- [Announcer] This program is presented by University of California Television. Like what you learn? Visit our website or follow
us on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with the latest UCTV programs. (electronic music) - Welcome to A Conversation with History. I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies. Our guest today is Tanya Marie Luhrmann, who is the Watkins University professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department. Her books include Persuasions
of the Witchcraft, The Good Parsi, Of Two Minds,
and When God Talks Back. Professor Luhrmann, welcome to Berkeley. - Thanks, it's great to be here. - Where were you born and raised? - Well, I was born in Dayton, Ohio because my dad was in the Air Force, but I was actually raised on
the East Coast in New York City and outside, in New Jersey. - And you mentioned, in
one of the introductions, the influence of your grandfather, who was a Baptist minister. Talk a little about that, 'cause later, we'll talk about your
book on the evangelicals. - He was just such a lovely man, and I still have this vivid memory of him taking me on his shoulders
as we walked across the park. And it somehow melds with the memory in my mind about Saint Christopher
carrying the baby Christ child. And I don't want to,
sort of, draw an analogy between myself and Christ, but between my grandfather
and Saint Christopher, as somebody who was just, you know, he was just that person who would take care of you. He was a very adventurous man. He was polylingual. He was a missionary in Burma. Unlike my grandmother, he
wasn't so eager to convert. He was eager to learn languages. He loved to get on the back of an elephant and go into the jungle, and
pulled teeth for people, and to do, sort of, simple medical work. He and my grandmother both taught school in this mountainous area
of what was then Burma, and told stories. He was kind of an adventure buff, and he died too young. But he died off exploring
in his later 60s, which, at that age, was kind of old to get an RV and drive
off into the desert, and cruise around. And I always thought
that there was something kind of wonderful about that, about kind of living
your life to the fullest to the last. - Where did you do your
undergraduate work? - I was at Harvard. - And what did you major in? - Folklore and mythology. - So you were an anthropologist,
or an anthropology major? - Well, I was not. So, folklore was its own program. There was this great
professor called Albert Lord, who was partially responsible
for the Lord-Parry hypothesis, the Parry-Lord hypothesis
about the making of oral epics and how they were kind of created. There was a sort of
implicit grammar to the way that the singer of tales
put together his story. And so, because of Lord,
there was this, kind of odd idiosyncratic, and quite
wonderful, undergraduate major, which introduced you to
the literature of folklore, and to the ways that, you
know, certain classic questions about how to understand
these myths and stories that people tell to themselves. I mean, I loved it. I actually came to college with the idea that I would be a philosopher, and this next story is about what it is like to be 17. But I remember reading Kant and thinking that this was cheating. He saw a puzzle that he wanted to explain, which was that people
thought in similar ways, you know, robustly, from person to person, and he solved it by just asserting that there were categories
of the understanding, and I thought that was
kind of interesting, but I also thought that people
were really complicated, and I wanted to know about the
differences between people. I also wanted to know about the stories they told themselves, and I
thought that those stories were at least as important as any categories of the understanding through which we grasped our world. - And then, where did you
do your graduate work? - At the University of
Cambridge in the UK. - And who did you work under there? - My formal adviser was Ernest Gellner. I actually started working
with Stephen Hugh-Jones, but he left for the Amazon
partway through my time there, and Ernest was just arriving. So, it was a wonderful match. Ernest is an anthropologist,
but also half a philosopher. He thought about the
rational and the mythical, and the way that people
are and are not logical, and means and directed
and organizing their life in a way that these variations are framed in different social groups. Geoffrey Lloyd was also a
very important influence. He's a classicist who tries to understand what he calls the mentalities, that was a word that was
in vogue at the time, trying to understand, how do
you make sense of the fact that the Greeks, you know, came up with what we now call science? Was it scientific to them? What did it mean for them to
use an experimental method? How do you openly understand that? And so, both of them were
great at asking questions, and pushing me, and arguing with me. It was a great education. - I get the sense that,
especially in your earlier years, but then later, also,
there's a real sense of distancing yourself as an observer, but also embedding
yourself at the same time, in sort of a respectful sense of the stories that people tell themselves as they belong to these groups. That seems to be present
in your very early years. - Thanks, yeah. I've I never had much physical courage. I like to drive slowly on the freeway, I don't climb mountains, but I really find it
fascinating to try to figure out how somebody else thinks. So I tend, in general,
not to be so frightened by ways of thinking
that seem very different to other people. And I think that what it takes
to be a good anthropologist is this capacity to empathically connect, and also stand back. So on the one hand,
you are embedded enough so that you can feel it when the magic shoots through your body. I've never really had this, and you know, a part of
what I do is I studied psychotic distressed people
who are really disconnected from reality, and you can't really have a true grasp of that experience, but grasp it enough to have a feel for the way people describe it. But you also need to
kind of be standing back and saying, oh. What happened? Why did I feel the magic
shoot through my body? How would I explain that? Putting the magic aside,
what's going on in the body? What's going on in the mind? What's going on in the social
world in which I was embedded that enabled me to have
such an experience? - And you are both an anthropologist and a
psychological anthropologist. - [Tanya] That's right. - So is the skill set the same for both, or do they complement each other and bring different skills to the table? - I think to be a
psychological anthropologist, so that's an anthropologist with one foot in the psychological domain, you're interested in
emotions and in thinking, and in the structure of the mind, and the way people carve
up the world cognitively, so you really have to
be pretty comfortable with sitting and listening to
people talk about themselves. You also have to be really comfortable with ambiguity and failure. So, one of the things that
I find so striking about trying to understand how people
experience God, for example, is that you never know. You can learn an awful lot, but, you know, real understanding just always
disappears over the horizon because people are so complicated. You know, language is
remarkably important, but it's, in ways, a flimsy vehicle for conveying anything as complicated to somebody's experience of God, so the more that you come to understand how somebody experiences, subjectively experiences their world, you need to tolerate that you can grasp only a tiny portion of what they do. - So in terms of temperament for somebody who's doing both
of these things, anthropology, it sounds like
self-confidence is important. Is that is that the right word? 'Cause you're moving between worlds, and moving out of worlds. - Well, I find that self-confidence is nice, it's
a good thing to have in life, you need to be robust enough
to come back to yourself. But I think the skill that you really need is the ability to kind of, you know, seek to identify with somebody else. There's actually a funny way in which the good anthropologist, I think this is true
for all anthropologists, but really, particularly for people who are really trying to understand the structure of the agricultural life, but what it's like to live
in somebody else's skin. You know, when you're talking to somebody, there's a piece of you
that's trying to figure out what it's like to be them, and so there's almost as
if you have a time delay, in that way that you're
responding to people. So I think it's not unrelated to being
the skills of being an actor, I think, except that
it's almost the opposite, but I think actors become very conscious of who they are in the room, and you know, the
anthropologist more needs to have this negative capability,
the sense of being aware, always thinking about
what it would be like to be somebody else. And so, again, you've got
to tolerate limitations because who knows what
it's like to actually live in somebody else's skin? But it's more like a novelist's skills, except you're constrained by the fact that you're not making it up. You're sitting with real people and you're trying to
figure out what it is like to write a ritual, sit with
somebody who's psychotic, if you're a psychiatrist, what it's like to pray. And so, you yourself can
learn a little bit about that by praying and sitting with
people who are psychotic, or writing a ritual, but
you never quite know. So you always have the sense
that you're triangulating from many, many different
sources of information, and you're trying to help
yourself to construct a sense of what this
different world is like in trying to lay out the
steps that it would take somebody who wasn't from that
world to sort of go native to some extent in that world. And then you, the anthropologist,
have to kind of be able to do that and come back. - And you come back and you record and analyze, and one of the remarkable
things about your work is it's very hard to put your books down 'cause they're so well-written. - [Tanya] Thank you. - So you said novelist, like a novelist, so in other words, the book that comes out is not a novel, but
you're carrying forward what you've learned. - Right, and one of the things
that you're trying to do is tell this story in a way
that's true to the people that you're describing, but
also makes them come alive to the people who are reading. You, the anthropologist,
know what this world is like. You then try to set it down in prose, and that's often, you know, it's really a sobering
experience to spend three hours in an evening, with a group of people, and then come back and
you try to write it down for three hours, and my goodness! There's all this stuff
that just drops out, and what remains is that, you know, skeletal structure that
you've sketched out. And so, what you're trying to learn to do is to use your words to evoke, to capture, to point, to get people to get some sense of what it's like. And it's so interesting
reading ethnographies. The good old-fashioned
ethnographies were kind of wonderful because they were written with the idea that nobody who was reading them had ever been to, say, Africa. So, I was studying at Cambridge. Most of the people I was meeting had done their field work fieldwork in Africa. And so, the books were
full of these descriptions of red earth and a hot sun that, you know, the reader
hadn't experienced before. And I find one of the
challenges of writing about a world that people know is that, you know, you write about
evangelical Christianity. People know a lot about
evangelical Christianity, and yet in some sense,
often, they know nothing, and so it's a slightly
different writerly challenge. And so it's an interesting challenge. - And the good writing seemed to be important
because as an anthropologist and a field worker, we've already said to be
respectful of the community, but then you have to capture that, and not embed it in jargon. - [Tanya] Right. - Really, because otherwise,
you will lose the empathy that you have had and you
won't convey it to the reader who also has to empathize, right? - That's right. Yeah, that's right. - So, what was your dissertation on? Let's go back to your graduate education. - Well, I called it as science, or children offspring of Prospero. It was about these middle-class folks, mostly middle-class folks in London, who practiced what they
called magic and witchcraft. I'd been reading Evans-Pritchard, and all these anthropological
accounts of people in preliterate settings who
practiced witchcraft and magic, and had a lot of ideas about magic. And on my way off to graduate school, I picked up a book in
the Harvard bookstore that told you how to be a witch. It was kinda great. It was written by somebody
in Berkeley, and-- - Was there a degree in-- - No, she wasn't describing one, but it turned out that there was. And I was just floored by this
description of being a witch, being a magician in this modern, sophisticated, complicated world. And I thought it would
be really interesting to try to understand how
magic became compelling to somebody, and how it
seemed real to people who had been brought up, in theory, in a very post-magical, very
modern, even post-modern, scientifically sophisticated world. And so, I went searching
for this in England. So here I was at Cambridge, sharing this book to people
and chatting about it, and somebody finally said, "Oh, "a friend of a friend of a
friend of a friend of mine "is a witch. "You ought to give her a call." And so, I called her
up and said, you know, "Hi, I'm a Cambridge anthropologist, "and I'm interested in witchcraft. "I hear you're a witch. "Can I come talk to you?" And I went out to see her, and it turned out that
she was a great woman. She also brewed her own wine, which was pretty intense. Vintage was about three weeks. It was a little tough, but she was fascinating. And she introduced me to
a whole world of people who were, on the one hand, sophisticated, well-educated, some
with Cambridge degrees, and on the other hand, practicing magic, and this was a world that
thought that there were different kinds of reality. There was the material world,
then there's other stuff. This other stuff has power, and you can use your mind to harness it, direct it, push it in different directions so that you can get the house next door, or cure your back problem, bring truth into English
politics. all kinds of stuff. So that's what I did. I tried to make sense
of how what these folks were doing was persuasive to them. - And you point out, actually, and I think this is a point you make in several of your books, is that we live in a
complex world, generally, in which we're very
uncertain and ambivalent about the meaning of things, and this is a defining condition for many of the communities you look at. So they're trying to come to term with their own ambivalences
about the world, and they recognize those ambivalences. - And I think what I was really aware of was how complicated these commitments to the supernatural were, and it's not that people aren't clear about what they believe, but that although they might believe that the magic is real,
or that God is real, in some ways, that's always
a conditional commitment, even though they really believe it. And if you think about
it, any church service is surprisingly work-intensive. I mean, you know, think
of the amount of effort we go to build a church. We spend a lot of money, a lot of time. We build this huge thing,
and then we fill it with, you know, sense and music
and people, and all this. You know, if people took for granted, and it was not at all a
question of whether God existed, you wouldn't have to do all that stuff. And there's a way in which
God is really real for people, the magic's really real for people, but they're also making God
real, and making the magic real at the same time. And particularly in a sophisticated world, like London, or you know, the South Bay, or East Bay, whatever, people know that there are other people who have very different
understandings of the world. They encounter people who believe different things things
about the ultimate, and they can't but be
aware of those differences. You can't write all those
people off as crazy. And if you take some of them
as being sensible people, then you have this, you know,
what do you do with that? And so, that was one of the things I was trying to understand, how people allowed their
fundamental commitments to be alive to them. - And you found that there was, in the ritual and the apparatus of magic, something that was
reminiscent of religion. - [Tanya] Absolutely. - Yeah. - I really began, remember, I was going to graduate school back in the days of the linguistic turn, and we were gonna understand
everything with language. I didn't even have the
tools of cognitive science to articulate it then, but I thought that what
I was gonna do when I, you know, wandered into this magical world and I tried to understand it, I thought I was gonna be understanding, looking for and identifying,
and sketching out words, metaphors, representations, narratives that people would acquire. So you'd be a non-magician, you'd start hanging out
in these magical worlds, and you would acquire a way
of thinking about the world that would just reshape your
way of explaining events, and I certainly found those. But what I also found was that the magicians were very clear. So these were people who met in groups of between, oh, 10 and 100, and they would do these rituals, and the rituals would involve
running around and whatever, but they really involve
shedding your mind, visualizing something powerfully, and allowing the power,
however you understand that, to come through your mind
and go out to the world. People were very clear
that if you were going to do magic, you had to practice, and the practices were things like, I mean, I did take a course
in magic, nine-month course, with what was called a supervisor. I wrote essays, they were
graded, and I had an exercise. So, 15 minutes a day, I
had to sit in my room, shut my eyes, and imagine in my mind's eye that I was flying through the air. I was going to this garden in the sky. I was building, in that garden,
an altar with a chalice, and whatever else. I was planting the garden,
and it was, for me, my own magical altar on
which I could do rituals that would change the world. And so, 15 minutes a day, I
had to do these practices, which involved, basically,
shutting my eyes and imagining stuff. People were very clear that if
you wanted to practice magic, you had to do those exercises. And what floored me is
that the exercises worked, and by that, I mean that they changed me. I never felt I was leaving my
body to fly to this garden, but I felt different. The garden got more and more powerful, sort of realistic. I had a couple of striking experiences. I felt magic move through my body, and I really felt it. I'm not making an ontological claim here about the reality of magic, but I felt that move through my body. I was in a ritual and I saw God, not externally in the world,
but I saw God in my mind's eye. This particular God, who
was sort of a horned God, and a kind of, sorta James
George Frazer kind of, you know, ancient peoples God. I woke up one morning and I saw six druids standing by the window, so I saw them. You'd call it, technically,
a hallucination. It's not so hard to have them
between sleep and awareness, but turns out they're kind of common, but it was very striking to me. And I was reading this book
that was written by a witch called The Mists of Avalon,
all about the Arthurian story. And other people would report
these experiences as well. It wasn't like it was just me. People would say things like, "Oh, "I saw the goddess, it was
the most amazing experience. "I looked into the
mirror and there she was, "and it wasn't me, I saw something." They would talk about
hunting on the astral plane, and sometimes, it was pretty clear they had a powerful experience. Goodness knows how you
make sense of that, again, ontologically, what's really happening, but they had these powerful experiences. And so, I realized that if I was, ultimately, really gonna understand that, I'd have to start
understanding these changes that happen to people as a result of these practices they did. And over the decades, I came to look at what the witches were
doing more carefully. Looks an awful lot like Christian prayer. - And the important point here, which you actually carry
into other studies, is that it's, just to
repeat what you're saying, that it's not necessarily belief or ideas, but it's really the practice of doing, in this case, magic, that in some way, helps shape your mind so that, in a way, some of what's going on here sounds like a novelist, basically, in a way, for the people who are
actually doing this stuff. - Absolutely. So, in substance, I see myself as doing a sort of social anthropology of the mind, looking at the way that
people use practices and ideas within a certain social world to micro-construct their
subjective experience, and to shift their
psychological responses. So, you know, humans have a certain packet of psychological capacities, but the practices, the social practices, in which those humans are located, and the way that they attend
to their inner experience during religious and other practices really changes their experience
in pretty powerful ways. So when I think about my
contribution to anthropology, I think about the way that culture really gets under your skin and changes your experience profoundly. - And it's important here
that magicians hang around with magicians, right?
- Absolutely. - So they're getting the communal support that reinforces this. - Absolutely. I mean, you can do some of these techniques by yourself, read a bunch of books, sort of
carry your community with you in the form of printed words,
but it's much more powerful when you're with a group
of like-minded people who are practicing
certain things together. One of the most amazing
things I saw when I was hanging out in the magical world were people who almost went on voyages in their mind together. So you would see people, and
we have records of people who would sit together,
and they would relax, and they would describe to each other what they were seeing in their mind's eye, and they were describing
it so that other people in the group could have this experience. And when the group was
skilled and small enough, people could take on the
story from each other, and they would have, together,
this shared experience that was also an imagined experience, or at least, they were
using their imagination to experience it. I thought that was fascinating. - You have a line here that was one of two lines that I thought were really, you say of the 1960s, people discovered tarot
cards at about the same time as they discovered bean sprouts, actually. So in other words, it's a phenomena that's
sort of generally out there in the world, but these communities take a particular form. - Absolutely. So, one of the things, the
big thing that happened in the '60s is that the ordinary middle-class life blew open, and people began to
search for the spiritual in new ways. They do that in Christianity
in particular ways, they did it outside of
Christianity in particular ways. They were using some
of the same techniques, and they were all searching for something that was more palpably real to them than God had been in the standard mainstream churches of the '50s. - Mm-hmm. Now, before you did the
work on the evangelicals, you worked on psychiatrists, and psychiatrists are a community that, in the end, finds illness and disease, and some of what you're dealing with, namely what people have in their minds, and how their practice
changes their minds. So, how did you come to
to work on psychiatrists, and what did you find? - So it's sort of the other
side of my interest in religion. When people embrace religion, they are seeking to
change their mental world in particular ways, often to make themselves, this is not the whole point of religion, but I think that you
could think of religion as an emotion management
and mind management system that changes the way
you experience yourself. It seeks to calm your anxious voices, give you a sense of
confidence, that you're loved, that you're doing good
in the world, whatever. Mental illness is the
other side of that story. There are ways in which people's
minds get out of control, the anxious voices don't quiet down. They sometimes hear people speak, and people aren't speaking. They are horribly depressed,
they feel anguish. The book on psychiatry is
really about the observation that the way that we think about the mind changes some of the mental experience. And the vehicle for thinking
about that more deeply was watching young
psychiatrists come to terms with what mental illness was from two different perspectives. I was in that world at a
time when there was tension between the biomedical model
and the psychodynamic model, so there were both, you know, scientists in white coats
who were in lab coats, who thought of themselves
as curing illness by giving medication, and you know, and illness was disease. And there were folks who were, you know, wearing tweed jackets and talking
about emotional suffering, and trying to help people manage their own sense of distress through
developing a better relationship with somebody else. And so, that was my
vehicle to watch the way that young psychiatrists came
to understand mental illness from two different perspectives, and how differently those perspectives represented mental illness. - And in the choice about the kind of psychiatrist you were was also socially based, basically, right? In other words, because the
work of medicine was changing, you were getting insurance plans that may want to pay for pills, but not for extended psychoanalysis. - Right. And so, you know, residencies where
young psychiatrists are trained, were shifting rapidly, and there was an expectation
that you would find your meal ticket by
prescribing medication, rather than conducting psychotherapy, that's changed a little now, and different places emphasized
one more than the other. But there was still these
two different models of psychiatry in any residency. And you could see the way they interacted, you could see the way that people tried to make sense of them. And I could see that the
loss of psychoanalysis, I thought, was hard on patients, and the rise of what I'll call
the vulgar biomedical model was hard on patients. And then eventually, I went
off and started studying people who were struggling with serious psychotic disorder as well. - And you say, at one point here, biology is the great moral
loophole for our age. - Yeah, thank you. I think it is. I mean, we think, increasingly, if we have a body-based
vision of human action, then nobody's choosing
to act in an immoral way. It simply happens. You were addicted to
gambling, for example. You were psychotic, and so not responsible for a crime you may have committed. You committed suicide
because you were depressed, you didn't choose to do it. And I think that it's just striking,
particularly when you have a vulgar, and I don't think
that most psychiatrists hold a vulgar biomedical model, but particularly at the
height of that excitement about discovering that drugs would affect psychiatric illnesses, there
was a sense that, you know, we were all just biochemical air bags, and you could kind of
move the bag this way or move the bag that way, but
it didn't have anything to do with human choice or intention. - So in the book, you
wind up really focusing on the psychiatrist, but
not on the mentally ill. - That's right. There was only a last chapter
in which I talked about the cost to patients, and I thought that the cost was greatest to the most ill patients. If you have somebody with depression, serious depressive disorder, relatively common experience for folks, if you attribute that depression not to anything that anybody did, or not to any way which
you were disappointed by somebody else's action, but you simply see it as a brainstorm, and you take a medication, and the depression goes away, you're fine. You don't have to think
about morality at all. You don't have to think about
anyone's responsibility, you don't have to think about yourself as a choosing agentic person. You come back to baseline. You don't have to worry
about the disorder. If you think about a serious illness, like schizophrenia, as a matter of a broken brain, you remove all moral
personhood from that person because their brain is broken and they're never gonna
get back to baseline, and it turns out that
that's a little exaggerated. Some people do come back to baseline. Many more people recover
than we, and in fact, give them credit for doing. But in representing people
who are chronically ill as having faulty brains, we just take their
selfhood away from them. - It's interesting because, in a way, in this book, you are
observing the observers, and you are looking at how they learn to judge what is wrong with
this particular patient, and their choices about
what's wrong with this patient are affected by their training. - Sure, right, yeah. - So in a way, it would seem to be taking another cut if
this problem of observing and being respectful of a body of people who, in this case, are ill. - Yeah, I mean, I wasn't
holding psychiatry to blame. I was thinking about these
great cultural shifts that shaped the way that
people think about the body, and think about the soul, and
think about other persons. - Next, you did a book on evangelicals. - [Tanya] I did. - Was that hard to get into, or was that something that
your background made easier? - Well, I was always puzzled by the power of the response I saw to people training to be magicians. I wanted to understand it more deeply, and one of the things I learned from hanging out with psychiatrists is that there were ways to ask
those questions more deeply. And I've acquired a more
psychological sophistication in thinking about the way
that certain practices changed your mental experience. So I did this project, in part, motivated because
the kinds of things that the Christians said to me was very much the kinds of things that the witches said to me. The Christians said, "If
you want to know God, "you've got to pray. "Prayer is hard, and it's gonna take work, "and it will change you. "Some people will change
more than others." And they talked about that change in ways that was quite similar to the way that the witches talked about change. In some ways, what they
said was very different. There's a whole theological language that the witches and
magicians did not use, but they would even sometimes
say that prayer practice led to sharper mental imagery, and that was very interesting. That's not the kind of thing that you say because you want a signal
that you're a pious person. And so, that's what
led me into that world. I felt I'd learned something
from the psychiatric work that would help me to think
more deeply about the puzzle I was left with as the
result of the magical work, and I thought I could
begin to solve that puzzle, or explain that puzzle, by
looking at evangelicals. And one of the things that's really clear about evangelical
Christianity is you can't say that they're a bunch of oddballs the way you can say about witches. You could say that witches
aren't very important. I mean, who's a witch? Arguably, more people in Berkeley than other parts of the
world, but you know. It's like you can't say,
to a group that constitutes something like 40% of
the American population, these are oddballs. You have to take their
experience seriously. - Now, how did you go about studying it? Did you actually join a church, become a participant in a
church, and which church? - So, I joined something called the, or I went to the Vineyard
Christian Fellowship, and it really represents the
way that American Christianity shifted after the Vietnam War, you know, with all of these shifts, towards a God who's
experienced more intimately and immediately, and more
powerfully, more experientially. And so the Vineyard is one of
these churches that grew up out of the hippie Christians, and turns out they had
a big effect on the way that the American Christian
Church has changed. And this is a church that
encourages you to experience God as interacting with you. The Christian God has
always been understood as an interactive God, but sometimes, it wasn't
for everybody in the church. And this church really invites
you to have a personal, intimate, and conversational
relationship with God. So I went searching for a
church, found the Vineyard, and then started going to the Vineyard. - And you're arguing that you observed the practice changing the mind, so it's not as if you're reading the Bible and memorizing the Bible, and developing a set of ideas, but it's by doing the work of prayer that you then open your mind to God. Talk a little about that. - So I should say that the Bible is still pretty darn important. What people are trying to do, in effect, which is something the
early church fathers and the Medieval clerics did, they're trying to replace
ordinary human imagination with imagination of the Scriptures. But what people are doing is they're trying to
experience God as talking back in what I would call
these imaginal dialogues. So this is a term that
somebody like Mary Watkins or Frederic Myers used to
describe these conversations we have with other people
who aren't present. You talk to your dog, you talk
to yourself in the mirror, you talk to your mom who's
not present, you talk to God. And they use the word
imaginal to describe the fact that these inner voice conversations, you've got to use your imagination to have those conversations, but the person having the conversation doesn't necessarily think that it is an imaginary experience. And so, when people come
into a church like this, they seek to come to experience themselves as hearing, talking to God
in prayer about anything, about, you know, their exam on Friday, about their bad date the previous night, about where they want to go on vacation, I mean, all the stuff you
talk to a best friend about, even maybe more than you
talk to a best friend about, and you really want to hear
what God has to say about that. And so, people experience
that in many different kinds of ways. Sometimes, people experience God very actively, talking back and forth, and some people don't. But you're really trying
to create this experience in which God is talking back, you recognize his voice in your mind, and that conversation you're having is not anchored in your imagination. It's rooted in the world in some ways, and so you've got to learn how to do that. First of all, you've got
to hold the conversation. A pastor says things like,
"Have a cup of coffee with God." You know, you have your cup of coffee, pour a second cup of coffee for God. Sit there at the table with
the two cups of coffee. It'll help you have this conversation, and just talk to God and see
whether anything happens. For something to happen,
you've got to pick out a thought in your mind
that you might have thought as being your own mind, your own thought, but you learn to recognize
is not self-authored, but other-authored. And so, there are
certain thoughts you have that are good candidates for this. So, you know, you're talking to God, and you're having this conversation, and maybe you're sort of
making up what God says, and then a word pops into
your mind, you know, Christy. I should call Christy. God wants me to call Christy. If a thought is spontaneous, you weren't thinking about it at the time, it feels louder than other thoughts, it's a better candidate
to be a thought from God. If it's in accord with
Scripture, the pastor will say, "If God tells you to jump
off a bridge, it's not God. "You've made a misidentification." The thought should make you feel good, because in this church,
God is good and loving. He loves you, you should feel loved. And then you should kinda
check it out with other people, get them to pray about it with you, or see whether you can confirm
the experience in other ways. So that's the first thing that people do. They begin to discern how
God is speaking to them, they practice, practice, practice, they use their imagination
to represent God, and they develop very
complicated ideas about when it's God and when it's not God. So if God is speaking to you in your mind, you are extremely, you know, I know that secular liberals
get very freaked out by that idea, you know. George Bush said that God
told him to invade Iraq makes people very anxious. But I thought the people
were really pretty thoughtful about all the stuff that
intervened between them and God. Then they had this really rich sense that they could be wrong,
maybe it's not God, maybe it's their own desire,
maybe God's not telling them to go out with so-and-so,
maybe they just wanna do that. - How do we distinguish, 'cause a secularist would
look at this and say either these people are being
brainwashed, on the one hand, or very demeaning and say,
you know, they're crazy, they're like mentally ill people. How do you distinguish
between these categories of a discipline talking to God
to somebody who hears voices and loses control, on the one hand, and on the other hand, people
who are being brainwashed, basically, by their ministry? - I wouldn't call it brainwashed. People come to these
churches and sometimes, the pastors of these churches
will hold political views, or other people hold political views, that seem very comfortable to people, to newcomers to the church, and other observers become very agitated by those political views for, you know, reasons that aren't surprising. The really kind of
complicated question, I think, is the relationship
between these practices where people are schooling
and disciplining their mind and mental illness. And I think that in some crude sense, it's an easy distinction because
people who are mentally ill are often very unhappy. They feel there's something going wrong, and their voices aren't
telling them things that are consonant, they're
not in accord with Scripture, is what a Christian would say,
or they have very odd ideas. And often, particularly
the person who is having these back and forth
conversations who meets criteria for a diagnosis like schizophrenia, they have auditory experiences, and those auditory experiences
are really pretty disturbing. So in general, you got folks in church, they're having inner voice conversations, they're seeking to
sculpt those experiences so that they are helpful, healthful, happy, whatever, and very, very rarely do they
have an auditory experience. Turns out these are not so uncommon in the context of the general population. If they do, it's short, it's
rare, and it's startling, but it's not distressing. So you're driving along the road, and God pipes up out of
the backseat and says, "I will always be with you." Kinda great. You're a little startled,
you're a little freaked out, but it's kinda great. Somebody who is psychotic
and hearing voices, they are hearing not six words, but they're hearing
paragraphs, conversations, voices all the time, 700
voices, a cloud of voices. And what those voices say, it's
really pretty awful usually. I mean, really terrible, terrible things. And so, there's this very
crude anD obvious difference. What's messier is that line where people probably meet
criteria for schizophrenia, but they're really holding themselves together really well, and maybe they pass. And so, we could we could
talk more about that. I do think that these
mind management techniques are at the heart of therapy, they're at the heart of mindfulness. These are techniques people
use to manage their anxiety, and sometimes, they help
people who are vulnerable. - You make a comparison with
what's called, in fiction, magical realism, that in some ways, these communities you're talking about are versions of that, that
they're applied to real life. - Yeah. So if you think about magical realism, what it does is a technique. You drop in supernatural magical stuff as if it's just there. You don't mark it as something
special and different. That's how you're supposed
to be experiencing God, as if he's right there. I know exactly where he
is, and there's a sense that you're trying to
create that for yourself. So people calmly and
casually say things like, "Well, you know, the other
day, God told me to X. "Oh, the other day, I really felt that God "strongly said to me that I should do Y." And you're at church and
you sing a worship song, and you pause for God to talk to people. And the idea is to really let God not be part of 45 minutes on every Sunday in which you think a little
bit about the Scripture, but somehow, an ongoing
presence in your life. I started asking people whether God was like an imaginary friend, and I had in mind the
10-year-old, or the six-year-old, you know, you have to
keep a place at the table for the imaginary companion. And people would say, "Oh,
yes, but he's not imaginary." So he's kind of real in the world, and that's what you're aiming for. It's a complicated dance because it's hard not to notice
that God is invisible. And in fact, adults behaved with God kind of the way young children behave with invisible friends. You set a place at the table for God, and sometimes you don't. And maybe on Tuesday morning,
it's really, really important to you that you've been experiencing God, and you just kind of
forget that he's there. It takes a certain
amount of work and effort to keep God always in mind, and that's kind of central
to the action of this church. That's what they're
trying to do to get you to keep God always in mind. - Is there a lesson or
two that you've learned from these experiences by observing these communities, empathizing with them, and these are communities that at least part of the population would be dismissive of, and
not understand the richness of what's going on? - Yeah, I mean, one of
the bluntest lessons is that mind management, to
use a secular term, works, and it works more effectively if you can carry God with you and believe that God is external to you. So if you think about
what people are doing as being something that's
a lot like therapy, you know, you're kind of
building this external being up, using all your best examples of loving, caring, thoughtful, wise people. And you've got the community around you, the real people around
you, trying to persuade you that this representation,
this God, this is really real, and you give yourself time to consult God when you're anxious or scared, or something lousy has happened, and you allow this God to remind you that the world's good, you're loved, life is lovely, life is beautiful. That's kinda great. We have abundant evidence
that going to church is good for you, on
average, statistically. We don't understand this
fully, but on average, you go to church once a week, you live two to three years longer. It's not quite as good as 30
minutes of exercise every day, but it's pretty darn good. That's really striking. - One final question. Is there something that
secularists could learn from what you've studied, as they deal with fundamentalists and evangelicals in politics? In other words, is there a lesson that might create a common ground here in the future? - Yeah. I mean, there are a couple of lessons. First of all, the evangelical
community is more complicated and more diverse than most
secular liberals imagine. There are many green evangelicals, there are many liberal evangelicals, there are many evangelicals
who voted for Obama, not most evangelicals, but
even in the last election, where it was when 80%
of the evangelical vote was for the Republican ticket, it's like one in five. That's a lot more than
most people imagine. Many evangelicals are more well-educated and more sophisticated
than people imagine. And I think the basic lesson that the experience of God
is not a mistaken belief that people carry with
them because they're dumb, but a rich practice in
which people are using an experience of God in order
to feel more comfortable and at ease in the world. I think that's really important
because I think it helps, in having these conversations, to see that there's something smart and sophisticated that somebody else is doing. Evangelical world is a
very complicated world, and that's just a real
truth about the world. And sometimes, the things that people say get up my nose too. That doesn't mean that it's true for all of the community. - Well, on that note, Professor Luhrmann, I want to thank you for being
here today on our program. Fascinating account of your
intellectual journey, thank you. - Thank you very much for having me. - And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History. (bright electronic music)
