychological Association’s Handbook on Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality said this domain was “rapidly growing.” In 2020, explaining why they added the word “Spirituality” to the second edition of the Handbook of Religion and Mental Health (1998), the editors stated: “We seem to be witnessing a spiritual awakening within the combined mental health disciplines” (Introduction to Handbook of Spirituality, Religion, and Mental Health, 2020). The “APA Resource Document” published in 2020 explains some of this history.

• The trend toward religious disaffiliation in America has been documented numerous times in the past 20 years, in major national studies like the General Social Survey (GSS) and recurrently in Pew’s 2007 and 2014 Religious Landscape Studies, aspects of which were updated in 2019, 2021, 2023. 2024. While “religion” is on the decline, spirituality is becoming the vernacular. For instance, the 2023 Pew study finds that 70% of Americans describe themselves as spiritual.

What I find truly (and deeply) disturbing about this rapidly growing field — in which Luhrmann is intellectually embedded — is that as “religion” is getting decimated, spirituality is on the rise.

I currently define “spirituality” as that feature of religion that is centered in individual conscience. But what I want to immediately make clear is that, although spirituality may be defined against various structural features of religion — individual conscience is almost fully formed by social worlds, political forces, economic activities — that is to say, “spirituality” appears to be a domain of personal freedom, but that “freedom” is probably best viewed as a momentary reprieve from new forms of subjectivity. The fact that the freedom of conscience is now a right shared with corporations in the U.S. should give anyone pause about treating “spirituality” as some kind of pure form of authentic personal experience.

And this leads me to my critique of Luhrmann…

Sidebar: As a feminist, as a critical academic, and as someone who has personally beneffited from reading Luhrmann — I have three layers of energetic response to Luhrmann’s writings. But critique? I want to explain what I think it is that I am doing when I “critique” Luhrmann. First of all, I confess I am ornary and frustrated that the word “critique” is going so quickly out of vogue in many popular and academic circles. Critique literally saved my life — or perhaps better, it offered me the only pathway out of sacred desperation (see my Prelude) — so my devotion to critique runs deep — critique, not just as a personal practice of individuation to discern the forces of subjectification in the world, but critique as an energetic sociality that unites me with others in solidarities of freedom and dignity. I consider critique something more like co-analysis (one of the reasons I am so drawn to Glissant’s poetics of Relation). But since I am not friends with Tanya Luhrmann, I have never met her, I don’t get to engage the most beautiful forms of co-analysis with her. I am drawn to the glittering intelligence, capacious insight, and humanity of her work. Sometimes, when this happens, like with Édouard Glissant’s poetics of Relation (which I’m writing about in this series), I am a giddy, enthusiastic follower. But other times, like with Luhrmann — the terrain being mapped starts to overlap substantially with my own experiences and analyses — my respect and enthusaism is expressed in the desire to co-analyse. So I offer the following…

Critiques of Luhrmann

Luhrmann’s interest in psychological absorption as the cognitive practice that kindles spiritual experience relies on the assumption of a universal cognitive capacity to “go beyond.” Indeed, Luhrmann’s very definition of religion centers the “porous boundary between mind and world,” given the en-cultured ways people “understand and relate to the mind” (Luhrmann, “Porosity is the Heart of Religion,” 2022). Luhrmann has also attempted to describe the culture of mind at work in (American) psychology — I am abundantly inspired by her really important book, Of Two Minds (2001), which attempts to map her own discipline’s two prevailing understandings of mind. But this does not go far enough. Even beyond the psychological and psychiatric cultures of mind in her field of knowledge — I think she neglects even more crucial modern conditions that have shaped the historical discipline of psychology and its Enlightenment concept of mind.

In an attempt to stay clear in the “free writing” I am doing here — I will offer concise statements of critique that all fall into this much larger portrait of neglected modern conditions of cognitive psychology:

(1) The very concept of “going beyond” the self is economic and socially structured (Glissant helped me think about this).

(2) Luhrmann seems to mean spirituality, not religion — for religion consists in many mundane actions that do not require absorption and/or do not kindle invisible others — like most ocassions of following Jewish kosher laws, cooking bread for a church soup kitchen, helping build the palace of your divine king, or sewing a kalagas tapestry to donate to a Buddhist temple.

(3) Peter Berger’s work on “worlds” and religious cognition is one way to “fix” Luhrmann’s lack of attention to context.

[I may add more over time]

Luhrmann restricts her definition of religion to experiences of perception. The only “contingent” feature is encultured concepts of mind/world. That is to say, the only differences between people’s experiences are literally in their minds, shaped by their concepts of mind and ideas about how their mind interacts with the world. Luhrmann pays far too little attention to the “worlds” of her subjects. I think she neglects worlds because she is finding that psychological absorption is available in any context — even if not everyone “advances” in its disciplines. Good God — this sounds so Christian Protestant! —> “Many are called, but few are chosen” (Matt. 22:14); “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:13); “Press on toward the goal” (Phil. 3:14); “for power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9).

To be fair, psychological absorption is about losing “touch” with one’s context in order to focalize imaginary/mental experiences. But Luhrmann mistakes this mental loss of touch with context as constitutive of absorption, not one of its conditions — she fails to account for how lack of context is one of absorption’s effects. 

• It makes sense that a psychologist would not be accustomed to analyzing politics, economics, technology, and society, instead collapsing them under an ill-defined category of culture. But these are the contexts of human life that structure experiences of power — and power is what evangelicals are drawn to, in my experience. The power of felt faith. The power of passionate belief. The power of healing. The power of prayer. The power of authoritative speech. The power of growth, success, and wealth under the sacred banners of hope, blessing, and the “fruits” of faith. Numerous scholars of religious studies are positioned better than I am to trace out all the theories of religion that can better contextualize Luhrmann’s psychological findings. But I will gesture towards Peter Berger’s theory of religion, which will help me develop this point about power. 

• Berger coined the term “sacred canopy” (1967) to describe everything that makes religion real within human communities. For Berger, sacred canopies collect people within shared worlds. Worlds themselves emerge over time through all kinds of acts of human construction, not just religious acts. In that sense, Berger shows how religion is a specific kind of world maintenance. Indeed, religion is most noticeable in the places where a community’s world is falling apart; Worlds with less social stability seemed to need more religion to maintain them. 

• Luhrmann was clearly struck by how her subjects lost touch with their contexts to enjoy the benefits of increased spiritual perception. But what would a rigorous study of her subjects’ political, economic, technological, and societal contexts reveal about the social patterns of spiritual experience? Put another way, does the loss of “world” power correlate with increased motivation to cultivate psychological power?

• Peter Berger observes that “the community of faith [is] a constructed entity—it has been constructed in a specific human history, by human beings” (A Rumor of Angels).

I would love to see Luhrmann return to the kind of socio-political analysis she conducted in The Good Parsi: The Fate of a Colonial Elite in a Postcolonial Society (1996) …

During the Raj, one group stands out as having prospered and thrived because of British rule: the Parsis. Driven out of Persia into India a thousand years ago, the Zoroastrian people adopted the manners, dress, and aspirations of their British colonizers, and their Anglophilic activities ranged from cricket to Oxford to tea. The British were fulsome in their praise of the Parsis and rewarded them with high-level financial, mercantile, and bureaucratic posts. The Parsis dominated Bombay for more than a century. But Indian independence ushered in their decline. Tanya Luhrmann vividly portrays a crisis of confidence, of self-criticism, and perpetual agonizing. — This story highlights the dilemmas and paradoxes of all who danced the colonial tango. Luhrmann's analysis brings startling insights into a whole range of communal and individual identity crises and what could be called "identity politics" of this century. In a candid last chapter the author confronts another elite in crisis: an anthropology in flux, uncertain of its own authority and its relation to the colonizers.

Her conclusion that anthropology has an uncertain relationship to the colonizers should form the basis of her next meditation — on “psychology” and the field of cognitive psychology.

To study Christianity in America, and especially Christian minds, one requires a richer description of religion’s political nature and how American Christian histories thread through “world” domains that are structured by power.