A hyperreal God and modern belief

Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 4, August 2012 371

! 2012 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2012/5304-0001$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/666529

A Hyperreal God and Modern BeliefToward an Anthropological Theory of Mind

by T. M. Luhrmann

This article argues that there is an epistemological style associated with much American evangelical Christianity thatis strikingly different from that found in never-secular Christianities. This epistemological style is characterized bya playful, self-consciously paradoxical framing of belief-claims in which God’s reality is both clearly affirmed andqualified. One can describe this style as using an “epistemological double register” in which God is described asvery real—and as doubted, in some way. The representation of God generated by this complex style is a magicallyreal or hyper-real God, both more real than everyday reality and in some way fictive. The article goes on to arguethat these epistemological features can be understood as generated by and generative of particular theories of mind.The article argues for the development of an anthropological theory of mind in which at least four dimensions areimportant: boundedness, interiority, sensorium, and epistemic stance.

In a famous series of papers, the anthropologist Robin Hortoncontrasted African traditional thought with Western science.His first goal was to rescue African religious thought fromthe charge of irrational confusion and incoherence that gen-erations of interpreters, some of them anthropologists, hadlaid at its door. They are brilliant, audacious papers, layingout side by side with ex nihilo grandeur what Horton tookto be the basic principles of African traditional thought andWestern secular scientific philosophy. He pointed out thatneither the African accounts of gods, ancestors, and spiritsnor the Western scientific accounts of atoms and electronsare commonsense models of the world.

Take the exasperated, wondering puzzlements of Levy-Bruhlover his “primitive mentality.” How could primitives believethat a visible, tangible object was at once its solid self and themanifestation of an immaterial being? How could a manliterally see a spirit in a stone? . . . Yet these questions of Levy-Bruhl’s have a very familiar ring in the context of westernphilosophy. Indeed, if we substitute atoms and molecules forgods and spirits, these turn out to be the very questions . . .posed by modern scientific theory in the minds of Berkeley,Locke, Quine and a whole host of European philosophersfrom Newton’s time onwards. (Horton 1967:52)

Both African gods and Western atoms, he argued, are ex-planatory theory, and they function to articulate unity beneathapparent diversity, simplicity beneath apparent complexity,and order and regularity beneath disorder and anomaly. An-

T. M. Luhrmann is Watkins University Professor in the Departmentof Anthropology at Stanford University (Building 50, Stanford,California 94305-2034, U.S.A. [[email protected]]). Thispaper was submitted 13 X 10 and accepted 9 III 11.

thropologists, he argued, had not noticed how the godsworked as theory for Africans because they had no moreunderstanding of basic chemistry than a cat.

Horton was not saying that traditional African religiousthought was a kind of science. He was saying that it was atheory and that the correct question to ask about such seem-ingly strange ideas as water spirits was not whether they weresensible in the abstract but how and why they were used. Astheories, he argued, they come into play when common sensefails us, and they work—as above—to unify, order, and struc-ture our chaotic world. Of course, the religious thinking oftraditional Africa and the theoretical thinking of the modernWest, including science, were different, but their difference,he argued, could best be captured by what he called the “open”and “closed” predicaments, a simplification of Karl Popper’saccount of the social conditions necessary for the emergenceof science. “What I take to be the key difference is a verysimple one. It is that in traditional culture there is no de-veloped awareness of alternatives to the established body oftheoretical tenets; whereas in scientifically oriented cultures,such an awareness is highly developed” (Horton 1967:155).

And he sketched out the consequences that followed fromsuch awareness of alternative explanations and such tolerancefor ditching a less adequate explanation for one more com-pelling: a nonmagical attitude toward words, the abstract sys-tematization of ideas, reflective thinking, a clarification orstreamlining of explanatory motives.1

The contrast left to one side the nature of Western religion.If Horton had considered it, he probably would have iden-tified liberal Protestantism—perhaps Unitarianism—as thenatural outcome of faith in a scientific society. He would have

1. He develops the contrast in his collected essays (Horton 1993).

372 Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 4, August 2012

anticipated a church retracting its claims to supernatural mir-acles, pulling back its commitments to swift creation in theface of geology and evolutionary theory. He would have ex-pected the church to narrow down its theoretical domain tothe spirit rather than allow it to serve as a general purposetheory of the world. In a throwaway line he said as much:“When we hear a western theologian proclaim loudly the‘modern discovery’ that the essence of religion has nothingto do with explanation and prediction of worldly events, butis simply communion with God for its own sake, we are onlypartly right when we sneer at him for trying to disguise retreatas advance” (Horton 1967:165). Horton would predict thatin an open society, Jesus would become a wise but humanteacher whose life story became cloaked by myths that thenaive take to be history but that are in fact no more thanmetaphor and symbol.

And from that perspective, of course, Horton would bedead wrong. There are pockets of liberal Christianity left inAmerica and Europe, but Christianity around the world hasexploded in its seemingly least liberal and most magical forms:in charismatic Christianities that take biblical miracles at facevalue and treat the Holy Spirit as if it has a voltage (Jenkins2002; Robbins 2004b). Moreover, theologically conservativeChristians are found not only in Africa and Melanesia but inthe heart of the open, pluralistic, science-oriented societieswe call the “West.” A long line of sociologists have predictedthe demise of religion and magic in the face of better theoriesof existence, and they are wrong. Weber’s disenchantment hasnot taken place. That brute fact, and the politics associatedwith it in America at least, has perplexed and frustrated manysocial scientists. What is the matter with Kansas?

I want to argue that at least in the West, this magical, mi-raculous Christianity is in fact a direct product of the opennessHorton (and so many others) has described, and that what ismodern about it (or late modern, or postmodern) is the wayit deliberately cultivates the as-if imagination (Vaihinger 1935).What is striking about contemporary Christianity, at least inthe United States, is that it is entirely framed by the exquisiteawareness that there are other theories, both religious and sci-entific, that one can use to explain the world. This might seemto be a surprising claim because one might think of conservativeChristianity as literal minded and epistemologically concrete.It is easy to infer from this that there is little tolerance of doubt.Yet I suggest that the current Christian moment, at least in theUnited States, is deeply shaped by the awareness of doubt andthe pull of other ways of thinking. One of its responses to thatdilemma has been to encourage a deliberatively playful, imag-inative, fantasy-filled experience of God that is as unlike tra-ditional African religious thought as it is unlike Western science,and as alien to the world of medieval spirituality as the conceptof a photon.

I wish to be clear that the claim is a cultural claim and nota psychological one. I am not claiming that so-called traditionalpeoples lack the capacity for imagination or play. I am claimingthat late modern secular society values and cultivates an explicit

as-if engagement in the spiritual domain and that it does soin a way that seems distinct from never-secular religiosity.2 Itdoes so by explicitly inviting the suspension of disbelief as aresponse to the skepticism inherent to an open society—openin Horton’s theoretical sense—and as a way to engage peoplein the epistemological claims of a church under attack. It pre-sumes a skepticism and a disbelief that it sets out to overcomewith a supernaturalism that is both vividly, concretely real and,at the same time, as playful as a kitten.

This empirical observation—that there is a playful episte-mological style particular to late modernity—has a powerfultheoretical payoff. It draws to our analytic attention the ob-servation that the way people understand their minds affectstheir mental experience. This understanding of the mind is notwhat we mean by “subjectivity.” It is a second-order model ofthe mind: a “theory.” The term “theory of mind” has an es-tablished role in the developmental literature, where it refersto the child’s ability to infer that people know different thingsbecause they have different “minds.” In the developmental lit-erature, this acquisition of mind is usually treated as universaland independent of culture. Here I argue that these ideas aboutideas are also shaped by local culture and that they have realconsequences. I will argue that we see these consequences inthe way late modern Americans experience God.

These evangelical Christians believe that God is undeniablyreal and actively involved in their daily lives. He is alive forthem in a quite literal way. Yet when they enact that literal-ism—when the pastor suggests, for example, that they putout a second real ceramic cup of coffee for God—they becomeplayful. Why? That doesn’t seem to make sense. Yet it doesmake sense when we realize that this Christianity asks thatcongregants develop a theory of mind that straddles multipleepistemic frames simultaneously (I will call this an “episte-mological double register”). This Christian theory of mind iswhat makes the ambiguity about the coffee exercise under-standable and what makes it necessary. Its playfulness is whathelps Christians to handle their awareness of doubt by re-framing the context of belief. It can also teach us what wecan learn by developing an account of an anthropologicaltheory of mind.

Experiential Christianity

In the late 1960s, the United States saw the emergence of astyle of spirituality that seemed to many observers to be rad-ical and new. It was, of course, not entirely new. The UnitedStates is a deeply religious country. For more than 50 years,about 95% of Americans have said that they believe in God,or in a power higher than ourselves, with great consistency(Gallup and Lindsay 1999). But every so often, the country’sreligious enthusiasm seems to crest. Historians have calledthese periods of religious excitement “great awakenings.” They

2. I owe the term “never secular” to a conversation with Joel Robbins.

Luhrmann Toward an Anthropological Theory of Mind 373

appeared (more or less) from 1730 to 1760, from 1800 to1840, from 1890 to 1930, and from 1960 to the present (Fogel2000; McLoughlin 1978). During these periods, Americanshave been more likely to have had unusual spiritual experi-ences in which they fainted, spoke in tongues, saw visions,and so forth, and they have been more likely to seek out andpublicly celebrate these changes in consciousness as proof ofGod’s living presence in their lives. These are not, of course,the only times when God has inflamed the American senses.Nevertheless, America does seem to have periods when greatspiritual passion enters many humble homes. The decadessince the 1960s appear to be such a period.

What has struck observers is how different the post-1960speriod was from the sober 1950s. Two-thirds of the “babyboomer” generation stopped going to churches and temples asadults. Close to half of them have now returned to religiouspractice, but not to the mainstream, hour-long services of theirchildhood (Roof 1993). They have joined churches, temples,and odd little groups that put intense and personal spiritualexperience at the center of what it is to believe. This is thegeneration of the so-called New Age. Millions of Americanstried meditation, bought tarot cards, and explored non-Chris-tian spiritualities. Mainstream congregations plummeted—Episcopalians, for example, lost nearly 60% of their member-ship.3 There arose a style of Christianity that called itself “evan-gelical,” a term that usually implied that the congregant believedthat salvation depended on a personal relationship with Jesus,that the Bible is either literally true or near-literally true, andthat, to some extent, one should “evangelize” and share thegood news with others. More generally, it implied that one’sChristian stance should involve effective action in the world.4

It became phenomenally successful. In 2004 and 2005, acrossfour Gallup polls, when asked, “Would you describe yourselfas a “born again” or evangelical?” on average 43% of Americansresponded “yes” (Newport and Carroll 2005).5

Many of these evangelical churches believed that congre-gants, although not all of them, could interact directly andimmediately with God.6 Such Christians are now commonly

3. Among the illustrative numbers are these: per 1,000 Americans,membership in Assembly of God churches has risen by 230% since 1960;the Pentecostal Church of Christ by 775%; and the Pentecostal Assemblyof the World by 1,934%. Meanwhile, membership in the PresbyterianChurch has fallen by 50%; the United Church of Christ by 60%; theUnited Methodist Church by 52%; and the Episcopalians by 58% (Year-book of American Churches: http://www.demographia.com).

4. The term “evangelical” is not new, but it began to be used in a newway. This new understanding was initially introduced as a critique offundamentalist Christianity in the late 1940s and then broadened in the1960s and after. See Marsden (1987) and Smith (1998).

5. Gallup polls that ask that question more stringently show smallernumbers. For example, when people were asked to affirm the three classicquestions often associated with evangelical Christianity (Have you hada born-again experience in which you committed your life to Jesus? Haveyou tried to encourage a non-believer to believe in Jesus? Do you believethat the Bible is the actual word of God?), the Gallup numbers came inat 22% in May 2005, although—worded somewhat differently—at 39%in 1996 (Gallup and Lindsay 1999). It is also true that those affirming

called “charismatic” or “neo-Pentecostal.” Scholars use theseterms with varying degrees of specificity. Some speak of three“waves”: Pentecostalism, which emerged in Los Angeles in1906 under the leadership of a man who had been inspiredby a Kansas pastor (Anderson 1979; Wacker 2001); the Char-ismatic Catholic Revival (CCR), which is typically dated to a1967 retreat at Duquesne University and which exploded inthe 1970s (roughly one-fifth of all American Catholics de-scribe themselves as “born again,” which is usually taken tomean that they embrace some aspects of the CCR; Csordas1994); and the “Third Wave” or “neo-Pentecostal” experi-entially oriented Protestant evangelical movement thatemerged from the Jesus People movement and has shapedmany churches (Luhrmann 2004; Paloma 2003; Springer andWimber 1988). All “waves” interweave claims about biblicalliteralism and a conservative approach to biblical truth withan expectation that congregants will experience God directlyin their bodies.

In general, “charismatic” is a theological term that refersto the “gifts” of the Holy Spirit, which include visions, proph-ecy, spiritual healing, and tongues. In Pentecostal Christianity,church services often incorporate tongues and prophetic per-formances.7 Many neo-Pentecostal churches have more con-ventional public services, but their congregants may embracesome charismatic practices. Moreover, many congregationswhose official theology appears hesitant about charismaticphenomena nevertheless are home to many experientially ori-ented congregants.8 A 2006 study by the Pew Forum found

the single question “Would you describe yourself as born again or evan-gelical?” include 19% of Catholics. Gallup concludes that three in 10adult Americans could be described as white evangelical Protestant. Thisis consistent with the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey re-port (Kosmin and Keysar 2008).

6. The numbers suggest that this style of spirituality is really quitecommon in the United States. The 2006 Pew Forum on Religion andPublic Life found that 68% of all Americans completely or mostly agreethat angels and demons are active in the world today, 58% of all Amer-icans pray at least once a day, 47% of all Americans completely agreethat miracles occur today as in ancient times, 36% have experienced orwitnessed the divine healing of an illness or injury, and 24% receive adefinitive answer to a specific prayer request at least once a week. Forcomparative figures outside of the United States, see Coleman (2000);Jenkins (2002); Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (2006).

7. The original Pentecostals usually held that the essential sign ofsalvation was “tongues,” the production of language-like sound that isnot, in fact, a spoken human tongue and is interpreted as spiritual com-munication. These days, only 60% of the congregants in American Pen-tecostal congregations have spoken in tongues (Pew Forum on Religionand Public Life 2006), and participants in both the Catholic and Prot-estant “waves” typically treat speaking in tongues as a joyous event, butnot one required for salvation.

8. For example, one thinks here of the California megachurches likeHorizon Christian Fellowship or Saddleback Church. Horizon ChristianFellowship is associated with the Calvary Chapel movement, whosefounding pastor (Chuck Smith) initially encouraged intense spiritual ex-perience and then grew more cautious, so that the “official” position ofHorizon is noncharismatic. Yet I know from personal fieldwork thanmany Horizon congregants embrace prophecy, speak in tongues, andexperience God in their bodies (Luhrmann 2004). Saddleback’s pastor,


that 23% of all Americans could be described as “renewalist,”by which they meant those who are members of a Pentecostalchurch, those who call themselves Pentecostal, those who callthemselves charismatic, and those who speak in tongues atleast several times a year. As a result, we can estimate thatabout half of all of those who describe themselves as “evan-gelical” are also charismatic or experientially oriented. Thatis, they expect congregants to experience God directly andpersonally.

Another source that captures the shift toward experientialevangelical Christianity in the United States comes fromGeorge Marsden’s (1987) study of the Fuller Theological Sem-inary. Fuller was founded in 1947 with the explicit aim ofbringing evangelical Christianity into the mainstream. By anyaccount it has succeeded, and the seminary has become inmany ways the heart of American evangelism. Fuller wasfounded with an explicit anticharismatic stance.9 That haschanged. By 1982, fully 44% of all Fuller students describedthemselves as charismatic, and 43% said that they had spokenin tongues at least once. By the end of the 1980s, one-thirdof all American adults were involved in some form of ex-periential religion, Christian or otherwise (Fogel 2000:25).What has emerged from this historical shift is a Christianityembraced by many, many Americans in which the Bible istaken to be near-literally true and God is understood to besupernaturally present, as he is in the Hebrew Bible. And inthis Christianity, God is accessed (deliberately) through playand imagination in a form that is dramatic and striking.

The Fieldwork

In April 2004, I joined a church that many scholars take tobe representative of this charismatic evangelical Christianity:the Vineyard Christian Fellowship (Miller 1997). This churchwas one of eight such churches in the Chicago area. For me,this was a continuation of ethnographic work begun in Cal-ifornia on the growing points of American religion (see Luhr-mann 2004). For 3 years, I attended most of the “Sundaymorning gatherings,” joined a weekly house group for a year,and participated in many of the courses run by the church(for example, the Alpha course, designed to convert the cu-rious and bring the new believer to greater commitment) andby other Vineyards (for example, a local Vineyard’s courseon “The Art of Hearing God”). I have formally interviewedover 30 members of the congregation, and I have talked in-

Rick Warren, specifically warns the readers of his phenomenally successfulPurpose Driven Life (2002; over 30 million copies sold) that they shouldnot seek God in order to have intense experiences—thus revealing thatmany of his congregants are deeply interested in an experiential spiri-tuality.

9. Conservative Christian churches that are not charismatic can tracetheir commitments back to this original fundamentalist stance. Thesemore experiential churches are in many ways best understood in contrastto them. See accounts by Ammerman (1987) and Harding (2000).

formally with dozens more.10 I knew these people well. Forevery ethnographic vignette I report, I have many more, andI am confident that the aspirations and ambivalences I reportwere not the result of my anthropologist inquiries but weregenuinely felt by congregants.

This church is one of what the sociologist Don Miller calledthe “new paradigm” Christian churches, among them thechurches that belong to the Vineyard Christian Fellowship,Hope Chapel, Calvary Chapel, and Horizon Christian Fel-lowship—hundreds and hundreds of churches (Bialecki 2009;Miller 1997). Such churches pair conservative Christianitywith a casual, youthful social style tolerant of the rock music,dancing, and movies labeled as vices by their conservativeChristian forebears (admittedly, they reshape those activitiesinto Christian forms). They typically meet in gyms, notchurches; they use a rock band, not a choir; their membershipis young and their music contemporary. They are often white,middle-class, and suburban, although not exclusively so. Theydescribe themselves as “Bible based.” By this they mean thatthe Bible is the only real authority—not the church, nor thepastor, nor any scholar. They share, then, the basic commit-ment to a literal or near-literal truth of the Bible that weassociate with evangelical Christianity (see also Bielo 2009b;Crapanzano 2000).11

For the Vineyard, this commitment to biblical truth meansthat the miraculous events described in the Bible take placetoday. As the Gospels tell the story, the first disciples healedwith supernatural power, cast out demons, saw visions, andhad prophetic dreams. Thus—the church concludes—mod-ern disciples should have these same abilities, which are givento them by God. At the end of the service each Sunday,congregants are invited up to the front so that other people(the prayer team) can pray for them. That prayer is under-stood to be supernaturally effective. Many congregants talkabout feeling the power of the Holy Spirit move through themand about miraculous healing, prophecy, and the experienceof having God speak to them. They explicitly talk about whatthey call a “supernatural God.” One congregant told me thatthe “great secret” of being a Christian is that “God can dostuff in the world.” By this she meant that God’s supernaturalpower could change the world in concrete ways and a con-gregant could help that to happen through prayer. Yet thecharismatic orientation is gentle. Sunday morning gatheringsare usually conventional. People rarely speak in tongues dur-

10. I should also say that in doing this work, I joined a communityof other anthropologists seeking to understand contemporary conser-vative Christianity and to form what Joel Robbins describes as an “an-thropology of Christianity.” That group includes Jon Bialecki (2009),James Bielo (2009b), Fenella Cannell (2006), Simon Coleman (2000),Vincent Crapanzano (2000), Matthew Engelke (2007), Susan Harding(2000), Webb Keane (2007), Rebecca Lester (2005), Danilyn Rutherford(2006), Bambi Schieffelin (2002), Matt Tomlinson (2009), and others.See also the work of Proudfoot (1985) and Taves (2009).

11. Jon Bialecki gives a somewhat different (but not inconsistent)interpretation of the Vineyard approach to scripture in his essay in JamesBielo’s The Social Life of Scriptures (2009a).


ing the service (although perhaps one-third do in privateprayer), and no one keels over, “slain in the spirit.”

Like other new-paradigm Christian churches, the Vineyardalso describes itself as “Jesus centered.” By this they meanthat the point of one’s life on earth is to develop an intimatepersonal relationship with Jesus. In a Vineyard church, Godis present not only as majesty but as a person: indeed, as afriend. He is expected to be interested in the most trivial ofyour concerns, as a friend would be—in your haircut, yourvacation plans, your quarrel with your boyfriend. The con-gregant expects to develop that personal relationship throughprayer, and prayer is usually presented as something that isdifficult and hard to learn. And God is expected to speakback, not only through scriptures and through circumstancesbut in supernatural ways. Congregants experience God’s com-munication through dreams, in mental images that “pop” intotheir mind during prayer, in words that appear in the sameway and are sometimes understood to be prophetic, and intingling and goose bumps and powerful adrenaline rushesthey associate with the Holy Spirit. As a popular book onprayer explains, “It is a walk—a supernatural walk with aliving, dynamic, communicating God. Thus the heart and soulof the religious life is learning to hear God’s voice and de-veloping the courage to do what he tells us to do” (Hybels1988:125).

In this church, God is, in fact, so real and so concretethat—because a congregant does not, in fact, experience aninvisible God as a visible human—a congregant cannot helpbut confront faith as paradoxical.

The Invitation to “Just Try It”

The need for paradox arises because these Christians presumethat the way educated Americans understand the mind andthe world leaves no room for God. They presume that edu-cated Americans think that what is real is outside the mindand material; they presume that educated Americans thinkthat the job of the mind is to reason about what’s real.

The founders of the Vineyard movement put the problemof secular doubt front and center in their basic theology. Theproblem with being a Christian in America, they argued, wasan entrenched secular skepticism. The Vineyard’s leader, JohnWimber, used the term “power evangelism” to describe histheological vision. In the 1970s, “power encounter” was aphrase used by charismatic missionaries to describe a visible,practical demonstration that Jesus was more powerful thanthe local pagan spirits, a sort of supernatural shoot-out(Springer and Wimber 1988:xiv). In the 1980s, Wimber ex-panded the concept more broadly into the encounter of aWestern Christian with the Holy Spirit; for him the real enemywas not a pagan faith but the Enlightenment, which led peopleto doubt God’s supernatural power.

Melinda [was] a young person who manifested all the signsof demon possession. When John Wimber first encounteredMelinda—he had been called late one night by a scared

friend of hers—the demon said through Melinda, “You can’tdo anything with her. She’s mine.” Eventually the demonleft Melinda, but not until first putting up a fight. An eventlike this in a remote village in Africa would result in manymembers of the tribe converting to Christianity. In theUnited States it only raises questions about the relationshipbetween mental illness and demonic delusions. (Springerand Wimber 1988:xviii)

In Power Evangelism, his primary text, Wimber spells out hisunderstanding of an impoverished Enlightenment frameworkso basic to Westerners that they could not even see its as-sumptions as merely cultural, as opposed to real truths aboutreality (Wimber 1985:95–96).

First, Wimber said, the Western worldview is secular. West-erners assume that we live in a material universe closed offfrom divine intervention, in which we find truth only throughempirical study and rational thought. Second, the Westernworldview is self-reliant. Westerners feel confident in theirability to control their environment and feel little need forany help from anything outside themselves. Third, the West-ern worldview rests on materialism. Westerners assume thatonly that which is seen to be tested and proven is true. Andfinally, the Western worldview rests on rationalism, whichaccepts reason as the only and highest authority in life. Thisculture, Wimber argued, was the greatest impediment to aChristian’s authentic personal encounter with Christ. In fact,it was the greatest impediment to the development of Westernculture itself. “The Enlightenment failed to deliver what itpromised, because objective moral truth cannot be derivedfrom human experience and human reason alone” (inSpringer and Wimber 1988:xxi). Now, Wimber argued, welive in a world in which most intellectuals have abandonedthe hope that we have a purpose for being, and we havecreated a moral crisis and a miasma of existential doubt.

Many of the books written for evangelical Christians seemto share these views, and they specifically set out to help readersoverride their hesitation by encouraging an imaginative playthat invites a suspension of disbelief in the face of presumeddifficulty in accepting God’s real reality. They themselves speakof the importance of imagination and play in coming to belief.C. S. Lewis expressed the impulse clearly in a chapter in MereChristianity actually titled “Let’s Pretend.” In it he states, “Letus pretend in order to make the pretence into a reality” (1980[1952]:193). He pointed out that in addressing yourself as God’schild (in the Our Father prayer), you are putting yourself inthe place of Jesus. The theme of imitating Christ to becomemore Christlike is an old Christian theme, and Lewis could beseen as alluding to this tradition.12 Yet he writes explicitly aboutpretending, not about imitating. Moreover, Lewis is best knownas the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, and it is into whim-sical, Narnia-like imaginative pretense that so many evangelicalChristian books now invite their readers. C. S. Lewis wrote in

12. For example, Thomas a Kempis, De imitatione Christi.


the 1940s and 1950s, but he is if anything more popular now.A few years ago, Time called him “the hottest theologian of2005” (van Biema 2005). I believe that he is read so widelynow at least in part because of his insistence that a “let’s pre-tend” invitation facilitates belief.

One of the most popular books in this genre, The SacredRomance, begins by inviting readers not to be reliable, respon-sible adults. “Our inner story is most audible in the movies,or sometimes in the middle of the night when the inner editorthat tells us how we ‘should’ respond to the world has goneoff duty” (Curtis and Eldredge 1997:13). That inner story issaid to be our yearning for God. The authors tell us that it isour “life’s enchantment” (1997:14)—it is a romance. Romance,they say, is “the place we both long to see again and fearreturning to for fear that our memories will be stolen from us”(1997:14). Once, the authors say, we felt the romance.

I first remember the romance calling to me when I was a boyof six or seven, just past dusk on a summer evening, whenthe hotter and dustier work of the farm had given way toanother song. Something warm and alive and poignantlyhaunting would call to me from the mysterious borders ofthe farm that was my world. . . . I remember being in thatplace until the music of life would fill me with the knowledgeof some Romance to be lived; an assurance that there wasreason to joust against dragons with wooden swords. . . . Themagic assured me of loves and lovers and adventures to bejoined and mystery to be pursued. (1997:16)

Then they explain that God is that romance. We need God,these authors say, because to be with God is to live thatromance, to recover the imaginative vividness of childhood,and through that fantasy to feel alive once more.

In Reading the Romance, Radway (1984) argues that ro-mantic fiction describes the world as it should be, rather thanas it is—and that the women who read such romances areable, in reminding themselves of the way the world shouldbe, to live more effectively in the world as it is. This appearsto be the argument in The Sacred Romance, except that theauthors periodically remind their readers that the romance isreal. And yet the emphasis on the make-believe and pretendis striking. The Sacred Romance compares the scriptures, ap-provingly, to Tolkien’s Middle-earth and to C. S. Lewis’s Nar-nia (Curtis and Eldredge 1997:143). The authors say that theGospel is a fairy tale and that this is its wonderful strength—and the only difference between the Gospels and fairy talesis that the Gospel happens to be true. And still: they havecalled the Gospel a fairy tale.

Meanwhile, one of the most remarkable features of thisbest-selling book is that it presents God as more humanlyreal than even in the Hebrew Bible, where God talks directlyto Abraham and Moses. The authors want their readers toimagine God not as the dispassionate author of a novel inwhich the reader has a part but as one of the charactersalongside the reader, suffering and triumphing, crying andlaughing. They want the reader to imagine a God who is as

affected by the human reader as the human is affected byGod. “When we see God as the Hero of the story and considerwhat he wants for us, we know one thing for certain: we affecthim. We impact the members of the Trinity as truly as theydo each other” (Curtis and Eldredge 1997:82). God is greatand mighty, but he is also just like you. They seem to pointout that because this is an impossible contradiction, you mustreach it through your childlike imagination. You must go ona quest for God that is foolish and irrational not only in theeyes of the world but in your own.

A skeptical reader might respond that Christian belief hasalways been imagined as foolish. Paul does famously say that“we are fools for Christ” in his first letter to the Corinthians(1 Cor. 4:10). The search for Christ has been a romance, aquest, a heart’s journey, since the Gospels were written. Andyet it is striking how the language of as-if pretence pervadesthis late modern literature of faith and how it serves as adeliberate and self-conscious attempt to pull a believer outof an everyday world of skeptical, sober appraisal. “I am afool for Christ!” shouted Wimber; it became the title of hisautobiographical documentary. These books do not set outto prove that what you thought was a fairy tale is in fact true.They set out to have you experience yourself in the delightfulfantasy of a fairy tale and then take that experience seriously.And so the books and the workshops and the sermons oftenhave a come-hither quality to them: they want you to try, toovercome what they expect to be your natural skepticism andyour fear of looking foolish.

That invitation—just try—runs throughout the church. Inthe summer of 2006, I went to a regional Vineyard conference,these days a sort of cross between a nineteenth-century tentrevival and an academic symposium. Well over 1,000 peopleattended. I went to one of the morning workshops on proph-ecy. Every seat was taken, and people were lined up along thewall at the back. Anyone could be prophetic, the speakerbegan. You have to choose to hear prophecy, she said, becauseif you do not choose to have the experience you will not haveit, and you must believe that the source of what you haveheard is God. In other words, she implied to the audience,the experience of prophecy is not so very different from or-dinary life. It arises from the way you interpret your expe-rience, and unless you are willing to interpret yourself ashaving heard from God, you will not experience yourself ashaving done so.

So her suggestions for practice were suggestions about howto pay attention to your inner world, how to see images,thoughts, and feelings as significant and as communicationsfrom an external mind. “Practice silence, and start small,” sheexplained. The idea was that you might feel something orexperience something—an image, a thought, a snatch of scrip-ture—that would not be from the recesses of your humanmind but sent by God. She told people that they should seta timer for 5 minutes and wait—not with a particular questionin mind but open to anything that might happen. Just in case,


she went on, keep a pad of paper beside you, to write downwhat he gives you.

“Just try it,” she said. The word “try” implies the possibilityof failure. The audience seemed to have little difficulty grasp-ing this possibility. All of the questions were about tentative-ness and worry: how they would know, in the moment, thatthe thought they had was really from God. The speaker cau-tioned the audience not to take themselves too seriously—“ifyou feel confident, I don’t want that prophetic word fromyou, because it is probably you and not God.” In responseto their anxiety her answer was clear: “Just do it! Sometimesyou’ll be wrong. Just do it anyway.”

The Problem of Secular Doubt

The invitation to “just try it” makes explicit the presumptionof doubt among congregants. This is the preoccupation of asecular world. In the world of the early Roman Empire, thesupernatural acts reported in the scripture were used as proofto convince the skeptical observer that Jesus was indeed thedivine—much as supernatural acts are used in the Hebrewscriptures to demonstrate that this God, Yahweh, is more pow-erful than others one might worship. Few people in Palestineor Carthage would have doubted that supernatural power ex-isted, although doubt about the claims of individuals was ofcourse common.13 The only question was whether Yahweh or,later, Jesus commanded it. To be sure, some scholars have ques-tioned the presumption of the absence of doubt in the pre-Enlightenment world. Rome was certainly a pluralistic societyand in that sense “open.” Expressing his outrage in a 2008essay, the medieval historian Stephen Justice claims that scholarssuch as Charles Taylor grossly overestimate the presence ofbelief in the premodern world (Justice 2008). And yet whatJustice’s counterevidence demonstrates is that medieval Chris-tians doubted specific people and specific claims: whether so-and-so had really experienced God, not whether God existedat all. That is not the issue Taylor (or Popper) is raising. Taylordraws our attention to doubt in the entire system, to doubt ofthe very need for the idea of the supernatural. This is also thecase that Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1977) makes in his essay onbelief: that in the modern period, belief comes to carry itsreferential sense from the possibility of nonbelief. In late mod-ern America, the supernatural is not taken for granted, evenin a society in which the vast majority of people believe in God.People know that there are other people who do not believeor who believe differently.

When Horton published his famous papers in 1967, thesociological consensus was that secularization was inevitable.This was widely known as the “secularization hypothesis.” Itwas summarized in an orderly way by Peter Berger the sameyear.

Secularization has resulted in a widespread collapse of theplausibility of traditional religious definitions of reality. . . .

13. For example, see the discussions by Fox (1986) and Pagels (1995).

Subjectively, the man in the street tends to be uncertainabout religious matters. Objectively the man in the street isconfronted with a wide variety of religious and other reality-defining agencies that compete for his allegiance or at leastattention, and none of which is in a position to coerce himinto allegiance. (Berger 1967:127)

As societies industrialize, Berger argued, their political econ-omy tore loose from the reins of traditional religious insti-tutions. Religion became a private matter, and as it becameprivate it also became individualized, a matter of choice orpreference. “Such private religiosity, however ‘real’ it may beto the individuals who adopt it, cannot any longer fulfill theclassical task of religion, that of constructing a common worldinto which all social life receives ultimate meaning, bindingon everybody” (1967:134). Religious allegiance becomes vol-untary and thus uncertain. Pluralism emerges. There are al-ternate religiosities, alternate ways of doing things, alternateways of making sense of life. Spirituality becomes a consumergood, and adherents sample and consider and discard as ifthey were buying cosmetics in a grocery aisle. And indeed,what is sampled comes to feel cosmetic: perhaps nice, perhapsuseful, scarcely necessary. “The pluralistic situation . . .plunges religion into a crisis of credibility” (1967:151).

As the evangelical movement became a tidal wave, not onlyin the United States but across the globe, the evidence seemedto prove this story wrong. And yet the basic insight thatpluralism transforms faith is undoubtedly correct. Many,many Americans describe themselves as Christians, but theyattend a wide variety of churches, they move regularly, andthey recognize that others do not share their views. They arewilling to say that they do not care where someone goes tochurch, as long as the person goes to a church (Wolfe 1999),and they are likely to pick and choose what they believe tosuit their interests (see the discussion of “Sheilaism” in Habitsof the Heart: one of the subjects, Sheila, described her religiouscommitment as “Sheilaism” rather than aligning it to a tra-ditional faith [Bellah et al. 1996]). This has been true sincethe nineteenth-century immigrants brought Catholicism intoa Protestant country, but the range of religious choices hasincreased exponentially, along with the awareness that thereare other decent ways to live. These facts have led CharlesTaylor to a bleak conclusion about contemporary religiosity,although more than Berger he writes with the dismay of aman of faith in the face of faith’s erosion.

The change I want to define and trace is one which takesus from a society in which it was virtually impossible notto believe in God, to one in which faith, even for thestaunchest believer is one human possibility among others.I may find it inconceivable that I would abandon my faith,but there are others, including some possibly very close tome, whose way of living I cannot in all honesty dismiss asdepraved, blind, or unworthy, who have no faith (at leastnot in God, or the transcendent). Belief in God is no longeraxiomatic. There are alternatives. And this will likely mean


that at least in certain milieus, it may be hard to sustainone’s faith. There will be people who feel bound to give itup, even though they mourn its loss. This has been a rec-ognizable experience in our societies, at least since the mid-nineteenth century. There will be many others to whomfaith never even seems an eligible possibility. There are cer-tainly millions today of whom this is true. (Taylor 2007:3)

Little wonder that Talal Asad (2003) has recently called foran anthropology of secularism (see also Habermas 2002). Onecan quarrel with the characterization of ours as a secular age,but one cannot quarrel with the observation that faith is nowlived with the acute awareness that one can choose not tobelieve—not only not in this specific faith, but in the tran-scendent at all.

The play-like nature of this secular-sited Christianity maybe able to help Christians to handle the presence of thesedoubts by reframing the epistemological context of belief. Thepoint about play is that it is distinct from nonplay: a “freeactivity,” as the historian Johan Huizinga defined it in HomoLudens, “standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life inbeing ‘not serious’ but at the same time absorbing the playerintensely and utterly” (1971 [1938]:13). When dogs play, theysometimes signal the play with a distinctive play-crouch, andthey infer from the crouch that the snarling intensity is notto be taken as aggression. Gregory Bateson (1972) talkedabout this as a layering of epistemological frames. There is a“play frame” and a “reality frame,” and when we play, we actwithin the play frame. We bathe the teddy bear in invisiblewater and we dry him off with a towel of air, and we are notconfused when our hands do not get wet.14

But when evangelicals pretend to experience God gigglingalongside them, the play frame is also a reality frame. Theyknow that they are “pretending” to laugh with God. At thesame time, pretend talk with God is not just “let’s pretend.”It is, as congregants insist, a way of encountering God. Thecrucial part of play in a Christian context is that the playclaim that God is an imaginary companion is also a real claimabout the nature of the world, a claim about the objectivereality of the Holy Spirit and God’s supernatural presence. Itis play, but not play, the place where—as Huizinga said ofsacred play in general—“the distinction between belief andmake-believe breaks down” (1971 [1938]:25). Yet the framingclaim “this is play” does not quite disappear. While Huizingabelieved that play is an element of all sacred action, the ex-plicitness of the dual signaling among these evangelical con-gregants is striking. I thought of this as a kind of epistemo-logical double register: real but not real, not real but more

14. I am quoting here from Paul Harris (2000); other play theoristsinclude not only Gregory Bateson and Johan Huizinga but also RogerCaillois (1960), Peter Stromberg (2009), and others cited later in thisarticle. Joseph Bulbulia develops the idea of this play as “decoupling.”His discussion (2009) seems to be congruent with the approach I amdeveloping here.

than real, absolutely real for all time but just not real in thatmoment.

The Epistemological Double Register

It is in this context that I wish to point out a striking qualityof the Vineyard neo-Pentecostal presentation of God. On theone hand, God is presented as more real and more presentthan in many other Christian traditions. God is understoodto speak back in dialogue with his followers. Here are someexcerpts from widely read evangelical texts in this neo-Pen-tecostal style:

Prayer is two-way fellowship and communication with God.You speak to God and He speaks to you. It is not a one-way communication. (Blackaby and King 2004:174)

From the first moments in the garden of Eden, mankindwas introduced to the voice. Adam and Eve communed withtheir creator. When they called out to God, they didn’t getsilence. (Feinberg 2005:3)

A little education, a little training, and a little stepping backfrom the sophistication of adulthood can make it actuallypossible not only to hear and know God’s voice, but toactually carry on a two-way dialogue in intimate commun-ion with Him. (Virkler and Virkler 1986:26)

God is presented in church not only as alive but as personallypresent in the way that Christ was present to his followers inthe Book of Acts.

It’s really important to understand that God is not an im-personal force. Even though He is invisible, God is personaland He has all the characteristics of a person. He knows, hehears, he feels and he speaks. (Bickel and Jantz 1996:40)

God is also imagined almost as a substance through the formof the Holy Spirit. This imagining is drawn from the Pen-tecostal tradition. The Holy Spirit flows through the body andmanifests in tongues, prophecy, and supernatural healing. Inthese churches it is understood to be near-tangibly present.I have had congregants tell me to attend the second of thetwo morning church services because more Holy Spirit hasaccumulated in the room. Congregants work hard to allowthemselves to experience God as vividly real for them.

At the same time, congregants often mark their own directexperience of God as not real, as a product of their imagi-nation. God is deliberately presented as real like a person. Heinteracts, he responds, he even chats. Congregants are en-couraged to experience God as so real through using theirimaginative resources. Yet they then often indicate in someway that this experience is only play.

One of the most remarkable enactments of the church’sself-conscious cultivation of childlike, “let’s pretend” play asa means to make God real is the encouragement to treat Godlike an imaginary friend, as if he were standing right besideyou, the way toddlers treat the dragons who need a place setfor them at the table and the invisible friends whom the adult


is not allowed to sit on in the car. For example, one Sundaythe pastor told the church that in the morning we shouldhave “coffee for two.” The idea was to pour an actual cup ofcoffee for God, to sit down with your own steaming mug andone for him, and to learn to talk in a comfortable, relaxed,and intimate way, as if you were talking to a friend. The pastorwas clear that the coffee cup was a prop and that using propscan help focus the imagination. He was also clear that thisimagining would—as C. S. Lewis suggested—help to makeGod real for the congregants. The pastor did not think thatin imagining God, he was saying that God was imaginary.Instead, he was presuming that it was hard for congregantsto believe deeply that God was real, and that their imagina-tions could help them.

This presumption of the need to imagine God is at theheart of the way that prayer is taught in these churches.“Prayer is an unnatural activity” opens a best-selling book onprayer written by the pastor of Willow Creek, an evangelicalchurch in a Chicago suburb with around 25,000 congregants.He explains that to pray, it helps to have “a secret place whereyou can really pray. I created such a prayer room near thecredenza in a corner of my former office. In my prayer placeI put an open Bible, a sign that says ‘God is able,’ a crownof thorns to remind me of the suffering savior, and a shep-herd’s staff that I often hold up while making requests” (Hy-bels 1988:51).

I never met anyone who actually poured that second cupof coffee. I did know people who said that they had pulledout a chair for God or laid out an extra dinner plate, butthey seemed vaguely embarrassed by this. More people toldme that they knew people who did this than confessed tohaving done it themselves. But congregants often describedGod as someone you had to get to know the way you wouldget to know a friend. You had to spend time with him, hangout with him, get to know him. And to do that, you had tolearn to talk to him as if you were chatting with an ordinaryperson who was right there in front of you, as if you weresitting down in a bar with a couple of beers. As one congregantexplained, “It is like having an imaginary friend in a sensebecause I mean I would talk, talk to him all the time like he’salways next to me. The only way I would say that it differsis that you know that he’s there.” Does it feel, I asked, as ifthere’s a person walking right beside you? “Definitely.” Andyet when it came to his college exams, this man felt the needto take time from his Bible study to prepare for his exams.This made him feel guilty because he attributed his reallo-cation of his time to his doubt in God. “I know that I couldspend all this time with my Bible and pray and stuff and stillhave enough time to study to the point where I still get anA on those exams. I just don’t do it because I’m so concernedthat if I don’t do it my way that it’s not gonna work out.And that shows lack of faith in me.”

I did know people who went on what they called “datenight with God.” Only women would use this phrase, al-though men would talk about spending private time with

God. “Date night” usually implied setting aside the eveningto talk to God and getting some food and going to a niceplace to do it. “I will set aside times where I’ll have date nightwith God,” a single woman in her twenties told me. “Espe-cially when the weather is really nice, and I can go to thepark and I can take a Subway sandwich with me and just sitthere. It’s almost like a conversation then, where we’re talkingabout His children and we’re talking about what’s going onin my life and what He’s doing in the world, that sort ofthing.” Yet this woman giggled when she told her fiance thatshe was going on a date: she teased her boyfriend, secure intheir mutual understanding that this date was really pretend.She cherished the time she spent one-on-one with God, andshe clearly took it very seriously. Far more than a congregantin a mainstream Protestant church, she deliberately behavedas if God was a real person, present in the world by her side.But she told me with embarrassment that she knew that shewas really talking to herself, and she never bought a secondsandwich for him.

It was as if people overreached to make what they reachedfor more real. “You really need to ask God about the littlethings,” Elaine instructed me as I drove her home one after-noon. We had been to a conference in which the leader hadgiven us an exercise to help us learn to hear the Holy Spirit.She had held up her key ring, explained some six keys (thefront door of her house, the back door, the church office, hercar, etc.). She told us that she would think of one of them, andtell the Holy Spirit which it was. We, in turn, were to ask theHoly Spirit to tell us which she had chosen. We sat while sheshut her eyes and prayed to the Holy Spirit, and then weobediently shut our eyes and prayed to the Holy Spirit to revealthe answer to us. Then the leader tried again with coloredribbons and finally with paper boxes that held little treasures.

Elaine had reluctantly admitted to me that she thought thatthis was silly, but she went on to say that there was nothingtoo trivial to pray about. In fact, she thought that learningto hear God about the everyday things helped you to listento him when it really counted. This was something that manycongregants said. Elaine explained that she had been tryingto trust God with everything. She went on to say that onEaster morning, a few weeks earlier, she’d stood in front ofher closet and asked God which shirt she should wear to theservice. She would be playing her violin with the worshipteam band. The word “blue” popped into her head and sheknew that this was God’s answer. But when she put the blueshirt on, her bra showed, and so she put on a black oneinstead. Later in church, the pastor came over to chat to theworship team and said, “You’re all in blue!” Elaine told methat she felt really stupid then. From her perspective, thepastor had confirmed that God had wanted her to wear theblue shirt—and she hadn’t. She hadn’t listened to his voice.Despite her clear commitment to God’s reality, she treatedthe particular moment of listening for his voice more as akind of make-believe. Another woman who also asked Godabout what to wear gave this remarkably candid account: “I


definitely do that. When I can’t decide what to wear. Like,God, what should I wear? And you know, then I kind offorget about the fact that I asked God. I think God caresabout really, really little things in my life. I mean I know Godcares, but I don’t expect him to tell me what to wear. I’mlike, ‘Oh, I think I’ll wear that’ and forget I even asked God.But I also believe in like looking for God in little things.”

It is this self-conscious combination of reification and qual-ification that I call the “epistemological double register.” Peo-ple repeatedly spoke and behaved as if God were present bytheir side, speaking to them and with them as if God were ahuman among humans. They did so following the explicitdirection from the pulpit, from the many books that theyread, and from their fellow congregants. They would oftenexpress no doubt that God existed, that he cared about themdeeply, and that he wanted a personal relationship with them.They spoke as if they expected God to take a concrete, specificinterest in the details of their lives. And yet specific storiesabout setting out coffee for two, or going on date night withGod, or learning to listen to God in the little things, weretreated with a light, self-conscious touch. People were alwayscautious about specific instances of hearing from God andhesitant to attach too much to their own interpretation ofwhat they thought that God had said. They behaved both asif God was foundationally real and as if their particular ex-periences of God were deeply satisfying daydreams that theyhad no difficulty recognizing as daydreams.

How representative are these ethnographic vignettes of con-gregants in non-Vineyard churches? It is hard to say. But Iwould remind readers that the Pew Forum found that 23%of all Americans said that they were “renewalist,” a term theyuse for those who describe themselves as Pentecostal, char-ismatic, or who speak in tongues at least several times a year.I would remind them that the books I have been citing, whichencourage this play, are read far more widely than in this onedenomination. The Purpose Driven Life, which explains that“God wants to be your best friend,” has, at 30 million copiesand counting, arguably outsold any hardback book in thiscountry except the Bible. At least two works of contemporaryPentecostal theology, Wolfgang Vondey’s Beyond Pentecostal-ism (2010) and James K. Smith’s Thinking in Tongues (2010),argue that Pentecostalism’s playful spirituality is an importantpart of what makes their spirituality distinctive: its creativity,openness, surprise. God is inherently dynamic and interactive.Smith writes that “central to a Pentecostal construal of theworld is a sense of ‘enchantment’” (2010:39). All of this sug-gests that the self-conscious paradox and play may be widelypresent beyond the Vineyard.

Never-Secular Christianity

I take this self-conscious use of play to manage doubt to becharacteristic of modern neo-Pentecostal spirituality andquite lacking in never-secular Christianities. Such societies doof course face the problem of whether the Christian God

exists, but the ethnographic literature presents the challengein never-secular societies as one of shifting from one spiri-tuality to another, rather than the problem of living with theconstant awareness of the possibilities of disbelief in the su-pernatural itself as an ontological reality.

In Becoming Sinners, for example, Joel Robbins (2004a)presents a vivid account of a Melanesian community whochose to adopt Pentecostal Christianity. Robbins is clear thatthis conversion is the community’s own self-determinedchoice. Their Christianity was not imposed on them by eithermissionaries or neighbors. The heart of Robbins’s ethno-graphic challenge is to defend persuasively the claim that thischoice changes the cultural system dramatically against theanthropological suspicion (as evidenced in Comaroff and Co-maroff 1991) that the conversion to Christianity is a super-ficial veneer over a fundamentally non-Christian spirituality.Robbins’s clear evidence for deep change in his ethnographicsite is the degree of what he calls “moral torment” experiencedby the Urapmin. People felt moral torment because theirsociety had once a pre-Christian model of public intention(or will), in which private thoughts are not regarded as know-able or relevant, and then adopted a model of the mind inwhich all deviant (“willful”) thoughts, let alone public ex-pressions, are known by God and are damnable. The dramaof the ethnography is the utter despair that the Urapmins feelwhen they know themselves to have failed and the intenseritual activity they use to counteract their failure.

At least in Urapmin, the Christian life is impossible to live.There are two senses in which this is so: first, the Christianmoral system conflicts with the demands of Urapmin sociallife in such a way as to make its breach inevitable; second,the system in and of itself defines success in such a way asto create the conditions for people’s failure to meet its de-mands. (Robbins 2004a:247–248)

And in response: “To an observer, one of the most strikingaspects of contemporary Urapmin life is the density of ritualbehavior that marks it. Christian ritual activity is omnipresent:people are engaged in it from morning to night, in the villageand in the bush” (Robbins 2004a:259). This is not a societyin which doubt about supernatural ontology is the primaryproblem.

Birgit Meyer’s account of the never-secularized GhanaianEwe does present a social world in which the traditional pre-Christian faith is still alive, but here the problem is that thespirits of the traditional faith are understood, by Christians,to be demons. Both the Christian and the pagan supernaturalremain real; the pagan supernatural has, as it were, simplychanged its charge. That was what the missionaries accom-plished. “These powers were to be subsumed under the oldimage of the Devil, functioning as a sort of sponge absorbingthe old spiritual beings” (Meyer 1999:103). The strategyworked: the Ewe became engrossed with demonic issues,which Meyer argues became a way for them to handle theirambivalence about modernity. Meyer argues that what made


Pentecostalism so much more appealing than its Pietist pre-decessors is that Pentecostalism provided, in the form of thevivid experience of the Holy Spirit, concrete action againstthe devil and evidence of the devil’s vanquishment. CharlesTaylor (2007) has been taken to task for treating Ewe subjectsas simplemindedly emblematic of the non-West, and it is truethat his language can be read as clumsy. Yet his main pointwas to argue that the imagination of the supernatural is, inthe main, different among the Ewe than among (for example)middle-class white Canadians. The Canadians live in a worldin which the entire category of the supernatural can be dis-missed. Meyer does not give us an ethnographic picture ofEwe living in a world in which atheism is a constant presence.For her subjects, the problem is what should be identified asdemonic and what to do about it. Nor do the Christian Eweseem exactly playful about Christian ontology. It really mattersto them that the devil may be present. They may disagreeabout what is demonic—but they do not seem to doubt thatthere are demons.

The Christians Webb Keane describes in Indonesian EastSumba (Keane 2007) also struggle between religious worldsbecause for them, too, the words that summon the paganspirits are still powerful. The Dutch reformers understoodthat their role was to transform the local custom and to drawin and convert the unredeemed, so they used local words andritual phrases to convey the meaning of their new and dif-ferent God. This made the Sumbanese Christians exception-ally uncomfortable, and they did all they could to avoid theselocal reminders on the grounds that they might bring thepagan spirits back to mind and possibly into active life. Bythe same reasoning, those who were not yet converted foundit difficult to believe that it was possible to speak directly toa creator God. To reach that God you needed to travel by thepaths of the ancestors, which prescribed the words and prac-tices necessary to get through. As a result, it was not easy forthe Protestant missionaries to achieve their goal.

Keane is interested in the clash of semiotic ideologies andin what he takes to be the failure of the Calvinist belief thatlanguage is the pure and transparent expression of innerthought and can connect us directly with God. Keane thinksthat this semiotic ideology is mistaken. Yet he depicts theSumbanese Christians not so much as recognizing this featureof Christianity (its failure) but as struggling to be the im-possible subjects he believes that Calvinist Christianity de-mands. These Christians fail to fully liberate themselves fromtheir traditional entanglements, and they feel inadequate intheir faith. One woman tells him how awkward she feels inchurch, which she attends most Sundays. “There are all thesepeople you don’t know,” she explains (Keane 2007:217). Butalthough Keane sees more of an argument about the ChristianGod’s reality in his ethnographic setting than Robbins orMeyer sees in theirs, he does not depict a people grapplingwith disbelief in the supernatural altogether, and although hedescribes one puckish figure, a reader does not have the senseof a playful epistemology.

Matthew Engelke presents a Zimbabwean church that takesso seriously the semiotic epistemology Keane lays out thatthey refuse to read the Bible at all. The Friday Masowe Ap-ostolics receive the word of God “live and direct” from theHoly Spirit, and they distrust the Bible because it is old andstale. It can be misinterpreted and misused. It also came fromabroad. “We learned that we could not trust the whites ortheir book,” they told him (Engelke 2007:5). These Christianswant a faith, Engelke reports, in which things—like the Bi-ble—do not matter. The heart of the ethnographic materialis what Engelke calls the “problem of presence,” which I taketo be the problem of knowing when an invisible agent is athand and active. American evangelicals also directly confrontthe problem of presence; arguably, the problem of presenceis the central problem of any faith. But the great challengefor the Masowe is to experience God directly, without me-diation. In the healing rituals, the practice that Engelke saysmost directly confronts their commitment to pure immate-riality, they chose healing objects that carry the holy spiritbut are purely ordinary, meaningless little pebbles. They usewater and honey that become spiritually transformed but arenot powerful without the transformation. And they seem tobelieve that ordinary humans are too limited to rely on thefully immaterial: “even ‘strong’ Christians cannot distancethemselves from the material,” they imply (Engelke 2007:243).The problem of presence for the Masowe, in short, is not thatinvisibility implies nonexistence, which is the problem forAmerican evangelicals. The problem of presence for the Ma-sowe is not getting distracted by stuff on the way to God.

In never-secular societies, where the reality of the super-natural as a category has not been profoundly questioned,doubt is focused on specific supernatural claims—the realityof non-Christian spirits, the validity of spiritually chargedmechanisms, the efficacy of particular prayers. In never-sec-ular societies, congregants do not need help to persuade them-selves to take the entire enterprise seriously in the first place.And in none of these societies do we find an interest in anexplicitly as-if engagement that helps to place the spiritual inan epistemological space that is neither straightforwardly realnor transparently fictional. I turn now to a theoretical inter-vention that may help to explain how the response to a secularsociety may provoke this more complex stance.

An Anthropological Theory of Mind

The broader purpose of this article is to draw attention towhat we might call an “anthropological theory of mind”: anaccount of the way that second-order models of the mental—thoughts, memory, awareness, imagination, perception, andso forth—are shaped by the local context and in turn shapethe expectations of mental experience by those who holdthem. These charismatic evangelical Christians presume amodel of mind that shapes the way they imagine and respondto God. What can we learn from this?

By the end of the twentieth century, anthropological in-


terest in epistemology and ontology had waned in the UnitedStates, but it has emerged with a new vigor in European andLatin American anthropology, and in America one can seesigns of a revival of interest in the anthropology of knowledge(Farquhar 1994; Rumsey and Robbins 2008). This is good.The problem of understanding other minds, and what DanSperber (1996) called “apparently irrational beliefs,” is one ofthe oldest puzzles in our discipline.

To describe this puzzle by speaking of an anthropologicaltheory of mind is to see it not as a problem of how otherpeople (nonliterate, premodern, protoscientific) think but asthe puzzle of the way that culture shapes the expectation ofwhat counts as knowing and how knowing is known. Theterm “theory of mind” has a well-defined meaning in devel-opmental psychology (Wellman, Cross, and Watson 2001).There, the phrase refers to a toddler’s ability to draw theinference that another person’s knowledge is not identical tohis or her own. When very young, a child talks and acts asif what he or she knows, all people know. (For example, avery young child may “hide” by closing her eyes, as if becauseshe cannot see, others cannot see either [Flavell, Shipstead,and Croft 1980].) The toddler learns, in short, to infer thatsomeone else has a mind: that what they know is not identicalto what the toddler knows but depends on what has happenedto them and how they make sense of those events. The classictheory of mind experiment involves an experimenter whohides a toy in front of a parent and a child. Then the parentleaves, and the experimenter hides the toy in a new place,which the child can see. When the parent returns, the ex-perimenter asks the child where the parent thinks that thetoy is hidden. Very young children point to the second hidingplace. Somewhere between 2 and 3 years of age in the UnitedStates, at any rate, toddlers point to the first hiding place.They know that the parent has not seen the toy hidden asecond time and thus has no knowledge of the move. Thesetoddlers have developed a “theory of mind.”

The reason to talk about an anthropological theory of mindis because anthropologists have pointed out that the modelof mind inferred by the child is also a product of culture. Itis true that all toddlers will eventually draw the conclusionthat what they know is not known by all others, but it is alsotrue that their understanding of this difference has many var-iations. Among the Yucatec Maya, for example, a child willlearn that when you say something that is false, it is a lie—even if you thought it was true. (In other words, if you thinkthat your brother is at home and say that he is, but he hasgone out, you are taken to have lied.) Eve Danziger (2006)points out that the Mayan example implies that the self-conscious understanding of intention often assumed to belearned by the toddler (she calls this the strong Griceanmodel) is not universally shared.

An anthropological theory of mind would ask about thespecific features of mind modeled in different social worldsand the way those features shape inference and experience.There are already two burgeoning areas of research within

anthropology that could be described as doing this kind ofwork, both of which have their primary lives outside of theUnited States.

One of them is the evolutionary psychology school asso-ciated with Pascal Boyer (now at Washington University, butformerly of Cambridge and the CNRS [Centre National dela Recherche Scientifique]), Scott Atran (CNRS), and JustinBarrett, Emma Cohen, and Harvey Whitehouse (all now orformerly at Oxford; Atran 2002; Barrett 2004; Cohen 2007;Whitehouse 2004). This school seeks to identify the featuresof mind that can be plausibly attributed to supernatural be-ings. For example, they argue that the most effective attri-butions (meaning those that are adopted most easily by otherpeople) are “minimally counter-intuitive,” meaning that theyare different enough from the everyday to be memorable butnot so different to be bizarre. They evoke some prior onto-logical categories, but in a new way. “The religious conceptpreserves all the relevant default inferences except for the onesthat are explicitly barred by the counterintuitive element”(Boyer 2001:73). Emma Cohen (2007) has recently publishedan account of what she takes to be the model of mind peopleadopt to experience possession.

The second is perspectivism, which emerged out of theattempt to make sense of the apparently strange claims madeby Amazonians (that a woman can become a jaguar, or thatjaguars are really people, for example). The approach is as-sociated with the work of Eduardo Vivieros de Castro, at theNational Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiroin Brazil, and his students, like Aparecida de Vilaca. In per-spectivism, humans and nonhumans are understood to havesimilar intentions and interiorities: similar minds. Their re-lationship is determined more by the predator-prey relation-ship than by the human-animal relationship (thus the term“perspectivism”: relationships change as one becomes hunteror hunted). Philippe Descola, a student of Levi-Strauss andthe current holder of his former chair in the College de France,developed the argument to suggest that throughout the so-cieties described by ethnographers, one finds four ontologicalstyles: animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism (Ber-liner 2010; Descola and Palsson 1996; Vilaca 2005). Each isa particular cultural style of attributing intention and inte-riority (by which they seem to mean self-awareness that isheld to be important and meaningful) to humans and non-humans. In animism, the ontological style widespread inAmazonia and Siberia, one finds perspectivism. In totemism,the ontological style widespread among Australian aborigines,humans and nonhumans share similar interiority (awarenessand feelings) but not intention (animals do not quite havehuman minds). In analogism, widespread in India, both hu-mans and nonhumans are somewhat fragmented, and humansdo not have equally the same minds as other humans oranimals. In naturalism, the Western ontological style, there isa sharp distinction between humans and animals. Animalsare not generally treated as having minds or even much inthe way of feelings (witness the way we consume them), al-


though humans make exceptions for a special category ofnonhumans—pets.

The point here is that there are systematic cultural varia-tions in the ways that other minds are understood. As oneethnographer puts it, commenting that perspectivism doesseem to capture something about his Siberian field subjects:

Obviously, North Asian people do not generally walk aroundregarding themselves as, say, wild reindeer and, no less ob-viously, a given North Asian person does not suddenly con-flate himself with another given North Asian person. WhatI mean, rather is the ability to imagine oneself in someoneelse’s position, and the ability to imagine someone else inone’s own position, and the imagination in the animist caseextends to include nonhuman beings. (Pedersen 2001:416)

Perspectivism (in this reading) is not a psychological claimabout the mechanism of mind. It is an anthropological claimabout the way that other minds are imagined differently.

There is not sufficient time in this article to sketch out fullywhat an anthropological theory of mind might look like, butI suggest that it would have to engage at least four dimensions:boundedness, interiority, sensorium, and epistemic stance.

By “boundedness” I mean the degree to which presenceexternal to the mind can be understood to participate withinthe mind (Luhrmann 2007). Charles Taylor distinguished be-tween “porous” and “buffered” minds. The Ewe, he thought,have “porous” minds. The supernatural can flit in and outof them and even take up residence within them, as the su-pernatural did in premodern Europe. Modern Westerners, bycontrast, he described as having “buffered” minds. One mightquarrel with some of his characterizations while nonethelessaccepting that minds are understood to be open to the worldin different ways. American evangelicals must learn to ex-perience God within the mind. They must adopt a new (non-mainstream middle-class American) theory of mind to do so,and for many of them, this is hard.

By “interiority” I mean the felt importance of inner inten-tion and feeling. All humans are conscious, but not all humansare culturally expected to treat their self-awareness as equallyimportant. That was the radical change that came to the Urap-min when they adopted Christianity, and it has been terriblydifficult for them to adapt. They retained their traditionaldisapproval of overt intention but transferred their disap-proval to their inner intentions; they acquired a new theoryof mind (God can see everything you think and feel) yetretained their traditional disapproval of intention. Theirmoral torment is created by the interiority of their new theoryof mind. American evangelicals of course have a highly de-veloped awareness of interiority. They are keenly aware oftheir inner experience; they treat their inwardly spoken wordsto God as if they were more real than mere passing thoughts,and they scrupulously seek to be Christlike not only in be-havior but also in thought and feeling, to which they paygreat attention.

By “sensorium” I mean the local way in which the sensesare valorized. This has not yet been discussed in this essay atall. But we are becoming increasingly aware that differentsenses are cultivated in different societies (Seremetakis 1994;Howes 2005; Smith 2007). American evangelicals valorizehearing. They speak of hearing God; they have book uponbook entitled with some kind of auditory invitation (HearingGod, God Whispers, Dialogue with God). And when they ex-perience God sensorially, they are more likely to do so withtheir ears (Luhrmann 2011).15 This is in contrast to the morevisual emphasis in Catholicism and many shamanic spiritu-alities (Crocker 1985; Dyrness 2004; Noll 1985).

By “epistemic stance” I mean the way in which a claim orexperience is held as true. The difference I have identifiedbetween these American evangelicals and the never-secularChristians depicted by Robbins, Meyer, Keane, and Engelkeis one of epistemic stance. There is something different be-tween the way that these Americans experience the reality oftheir God and the way the never-secular societies experiencetheirs. God is certainly real to the American evangelicals, buthis realness is explicitly and self-consciously paradoxical. AGod like the God at the Vineyard is hyperreal, realer thanreal, so real that it is impossible not to understand that youmay be fooling yourself, so real that you are left suspendedbetween what is real and what is your imagination. A believeris able at once to affirm the reality of the supernatural andto acknowledge that this reality is open to doubt. In magicalrealism, the supernatural appears unpredictably and isblended almost seamlessly into the natural world, as if themagical is real and the prosaically material is real, and bothperspectives are real and true together, like the novels of Bor-ges and Rushdie, in which the characters unquestioninglyaccept the magic and the reader is left to interpret whetherthe magic took place in historical time or only in a symbolicdream.16 To engage this God, you must explicitly suspend yourown disbelief. You are invited to enter into your religiouscommitment the way you enter into a novel, except you areinvited to imagine that it is real. This seems to me to be anepistemological stance characteristic of the open society,which responds to the presumption that reality is materialand the job of the mind is to reason about the real, becauseit allows people to straddle what they know to be competingepistemological commitments. It is to some extent the stanceof the ironic, mocking, playful style of postmodernism thatFredric Jameson (1984) characterized so well.

The playfulness in the epistemic stance of this Americanevangelical model of mind makes belief more comfortable forthose who live supremely conscious that others do not believe.It is a style of ontological commitment, a way of knowing,that gives the believer the freedom to infer that his or heraccount of God is in part fictive (you thought God told you

15. See Schmidt (2000) for a rich historical framing of the way theauditory became, as Schmidt puts it, immediate.

16. For a discussion of magical realism, see Zamova and Faris (1995).


to wear the blue shirt, but maybe you were making that partup) and so gets the believer into belief by sidestepping his orher doubt. Many years ago, when writing about another re-ligious practice that has also exploded in this country in thedecades after 1960 (although I was then writing about En-gland), I used the term “serious play” to describe the dis-tinctive mixture of imaginative pretense and fundamentalcommitment that characterized the faith (Luhrmann 1989).I argued that modern magic and witchcraft were like playexperiences and that involvement in magic retained the am-biguity of the play world while allowing it to be understoodas serious. I suggest here that much the same cultivation ofimaginative play takes place in evangelical Christianity, andfor much the same reason—that the basic claim of Chris-tianity is presumed by adherents to be unbelievable, evenfoolish, in a modern, secular society. The function of theimaginative play, I suggest, is to make the player’s commit-ment to the serious truth claims embedded in the play moreprofound by enabling them to suspend disbelief explicitly andthen to take the play stance as a real epistemological claim.

Again, this is not a claim about different psychologicalcapacities. I am not suggesting that minds work in funda-mentally different ways in small, face-to-face societies and inlarge and chaotic modern ones. I am suggesting that the ep-istemic stance of magical realism may be more often foundwithin the latter. And as a result, the mind imagined in thecoolly rational “open” society may in fact be more open tothe magical, the irrational, and the fantastic than the “closed”world about which Horton wrote so elegiacally. I think thatHorton may have appreciated this paradox.

Does a different theory of mind matter psychologically?Certainly, if by that we mean that people draw different in-ferences depending on the way that they imagine their ownmind. Different models of mind probably make a differenceto the way people use their minds. It seems likely that thereshould be real effects on whether people have experiences inthe sensory modality that the culture valorizes—whether theyhear or see God more readily. But it is not yet clear whetherthese different models of mind change basic developmentalontologies. Astuti (2001), for example, argues that beneaththe work of culture one can discern fundamental human on-tological expectations. These claims seem likely to endure,although they call for further research. I suggest that under-standing the ways in which theories of mind differ system-atically, and the impact of those differences on human ex-perience, is one of the most exciting intellectual opportunitiesof this area of anthropology.

Acknowledgments

It is an enormous pleasure to thank those who have talkedto me over the years about the material in this article: JoelRobbins; Rand Tucker; George Luhrmann; Richard Saller;Richard Madsen; Ann Taves; Caleb Maskell and the Society

of Vineyard Scholars; James K. Smith; the participants in theVineyard who graciously spoke with me about their lives; theanthropologists in the informal anthropology of Christianitynetwork; the audience at Christ’s College, Cambridge;Thomas Csordas, Suzanne Brenner, and other participants inthe University of California, San Diego, Christianities semi-nar; and many others.

CommentsJames S. BieloDepartment of Anthropology, Miami University, 120 Upham Hall,Oxford, Ohio 45056, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 6 II 12

Luhrmann presents us with an ambitious essay, one I findboth compelling and convincing. I want to toy with two el-ements of her argument that the “as-if imagination” flourisheswhen faith is lived against a secular backdrop replete withcompeting explanations and worldviews.

First, let us take seriously the question of play in religiousexperience. Via Huizinga and Bateson, Luhrmann conceptu-alizes “play” relationally in contrast to what it is not—the se-rious and the real. But elsewhere, Huizinga offers a stricterdefinition (1955 [1938]:28) containing two features that be-come suspicious when applied to the case of religion generallyand evangelicalism especially. He defines play as “voluntary”and “having its aim in itself.” I hesitate to accept the formergiven the social power and authoritative force behind the in-vitation to “just try.” When your pastor, your home groupleader, and your favorite Christian author advise you to play,how voluntary is the choice to indulge your imaginative ca-pacities? And I doubt the latter because, as Luhrmann dem-onstrates, play is anything but an end goal; it serves distinctfunctions for Vineyard members. Their aim in playing is notplay but a greater intimacy with their God. My point here isnot to resist labeling the rituals of formation Luhrmann pre-sents as play but, rather, to ask for a stricter definition that iscongruent with the logics of religious life so we can better knowwhat counts as play and what does not. With a more refinedsense of play at the ready, we will be better equipped to seeand understand who deploys play and for what purposes. Thatmore refined sense may also open up the functionality of play.While I would certainly agree with Luhrmann that play worksto manage doubt, make truth claims more profound, and strad-dle competing commitments, I suspect that evangelicals do notonly look to play as a defensive maneuver. Might play also workoffensively, a productive resource? I am drawn here to twoothers who have theorized the experience of living in late mod-ern times. The first, Peter Stromberg (2009), whom Luhrmanncites favorably (if briefly), also sees play as central to contem-porary life. For Stromberg, play is vital to our obsession withentertainment, “arguably the most influential ideological systemon the planet” (2009:3). The most distinctive element of play


is the experience of “becoming caught up” (13), of becomingimmersed to a point where imagination and reality intersect.Certainly this function of play would reproduce the value ofcharismatic religiosity, where submitting to the Holy Spirit isa foundational religious disposition. I also wonder about theproductive function of play in light of Jose Casanova’s (1994)argument that late modernity is hosting the dramatic returnof religion into “the public sphere” (6), an argument he madeusing five key examples, one of which was America’s conser-vative evangelicals. Luhrmann concentrates on play’s power forthe inner life of the individual and the collective life of thecongregation. But, given the many public faces of evangelical-ism—from political mobilization to social engagement and lo-cal activism—how do these believers marshal play for civicends? Is the imaginative realism that serves them so well inprayer a reliable resource as they seek to effect concrete changesin the world around them?

Second, I want to capitalize on a dynamic that is crucial forLuhrmann’s argument to hang together. By couching her out-line of a theory of mind in the “openness” of the “pluralistic,science-oriented societies we call the ‘West,’” Luhrmann bringsinto sharp relief the social fact that a religious tradition likeevangelicalism lives and breathes dialogically. Evangelicalismforms and changes through its ongoing relationships—somethat play nice, some that do not—with the other traditions,institutions, discourses, and actors that vie for Americans’ at-tention and devotion. For an anthropology in the wake of aBakhtinian splash, it is not particularly wave making to observethat cultural life is dialogical. But Luhrmann goes further. Sheobserves that this dialogism is generative; in her case, it works“to encourage a deliberatively playful, imaginative, fantasy-filledexperience of God.” Thinking with Luhrmann on this point,I take as a central challenge for those working in the anthro-pology of Christianity to ask what else dialogical relations gen-erate in the lives of religious subjects. For example, what aboutthe kind of sustained cultural critique evangelicals constantlydirect at themselves (Elisha 2011), their Christian brethren(Bielo 2011), and their secular antagonists (Toumey 1994)?Remembering Casanova, what about unexpected public alli-ances, say, with American Indian activists to enact prison reform(Smith 2008) or progressive-minded secularists in antihumantrafficking campaigns? Be it theory of mind, cultural critique,activism, or something wholly different, Luhrmann is nimbleenough in her analysis for us to pursue dialogical products inour own analyses.

Matthew EngelkeDepartment of Anthropology, London School of Economics,Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom([email protected]). 27 II 12

Chris Crocker used to tell a story about Max Gluckman inthe field with the Barotse. It’s apocryphal, I’m sure, but worth

retelling here. There was a Barotse man with whom no oneinteracted, someone with no social relationships. The Barotsesaid he was a ghost. Gluckman—never one to suffer foolish-ness—pressed his informants. Unsatisfied with their replies,Gluckman said, “Tell me this, then: do ghosts have blood?”“No,” replied the Barotse. So Gluckman went up to this ghost,grabbed him by the hand, and pricked his finger; he startedto bleed. “Ha!” said Gluckman, only to be flummoxed by theBarotse. “Oh!” they replied, “ghosts do bleed.”

Another never-secular society? With Horton, it depicts aclosed system of thought—yet one that is apparently open toreformulation should new experimental evidence require it.As Luhrmann might put it, the challenge to the Barotse didnot seem to be one about the ontological reality but, rather,the epistemic stance.

Luhrmann’s article is one of the most thought-provoking,innovative, and important that I have read in a long time.And I can confirm that the Friday Masowe apostolics fit thenever-secular bill, as she describes it. I am not sure that isthe term I’d want to use myself, although it may have long-term purchase. For the purpose of this comment, though, Iwill occupy my own private epistemological double registerand just try it.

There are a lot of points one might raise in relation to thesecularity theme, but I will restrict myself to one. On the basisof what we’re told, it’s not clear to me that the ever-secularevangelicals are grappling with a different kind of doubt fromnever-secular apostolics. It’s not that I doubt such doubt ispossible; I’m just not sure I can see it here. I’d like to havemore clarification as to how these evangelicals play aroundand how that play is necessarily linked to post-Enlightenmentpromises (or threats) of unbelief.

Ludwig Wittgenstein said that doubt comes after belief.Luhrmann wants to show that, for one form of life in late-modern America, doubt and belief are always both in mind.But what kind of doubt is this? Luhrmann suggests it is thedoubt produced by an awareness that enchantment is nolonger axiomatic. As ever-secular evangelicals they are part ofthe world of rationalism and reason that John Wimber decries.But I am not sure this is the kind of evidence Luhrmannprovides evidence of.

It seems to me that most of what Luhrmann is talkingabout is better referred to as self-doubt. Inasmuch as this isa Christianity that looks to be all about the self (what colorshirt to wear?!), perhaps there is not as much of a distinctionas I assume. But this seems to be the doubt of particularpersons, unsure of whether they get it—not whether there issomething to be got in the first place. It reads to me as adoubt about my ability to know, my ability to do somethingthe right way. The encouragement to “just try it,” which servesas a prime example of the problem of secular doubt, looksmore akin to what such never-secular figures as Saint Au-gustine and, as it happens, Johane Masowe were concernedabout. They—each in his own way—doubted not God buttheir ability to comprehend him (impossible anyway), their


certainty to have heard what he said, and their confidence inbeing able to discipline their bodies and minds to do either.

I also wonder about the second cup of coffee. It is truethat in many never-secular societies, offering up actual foodand drink to the gods or ancestors is a regular, unself-con-scious experience. But do these evangelicals not pour the cof-fee because they’re ever secular? Couldn’t it be because theythink the pastor is going a bit over the top? They are Prot-estants, after all; “props” are not a big thing for Protestants.

So when we get to Luhrmann’s conclusion that the ad-mixture of faith and secular doubt produces a both/and resultfor the evangelicals—God being both “foundationally real”and a “daydream”—my eyes are drawn to the daydreamsbeing “particular experiences.” What have mere personal ex-periences ever had to do with the foundationally real?

The never-secular raises many other interesting issues, notleast when it’s related to the theory of mind—and I haven’teven gotten to the theory of mind. There are questions, yes.But what Luhrmann gives us is a characteristically rich anddeep essay, one we will be reading for some time yet.

Douglas HollanDepartment of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles,California 90095-1553, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 21 II 12

Luhrmann has done us a great service by articulating so clearlyan epistemological style associated with many forms of con-temporary evangelical Christianity. She characterizes this styleas an “epistemological double register” in which God is “mag-ically real” or “hyperreal” and yet, at the same time, is doubtedin various ways. She then goes on to assert that this episte-mological double register both generates and is generated bya particular “theory of mind” that has important implicationsfor how its possessors conceptualize how other people knowand understand things and how they interpret their own sen-sory and perceptual experience, including their own experi-ence of God. In particular, she examines how this theory ofmind affects how people interpret at least four dimensionsof mental experience: boundedness, that is, “the degree towhich presence external to the mind can be understood toparticipate within the mind”; interiority, that is, “the felt im-portance of inner intention and feeling”; sensorium, that is,“the local way in which the senses are valorized”; and epi-stemic stance, that is, “the way in which a claim or experienceis held as true.” Luhrmann contends that this contemporaryevangelical theory of mind and the experiential states it gen-erates are quite distinct from those found in “never-secular”Christianities, such as among the Urapmin in New Guinea.

Luhrmann makes two important claims in this article, oneethnographic or descriptive and one more broadly theoretical.The first is that contemporary evangelical Christians in placeslike the United States know and experience God differentlythan Christians in never-secular societies. The second is that

different “theories of mind” have very important implicationsfor how people know and experience the world and otherpeople, not only for contemporary Christians in the UnitedStates, but in all times and all places. I will let scholars ofChristian communities debate Luhrmann’s first claim andfocus my own attention on her second.

Let me just say at the outset that many psychoculturalanthropologists, and I am one, would completely agree withLuhrmann’s claim that different theories of mind have im-portant consequences for how people know, understand, andexperience the world. Indeed, some might even point out thatthere is little that is particularly new in this claim, since an-thropologists, including Luhrmann herself (1989), have beenexploring various “ethno-” and “cultural psychologies” fordecades now (for just a few examples of such work, see Hollan1992, 2001, 2012a; Hollan and Throop 2011; Levy 1973, 1990;Moore and Mathews 2001; Murphy and Throop 2010; Parish1994, 1996; Shore 1996; Shweder and LeVine 1984; Straussand Quinn 1997; White and Kirkpatrick 1985) and pointingout the various “looping” effects (Hacking 1995) differentmodels of mind, as some would prefer to call them, have onbehavior and experience. What is new, however, is Luhr-mann’s repackaging of some of this work into a concept,“theory of mind,” that is of growing interest in the muchlarger and much better funded discipline of psychology. Inthis way, Luhrmann is making anthropological theory andresearch more accessible and more relevant to a much largeraudience that usual, and she should be commended for this.

As someone already in Luhrmann’s choir, then, I am freeto address some of the finer points of her argument. One ofthese is her tendency to draw rather broad contrasts betweencultures and groups of people: evangelical Christians versusother types of Christians, “modern” societies and beliefs ver-sus “never-secular” societies and beliefs, “porous” minds ver-sus “buffered” minds, those who are keenly aware of their“interior” states of mind versus those who are not, and soforth. Such broad contrasts, although helpful in building sometheoretical ideas, very likely exaggerate the experiential dif-ferences between people and groups (Hollan 1992), in largepart because people rarely internalize or enact instituted cul-tural models or theories of mind wholesale but, rather, morepartially and more incrementally (Hollan 2000, 2012b), whichmakes for fuzzy boundaries rather than distinct ones.

Related to this is the issue of how someone comes to holdone theory of mind rather than another. Luhrmann’s eth-nographic examples imply that almost anyone could be taughtthe epistemological double register of evangelical Christianityif given enough time and playful coaxing. But surely somepeople must find the profound ambiguity and uncertainty ofthis stance more tolerable, while others must surely find itcompletely incomprehensible and intolerable. Luhrmann failsto investigate, then, the question of whether and how somepeople might be “preadapted,” in Spiro’s (1997) sense of thatterm, to either accept or reject a given theory of mind, de-pending on temperamental proclivities or prior learning and


experience. By noting this, I do not wish to dispute the factthat people can and do learn new epistemological stances asthey become exposed to new groups and institutions in justthe way that Luhrmann indicates but merely to underscorethat this learning process is always complex and may end inonly partial or incomplete learning, if not outright rejection.And if this is so, then the effects of this partial learning onexperience and interpretation may be more variable thanLuhrmann suggests.

James LaidlawSocial Anthropology Division, School of Human, Social and Politi-cal Science, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cam-bridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom ([email protected]). 16 III 12

The ethnography in this impressive essay is characteristicallyfinely observed and sensitive; the questions raised are, equallycharacteristically, the big ones. Anthropological accounts ofreligion typically emphasize the social embeddedness of beliefand practice and the mutual reinforcement of implicit con-sensus and shared experience. What cognitive characteristicsdoes religious commitment have, then, where participation isnot taken for granted and indeed the very existence of “thesupernatural” is generally doubted? How, in such contexts,can robust religious affiliation be maintained? Might we needto amend our understanding of the social component of hu-man thought in order to explain it? Painting on such a largecanvas, Luhrmann uses bold strokes and strong colors. Theresult, as it should be, is thought provoking.

One set of thoughts provoked in this reader concerns thecontrasts used to locate the explanandum. Luhrmann com-pares charismatic Christianity in contemporary urban, mid-dle-class America with situations in which poor people onthe social margins of postcolonial states have exchanged un-written, socially embedded local traditions for some form ofcharismatic Christianity. With theology and liturgical styleheld relatively constant, the contrast falls on the “modernity”(or “postmodernity”) of the social context, characterized byprevalence of doubt. The argument is that widespread skep-ticism both provokes and requires the distinctive “as if” play-ful cognitive style we see in the Vineyard Fellowship. But thisimplies that what is doubted now—“the supernatural”—isjust what was implicitly accepted and socially embedded be-fore, in “never-secular” societies where “the reality of thesupernatural as a category has not been profoundly ques-tioned.” But perhaps what is distinctive about the moderncontext is not just that the supernatural is questioned butthat “it” is clearly and distinctly conceived. It is a complementto a certain conception of the natural. So the question ariseswhether these conceptual contours are more Christian thangenerally modern, or whether you might find aspects or el-ements of “serious play” anywhere in the long histories ofliterate civilizations (such as China and India), where there

has certainly been widespread experience of religious diversity,where different traditions have conceived deities as sometimesgrandly distant but often banally imminent in everyday life,and where anything resembling a distinct supernatural realmof experience has been far from the norm. Luhrmann em-phasizes the striking vitality of charismatic Christianity in thecontemporary United States. It may be still more striking thanshe allows. Not only has “secularization” not occurred aspredicted or on timetable, and the United States has gone offschedule more conspicuously than anywhere else (as Luhr-mann documents), but furthermore, in the United States, asmuch as anywhere, a good deal of the rest of what Luhrmanncalls “Weber’s disenchantment” has indeed proceeded re-lentlessly. Luhrmann reminds us of the “Great Awakenings”that have punctuated American history. One wonders whetherthis exceptional American history is exclusively Christian. Arethere parallel phenomena in American Judaism, for example?In any case, perhaps the interest of American Christianity lieselsewhere than in being paradigmatic or in the vanguard ofa general “modernity.”

Those are questions about the extension of the article’s ex-planandum. Others occur about its intension. Luhrmann’s de-scription of a Christianity “deeply shaped by the awareness ofdoubt and of the pull of other ways of thinking” is very per-suasive. But while no doubt many congregants hold “conser-vative” moral opinions and lead well-ordered personal lives, Iwonder how helpful it is to describe their Christianity generallyas conservative. Their attitude to religious authority seems no-tably undeferential, and their critique of “Western secular mo-dernity” is as uncompromising as (and shares not a little incontent with) the Frankfurt School or Heidegger. There aremany ways of being radical, and it seems worth recognizingthat this might be one of them. The experience of God thatcongregants in the Vineyard Fellowship feel obliged to try torealize is certainly radical, and I am persuaded by Luhrmann’sclaim that a distinctive understanding of mental experience,and distinctive “as if” epistemological stance, is required inorder to manage the doubt that inevitably besets them.

In outlining her “anthropological theory of mind,” Luhr-mann boldly draws on the apparently antithetical projects ofthe cognitive anthropology of religion and “perspectivism.”This works for her, but only insofar as she resolves some ofthe ambiguities in the latter in a particular way. “Perspectiv-ism,” she writes, “is not a psychological claim about the mech-anism of mind. It is an anthropological claim about the waythat other minds are imagined differently.” This is a defensiblereading of much relevant ethnography, but the influentialclaim that “anthropology is the science of the ontological self-determination of the world’s peoples” (Viveiros de Castro2003:18) requires perspectivism to sustain, in Luhrmann’sterms, a metaphysical claim about the relation between “peo-ples” and “worlds,” and this is a version that will be lesstractable for her purposes.


Rebecca J. LesterDepartment of Anthropology, Washington University, Campus Box1114, 1 Brookings Drive, St. Louis, Missouri 63130, U.S.A.([email protected]). 27 II 12

Luhrmann argues that American evangelical Christianity ischaracterized by what she calls an “epistemological double reg-ister,” stemming from a paradoxical rendering of God as bothfundamentally real and, at the same time, not quite believable.In a cultural context that legitimates religious doubt, evangel-icals cultivate this theory of mind through practices that spot-light these paradoxical claims and turn them into a form of“play,” which adherents themselves view as somewhat silly butwhich nevertheless scaffold a capacity for holding two truthssimultaneously that would seem to be patently incongruent.

This is in many ways a brilliant argument, as anyone fa-miliar with Luhrmann’s work would expect. It highlights therich possibilities of anthropological engagements with locallyconstrued metacognitive processes and the social practicesthrough which theories of mind emerge and shift as peoplegrapple with novel historical and cultural circumstances.

At the same time, I found aspects of the argument to begfor constructive challenge. For the sake of space, I will focuson the two contradictions Luhrmann identifies as central toevangelical belief and around which she builds her argument:(1) God is both real and not really real, and (2) God is theall-powerful master of the universe and also cares about whatI eat for lunch. Luhrmann argues that these contradictionsare only ever resolved incompletely, generating doubt andleaving evangelicals skeptical of their own beliefs.

As a non-Christian nonbeliever who has nevertheless spentan inordinate amount of my life around believers (evangelicaland otherwise), I find myself asking, Why, exactly, are theseassertions contradictory? Why can’t God be both real and notquite real? Why can’t God rule the universe and help me findmy keys?

We must remember that all “real” is not created equal.There is the “real” of manifest materiality (things we canperceive directly through our senses). But as philosophers,social scientists, physicists, and others have argued, this leadsto an exceedingly narrow definition of reality that excludesentire dimensions of human experience. Moving up a levelof abstraction, we might say that the “real” also includesthings—like gravity—that we cannot perceive directly butwhose effects we can experience. I cannot see or touch gravity,but I believe it exists because of how it affects the things Ican see and touch. This sort of inference requires cognitiveprocesses similar to what Luhrmann calls “imagination”:treating mental representations of nonmaterial things as ifthey were “real.” Gravity, then, is both real and not real,without paradox.

And much as gravity works on the scale of galaxies and atomssimultaneously, evangelicalism views God’s presence as un-problematically multidimensional. He runs the universe, andHe cares if I lie. From this perspective, activities like the coffee

cup exercise still seem playful, but the play is, after all, deeplyserious, as Luhrmann herself has argued elsewhere (1989). Ifwe cannot fully perceive God with our paltry human sensesand must develop alternative strategies to help expand ourperceptions, this does not necessarily suggest that we doubtGod is real or that we can’t quite believe He exists.

So, if the contradictions at the center of Luhrmann’s argu-ment are less contradictory than they might appear, would thisshift our interpretations of evangelical faith practices in rela-tionship to doubt? I suggest that what Luhrmann describes isless about doubt in God and more about doubt in one’s capacityto fully attune to God, which is an entirely different matter.

From a faith perspective, the foundation of one’s relation-ship with God is one’s own disposition or intention; I mustbecome truly available to God for the relationship to formand flourish. If I make believe I am on a date night withJesus, well, then I actually am, because He is always available,waiting for me to open up to Him. The second I do, thepretending becomes the reality. It’s both. Techniques likepouring a cup of coffee for God in the morning “work,” then,not because I really expect God to shuffle in and have a seat(though He could if He wanted to) but because the act itselfproduces a disposition within me that enables me to perceiveand relate to a God who is actually always there but is usuallyoutside my conscious awareness.

If such practices are less about mitigating doubt and moreabout cultivating attunement, the question becomes whetherthis requires adherents to develop a new theory of mind,Luhrmann’s “epistemological double register.” I am not per-suaded that it does, and not only because I don’t think thecontradictions are actually contradictions. Rather, I contendwe all maintain and move among multiple epistemologicalregisters all the time, because different kinds of real dependon different kinds of evidence. I don’t think this is uniqueto religious belief, and it only generates paradox if we insiston the strict one-epistemology-at-a-time policy of scientificrationalism. In taking this to be the norm, Luhrmann endsup privileging materialist understandings of what makessomething real, what counts as evidence, and, therefore, whatgenerates doubt, leaving us yearning for the subtler theorizingfor which she is so deservedly renowned.

Birgit MeyerDepartment of Religious Studies and Theology, UniversiteitUtrecht, P.O. Box 80.105, 3508 TC Utrecht, The Netherlands([email protected]). 21 II 12

For the California Vineyard Christian Fellowship, imaginingGod does not imply that he would be imaginary. Here “pre-tending”—playing “as if”—does not stand in opposition tobelief but instead is an accepted means of facilitating it. Mun-dane acts, such as having coffee with God, are authorized asappropriate techniques to generate personal experiences


through which God appears as “hyperreal.” This fascinatingdescription challenges a conventional assumption that stillinforms a great deal of research. Striving to crack how religion“works,” scholars often claim to know better than their in-terlocutors, explaining “why we know and they believe” (Fa-bian 2008:92). Arguing that practices of belief are groundedin a broader “second-order model of the mind,” Luhrmannlocates secularist skepticism and doubt at the level of herinterlocutors. Her compelling analysis of evangelicals’ “epis-temological double register” signals that modern belief is em-bedded in a specific, reflexive thinking style that seriouslyengages the challenge posed by the secularist critique of re-ligion. Not unlike the notion of “semiotic ideology” coinedby Webb Keane (2007), Luhrmann’s call to investigate “ideasabout ideas” stresses the importance of taking into accountthe metatheories developed by our interlocutors. Belief cannotbe taken for granted. Exploring evangelical practice from thisfresh perspective, Luhrmann’s approach resonates with abroader scholarly project that aims for a better grasp of Prot-estantism in the modern world by challenging stereotypical,quasi-theological ideas about a hierarchy of “inner belief”above “outward practice,” of “content” above “form.”

While I am very sympathetic to Luhrmann’s approach, Ifind her sharp distinction between secular and “never-secular”societies problematic. In this context she refers to my workon the Ewe. More or less in passing she mentions that CharlesTaylor “has been taken to task for treating Ewe subjects assimplemindedly emblematic of the non-West.” Luhrmanndoes not give a reference, but I assume that she refers to apaper in which I question Taylor’s use of a vignette from mybook that shows how spirits are taken for granted (Meyer2012). I object to his view of contemporary Africa as bearingresemblance to Europe’s still enchanted pre-Reformation pe-riod (i.e., before 1500; Taylor 2007:11), because this neglectsthat the vignette is rooted in the present rather than in anever-secular past. Contemporary Ghana has a secular con-stitution that guarantees the freedom of religion to the plu-rality of religious organizations in the country. That it maybe hard to find full-blown atheists (just as in the United States)does not imply that, as Luhrmann puts it, “in never-secularsocieties, congregants do not need help to persuade them-selves to take the entire enterprise seriously in the first place.”Behind this statement there seems to lurk an idea that priorto the rise of modernity, belief would have been the defaultposition, with skepticism and doubt confined to merely ques-tioning specific supernatural claims. According to this sce-nario, belief got lost and is ever more difficult to recapturein the secular age.

I understand that Luhrmann uses comparison to spotlightthe specific ways in which American evangelicals persuadethemselves about the existence of God. However, I do notthink that the contrast she invokes between secular and never-secular societies does justice to the specific theories of themind that underpin religiosity in the latter. This contrast isproblematic because it projects a particular idea of belief onto

these societies. As a number of scholars (including SusanPreston Blier, Judy Rosenthal, and the missionary JacobSpieth) have documented, for the Ewe concrete human actsare necessary to make the gods and ensure their presence.They acknowledge that religion is a human creation. Thismade missionaries lament about the Ewe as being too down-to-earth. Also, in the Pentecostal churches that are phenom-enally popular today, the need to make the Holy Spirit happenthrough ever more spectacular performances is emphasizedcontinuously. A lot of action is necessary for people to invokeGod and persuade themselves that He is there, not unlike thecase of the Vineyard evangelicals. My point here is not toclaim that both are the same but to show that, despite certaindifferences, in both cases we encounter a strong emphasis onsome kind of authorized religious performance through whichthe divine shows up as real.

As Luhrmann argues, for God to be perceived as real dependson persuasive sensorial experiences. I agree with her that thesensorium is of prime importance for generating religious ex-perience, often by mobilizing the body as index of divine pres-ence (Meyer 2010). Scholars of Protestantism have come a longway to recognize how, in contrast to downtrodden views, beliefis actually effected through practices of make-believe. Exploringhow evangelical “theories of the mind” manage to make theinvisible tangible is an apt starting point to further rethinkProtestantism. For the reasons given above, insisting on a sharpdistinction between evangelical belief in secular and nonsecularsocieties is of limited use for this project because it blinds usto acknowledging striking similarities.

Joel RobbinsDepartment of Anthropology–0532, University of California, SanDiego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093-0532, U.S.A.([email protected]). 27 II 12

This is a major article that presents a new understanding ofthe nature of religious belief among middle-class charismaticChristians in the United States, explains why the kind of beliefin question has developed, and makes the identification ofthis kind of belief the foundation for an important call foran anthropology of mind that focuses on different ways themind is conceptualized in different cultural settings. The ar-ticle is an important contribution to the anthropology ofreligion and to anthropological theory more generally. Thereis no question here of engaging all of its important arguments,so I will make only a few observations that I hope might helpbegin the discussion it is sure to generate.

My first observation is about something noteworthy thatthe article demonstrates nicely but does not dwell on. AsLuhrmann recognizes, Berger (1967) influentially argued thatpluralism—understood as people’s exposure to different sys-tems of beliefs—was a driving force behind secular doubt. Hehas since recognized the resurgence of religion in pluralist


societies and has dropped this point (Berger 1999). But Luhr-mann puts it out of play in a more striking way—for all thenever-secular societies she discusses are pluralist ones simplyby virtue of the fact that they are ones in which people haveconverted to Christianity from indigenous religions. EveryChristian in them knows other people, or at least knows theirformer selves, who follow or previously followed a differentreligion. Yet they show no inclination to doubt the reality ofthe supernatural world. This is yet another line of evidencein support of recognizing that secularism is a complex projectof its own, and not a residue left in place when sacred canopiesbegin to fray for their own reasons. On a more general level,Luhrmann’s argument suggests that the elaboration of thenotion of the never-secular might have an important role toplay in pushing forward in new ways the currently prominentbut by now somewhat settled and repetitive scholarly dis-cussion of secularism.

My second set of observations relates to the core concernsof the article: play, belief, and mind. A key ethnographicfinding reported in the article is that Third Wave charismaticsoften approach their beliefs in a playful way and are en-couraged to do so by their religious leaders. Luhrmann arguesin a way I find convincing that the roots of this playfulnesslie in the Third Wave response to the educated, middle-class,secular conditions in which it thrives. Taking her finding inanother direction, I would note that it complicates a commonargument about belief in the current discussions of religion.Put schematically, this argument has it that modern, partic-ularly Protestant, understandings of religion have bleachedthe life out of it by insisting, as an adaptation to secularism,that beliefs are things one holds rather than does—that beingreligious is about subscribing to correct propositional beliefsabout the world and little more (see, e.g., Asad 1993; Robbins2007; Smith 1977). Luhrmann’s material suggests that this istoo simple. There are adaptations to secularism that do notturn beliefs from lived commitments to blandly held prop-ositions. One of these adaptations is a commitment to play.We would develop a much richer account of contemporaryreligion in places where the secular project is influential if welooked for other such unexpected adaptations as well.

Finally, Vineyard Christians play with belief because theybelieve in play. Here we get to another of Luhrmann’s keyethnographic findings, this one bearing on Third Wave theoryof mind. Third Wave Christians believe in play because theyhold that the mind is something that (1) can play and (2)when it plays, can relax its defenses and recognize things aboutthe world it usually ignores or suppresses. Their theory ofmind thus directly shapes their practice of religion. Acknowl-edging the import of theories of mind for religion opens upa new area for investigation in the anthropology of religion—even as it is also contributes to the emerging anthropologyof mind. One way to develop Luhrmann’s insight furtherwould be to ask how Vineyard Christians see God’s mind andwhat they understand to be God’s attitude to play. My hunchis that in all religious traditions, thought about deities is an

important site for working out theories of mind. Certainlyfor the Urapmin it is coming to understand God’s mind asomnipotent that has led them to imagine that human mindsmight be able to read the intentions of others. Laying outThird Wave models of the mind of God might bring to thefore further connections between different aspects of Luhr-mann’s ethnographic materials while also tying together evenmore tightly the elements of her pathbreaking theoreticalmodel of the way theories of mind influence religious ex-perience.

Ann TavesDepartment of Religious Studies, University of California, SantaBarbara, California 93106-3130, U.S.A. ([email protected]).18 II 12

In this article Luhrmann surfaces a self-conscious embrace ofparadox and “let’s pretend” play among contemporary neo-Pentecostals that she characterizes as a “hyperreal” approachto God. She finds “this self-conscious use of play to managedoubt . . . characteristic of modern neo-Pentecostal spiritualityand quite lacking in never-secular Christianities.” She explainsthis embrace of hyperreality as a response to the “constantawareness of the possibilities of disbelief in the supernaturalitself as an ontological reality” that characterizes secular so-cieties and contrasts it with the challenge of merely “shiftingfrom one spirituality to another” that [she argues] charac-terizes never-secular societies. Culture and mind interact inthese different social contexts, she argues, to shape the waywe perceive ourselves and others, including supernatural oth-ers. While surfacing this self-conscious use of paradox is anextremely important advance, I am reluctant to view it asreflective of a distinctive culturally informed theory of mindshaped by the possibility of nonbelief without consideringsome other options.

First, I am not convinced that the distinction between re-ligiously pluralistic societies, in which it is “virtually impos-sible not to believe in God,” and pluralistic societies in which“belief in God is no longer axiomatic,” matters as much asLuhrmann (or Charles Taylor) wants to suggest. In the longerwork from which this is drawn, Luhrmann makes much ofthe contrast between mainline denominations where peoplebelieve in God but don’t have an intimate, personal relation-ship with God of the sort she reports on here. Perhaps thedifficulty is not so much believing in an age of unbelief butexperiencing something that unbelievers and many believersfind implausible. Some Christian traditions are (and have longbeen) more experientially oriented than others—Catholicism,old-style Methodism, the holiness and classic Pentecostaltraditions, and Mormonism are all more experientially ori-ented than much of the Reformed (Calvinist) tradition inProtestantism. The fundamentalist movement of the earlytwentieth century and the neo-evangelicalism of the mid-


twentieth century, both deeply informed by the Reformedtradition, were vehement in their rejection of Pentecostal-style experience. The Vineyard churches studied by Luhrmannreflect the belated embrace of an experiential orientation bythe Reformed side of the conservative Protestant spectrum.Vineyard churches are full of adult converts from back-grounds—some secular but many mainline and evangelicalProtestant—that explicitly rejected an intimate Pentecostal-style experience of God. The contrast between “formalism”and the direct experience that used to be characterized as“enthusiasm” is a long-standing one in Christianity and marksan in-house disagreement not over believing but over whatbelievers can plausibly expect to experience.

This brings me to my second concern. According to Luhr-mann, “American evangelicals must learn to experience Godwithin the mind. They must adopt a new (nonmainstreammiddle-class American) theory of mind to do so, and formany of them, this is hard.” Is this hard because they aremiddle-class Americans or because they are middle-classAmerican adults who did not grow up in experiential religioustraditions? Would adults raised in an experientially orientedreligious tradition need to learn to experience God or wouldthey already know how? More attention to how children learnto understand reality through pretend play and at the sametime learn to distinguish the real from the pretend in differentcultural contexts will deepen our understanding of the dif-ferential effects of primary and secondary socialization onhow people relate as adults with unseen others. Given thepotential differences between adult converts and those whogrow up in experientially oriented religious traditions, I thinkwe may want to tease apart the epistemic stance that Luhr-mann attributes to (Third Wave) neo-Pentecostals. We maynot want to conflate adults who “are invited to enter into. . . religious commitment the way you enter into a novel”and children who grow up in families that cultivate a con-tinued relationship with unseen beings and who, in pluralisticsocieties anyway, most likely learn as children that not ev-eryone finds such relationships plausible. Like the adults stud-ied by Luhrmann, children growing up in such families mayalso be able “to affirm the reality of the supernatural and toacknowledge that this reality is open to doubt,” but they maydo so in rather different ways.

Finally, we can consider whether Luhrmann’s presence asa sympathetic, but probing, participant-observer might haveprecipitated some of the embarrassment that she highlightsas evidence of a hyperreal understanding of God. Given theimportance of suspending disbelief for Vineyard participants,I am curious about the effects of Luhrmann’s presence. Didher questions interrupt the suspension of disbelief and, thus,precipitate that which she observed to some extent? If so, theparadoxical expressions might reflect the difficulties inherentin suspending disbelief in mixed company in ways we wouldexpect in any pluralistic context.

ReplyThis is a hard crowd to persuade about the importance ofdoubt in a modern secular society! It is not exactly an originalclaim that the rise of science, and the dawning awareness ofthe existence of other complex faiths, shook the religiousconfidence of Western societies, and that new forms of Chris-tian spiritual practices emerged in their wake. Spiritualism,theosophy, Christian Science, and Unitarianism were nine-teenth-century responses to these shifts. They claimed to givebelievers a faith fully compatible with science. Fundamental-ism, with its new and unprecedented assertion that the Biblewas literally true word for word—an idea that would havemuch surprised the church fathers—similarly claimed to usescience as its method. I take these new movements to beevidence of the importance of and response to doubt in sec-ularizing societies; I also think there is excellent evidence thatthey have not worked well to sustain Christian commitmentacross the decades. Churches of the first kind are thin inmembership these days. Churches of the second kind are morenumerous, but since the 1960s they have been losing groundto experientially oriented churches. I make the argument thatthe outpouring of interest in experiential spirituality—asmany as one in three Americans practice an experiential spir-ituality—is a response to doubt engendered by this secularsociety and that it helps people to manage doubt because(among other reasons) it enables a double-register episte-mology.

Commentators have raised a range of searching questions.I will respond to some of them, in turn.

Do People Really Doubt?

Doubt is inherent to the Christian faith. People doubt whetherthey have grasped the true nature of God. I suspect that allChristians, at some point or another, doubt that the promiseof joy they hear from the pulpit really applies to them.

I believe, on the basis of my fieldwork and much otherscholarship, that there are two ways in which the doubt ex-perience in Western modernity differs from that in other set-tings.

First of all, doubt is salient. Even if a Christian never for-mulates personal doubt about the ontological existence ofGod, even in the very heart of Texas, that Christian knowsthat there are good, decent people who are not Christiansand even are not believers at all. That awareness has grownexponentially with the advent of television and the Internet(the 1960s era and beyond). These Christians are more awareof the possibility of doubt and more aware that it is sociallypossible to have an identity as someone who does not believe.That is why there is so much intense anxiety among evan-gelicals about whether their young are fleeing from the faith.Whether or not the young do abandon Christianity, the adultsare very aware that they can.


Second, there is a lot of doubt about the ontological statusof God—even for Christians who are clear that they do be-lieve. This observation is not the result of subjects’ anxietiesin talking to a doubting anthropologist. In fact, I first becameaware of the complexity of belief commitments in a prayergroup I joined. That group was full of pious women. Theywere quick to say that they believed in God. But when theytalked about the details of their daily life—what they felt aboutGod on Tuesday morning, for instance—they talked aboutsometimes not being able to take prayer seriously or findingit hard to believe that the idea of God made any sense. Thegroup leader once said, “I don’t believe it, but I am stickingto it—that’s my definition of faith.” Pastors routinely talkedabout moments when it was hard to believe. “I thought, Ihave lost my marbles. I am talking to the ceiling and thinkingthat this will do something.”

I take this expression of doubt to arise in part out of au-dience awareness. Not the awareness of the lone, odd an-thropologist, but the awareness of what non-Christian co-workers or skeptical parents might make of their faith. Thefaith at the church I spent time in was full of small caveats.That reflected the role of doubt in any Christian experience,but it also reflected the church’s awareness of being only oneway of thinking among others. They were exquisitely awarethat there might be people in church that were not Christians.They all had friends and relatives and, in most cases, work-places that were predominantly non-Christian. They knewthat the people who did not share their faith disapproved ofit. That is an important dimension of their social experience—more so, I suspect, than for those in non-Christian pluralisticsocieties.

Is This Experience of Doubt Really Differentfrom Doubt in “Never-Secular” Societies?

The answer to this question depends in part on what onepresumes about one’s intellectual audience. An anthropologistwho is eager to dispel the expectation that people outside ofthe West are different from those in the West is understand-ably likely to emphasize the commonalities. An anthropologist(like myself) who seeks to dispel the expectation that Chris-tianity is the same everywhere will emphasize the differences.What I do want to point out is that the ethnographies ofplaces that have had a continuous experience of religiositytend not to offer evidence of hesitation about the ontologicalstatus of the supernatural, whereas ethnographies and biog-raphies about faith in secular Western settings often do.

Is There Really a Broad Dividing Linebetween Secular and Never-Secular Societies?

Again, yes and no. The answer to that question depends inlarge part on the temperament of the scholar, as all thingshuman are alike and different to some degree. But if you takethe comparative enterprise of anthropology seriously, one

comparison worth making is between societies in which skep-ticism is widely presumed and socially recognized, such as theUnited States, and societies in which it is not. It does notfollow that twenty-first-century Ghana can be taken as astand-in for medieval England. But it might be possible toargue for the oddity of contemporary America (or Euro-America), the way a circle stands out against other shapes,even if they are all different from each other.

Is God Understood Differently in TheseDifferent Worlds?

This is an enormously difficult question, which anthropology(or religious studies for that matter) has not yet answered. Ido not think that contradictory ideas about God necessarilycause people distress, although they sometimes do, as theydid for a young evangelical man who came up to me recentlyand asked me (when I was talking about the Vineyard) howone could, indeed, logically reconcile prayer failure and God’slove. But we do not yet have more than an emergent theoryof the way people model God in their minds. In fact, I thinkof the God concept in churches like the Vineyard as a quitecomplex schema, as complex as the way we model “mother”and “father.” Embedded in those simple words are genericcultural prototypes; a conglomeration of specific memories;the salient issue that springs to mind as the moment whenthe word is used; the situational differences between talkingto a priest, a relative, or a beloved pregnant dog. We have anenormous amount to learn about the cognitive, affective, andsocial dimensions of the concept of “God” and the way itshifts.

At the same time, I do think that the dramatic and delib-erately cultivated range in the use of God concepts by evan-gelicals may serve a functional role in helping to protect themfrom the skepticism they feel around them. The combinationof the intimate, the playful, and the majestic renders the rep-resentation of God explicitly incoherent—or, to use moreconstructive words, paradoxical and mysterious. That mysterymay allow the self-aware and theologically anxious to hangonto a faith experience that reason might render vulnerable.That is not to say that congregants in churches like the Vine-yard do not think—far from it. But they are often highlyeducated, and in the face of rampant skepticism from peers,it may be easier to manage a sense of God as mysterious thanto work out an intricate theology that those peers might scorn.

Does Experiential Spirituality Always AriseBecause of Doubt?

Certainly not. The capacity to experience God vividly is acapacity of our human psychology, and it has been cultivatedor suppressed across the millennia. But I believe that thismodern playful experience of God does help to manage doubtbecause it elaborates and develops the contradictions in theexperience of God and treats them playfully, so that the precise


truth-claim (does God really care what shirt I wear today?)can be hard to pin down. This playfulness, and even morethe paradox and mystery, protects followers from attendingto the awkwardness that a Daniel Dennett might point out,or even from the conflict believers observe between theirprayers to save an ill friend and the knowledge that the prayerwas not answered. It adds a light epistemological touch tothe truth claims, allowing people to hang in limbo, not de-fining claims precisely (at least not necessarily) and givingthem freedom to move around critique.

Why did people move toward intense spirituality in earliertimes? The classic answer, for American society, is that theserevitalization movements are born out of cultural stress. It is,of course, easy to doubt such ambiguous identification. When,if we were looking for it, would we not find such stress? Iused to yearn for a synoptic simple explanation, and I amnot sure there is one. But it must be said that these periodsof intense yearning seem to be deeply satisfying for those whocan explore them.

Can Play Cultivate a Constructive, Ratherthan Defensive, Role in Religion and in Life?

The answer is surely yes, but I find the details of what ananswer truly looks like to be deeply fascinating. One of themost interesting questions here is the role of imaginal dia-logues—to use Mary Watkins’s term—in human life. Watkinsgroups together human experiences not always understoodin relation to each other: play, hearing voices, therapy, imag-inary companions. Some of these seem inimical to humanflourishing. Some seem part of the most remarkable part ofbeing human—our creativity, our imagination, and our abilityto symbolize and treat the symbolic as significant. Which iswhich and why? The broad-brush answer is clear (schizo-phrenia, bad; art, good), but there is much to explore in thedetails. The basic task of a religion that contributes to humanflourishing, I believe, is to make what one must imagine bothexternal and good. My own view is that the capacity to playand to suspend disbelief is central to this process.

Finally, why all this talk about theory of mind when wehave known for years that models of the mind vary? We haveindeed known for at least a generation that models of themind differ in different social settings, and that these differ-ences have consequences. My goal in calling these “theories”of mind is, first, to call attention to the real psychologicalsignificance of those consequences and, second, to develop acomparative method. I suspect (having organized a confer-ence about this recently, and benefited from the discussionof many wise scholars) that different theories of mind willpredict the way different social groups experience spiritualityand illness, the way they value play, the way their childrenpay attention, and their experience of empathy. The differ-ences I have suggested are of course quite schematic. But theymay help us to think.

Thank you to all for a thought-provoking and expansivediscussion!

—T. M. Luhrmann

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