How God Becomes Real

Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others

T.M. Luhrmann

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780691234441
  9780691164465
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691211985
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The hard work required to make God real, how it changes the people who do it, and why it helps explain the enduring power of faith

How do gods and spirits come to feel vividly real to people—as if they were standing right next to them? Humans tend to see supernatural agents everywhere, as the cognitive science of religion has shown. But it isn't easy to maintain a sense that there are invisible spirits who care about you. In How God Becomes Real, acclaimed anthropologist and scholar of religion T. M. Luhrmann argues that people must work incredibly hard to make gods real and that this effort—by changing the people who do it and giving them the benefits they seek from invisible others—helps to explain the enduring power of faith.

Drawing on ethnographic studies of evangelical Christians, pagans, magicians, Zoroastrians, Black Catholics, Santeria initiates, and newly orthodox Jews, Luhrmann notes that none of these people behave as if gods and spirits are simply there. Rather, these worshippers make strenuous efforts to create a world in which invisible others matter and can become intensely present and real. The faithful accomplish this through detailed stories, absorption, the cultivation of inner senses, belief in a porous mind, strong sensory experiences, prayer, and other practices. Along the way, Luhrmann shows why faith is harder than belief, why prayer is a metacognitive activity like therapy, why becoming religious is like getting engrossed in a book, and much more.

A fascinating account of why religious practices are more powerful than religious beliefs, How God Becomes Real suggests that faith is resilient not because it provides intuitions about gods and spirits—but because it changes the faithful in profound ways.

1

THE FAITH FRAME

Belief has always struck me as the wrong question, especially when it is offered as a diagnostic for determining the realness of the gods.

—Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth

Devout modern Christians talk constantly about not being faithful enough. They bemoan how hard it is to keep God’s love at the front of their minds. They complain about forgetting about God between Sunday services. They apologize for not being able to trust God to solve their problems. I remember a man weeping in front of a church over not having sufficient faith that God would replace the job he had lost. When you pay attention, you can see that church services are about reminding people to take God seriously and to behave in ways that will enable God to have an impact on their lives: to pray, to read the Bible, to be Christ-like. And then people say that they go back home and yell at their kids and feel foolish because they have forgotten that they meant to be like Jesus. They report that they run out of time to pray. They confess that they do not behave as if God can help them. They worry that they do not really understand or commit as they should.

In fact, when you look carefully, you can see that church is about changing people’s mental habits Sunday by Sunday so that they feel that God is more real, more relevant, and more present for them—so that they believe more than they did when they walked in and hold on to those beliefs a little longer after they walk out. It is one of the clearest messages in Christianity: You may think you believe in God, but really you don’t. You don’t take God seriously enough. You don’t act as if he’s there. Mark 9:24: Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.

This apparent paradox—believers as the unbelieving—stood out to me when I was doing ethnographic fieldwork with charismatic evangelical Protestants in Chicago and in the San Francisco South Bay (Luhrmann, When God Talks Back). Here were committed believers, most of whom asserted God’s reality with firm conviction and many of whom had acted and voted according to those convictions (as they understood them) in ways that had real consequences. Yet as I watched and listened carefully as an ethnographer, it became clear to me that they treated the invisible other at the heart of their faith quite differently than they treated visible, everyday things like barking dogs and orange peels. They said that God spoke to them, but they were often skeptical of other people’s reports of hearing God’s word, particularly when that word had specific outcomes. As one pastor said in church, “If you hear God say that you should be calm, take it as God! If God tells you to quit your job and move to Los Angeles, I want you to be praying with me, with your housegroup, and with your prayer circle to discern whether you heard God accurately.” People never asked God to write their term papers or to go shopping for them, even though they said that nothing was impossible with God. They said again and again that God’s power and love were infinite, but they often felt helpless and unlovable; they often said that they forgot to pray for help when they should have prayed; and they often struggled with apparently unanswered prayers. They talked about the mystery of faith, and how little they understood of why God seemed to answer some prayers but not others, and why God allowed such pain in their lives.

My observations suggested that it took these staunch evangelicals effort to keep God present and salient in their lives; that their belief in this invisible other was different in some way than their belief in the everyday reality of visible objects, or even invisible objects like electricity or microbes; and that it was particularly hard to sustain a straightforward faith in God’s deep love because the world so often seemed to deny it.

I saw that these Christians went to church at least once a week. They tried to read their Bibles every day, and they explained the details of their lives through biblical stories. They thought they should pray at least thirty minutes a day. Many of them spent an evening each week with a small group of other congregants, where they prayed and sang and talked about the Bible. They said again and again that unless you did all those things, your faith would wither and die—that unless people went to efforts to keep God front and center in their awareness, God would simply disappear for them. They never said any of those things about the kitchen table or other ordinary objects in the everyday natural world. There is an obduracy about the world of the visible that means that when inferences about invisible others are not supported by experience, the commitment to them can fade away—and believers know it.

This is not the way many anthropologists talk about belief. To be fair, Christians often state their beliefs with absolute conviction. It is easy for an observer to say, these people neither doubt nor question. They praise the Lord at every other sentence, so why would one even wonder about their confidence in the realness of God? “I believe in Christianity,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else” (1962: 165).

Perhaps because they hear statements like these at home, many anthropologists often write as if their subjects never entertain hesitations about the supernatural and never doubt that the supernatural is straightforwardly as real as the ground they walk on. Anthropologists, often describing people who are not Western and whose societies have never been secular to readers they presume to be both secular and Western, write sentences like these:

[The Andaman Islanders] believe that the spirits feed on the flesh of dead men and women. (Radcliffe-Brown [1922] 2013: 140)

Chiefs for instance are believed sometimes to “rise up” as lions. The belief is consistent with the theory of ancestral presence in animals, trees and artifacts dedicated to ancestors. (Fortes 1987: 136, about the Tallensi of Northern Ghana)

God’s existence is taken for granted by everybody. (Evans-Pritchard 1956: 9, about the Nuer of the Nile Valley)

That last sentence ends, as Clifford Geertz (1988: 58) remarked that all Evans-Pritchard’s sentences end, with an implied “of course.” That’s the way it is. These people think that the gods are real, that they are present, and that they are powerful.

In fact, when anthropologists write this way, they often intend to convey that the people they study are so unquestioning that it would be a mistake even to describe them as “believing.” That was Evans-Pritchard’s point. He wrote that sentence to reject the very possibility that the Nuer would ever say something like “there is a God.”

That would be for Nuer a pointless remark.… There is … no word in the Nuer language which could stand for “I believe.” (Evans-Pritchard 1956: 9)

It is a claim echoed by anthropologist after anthropologist. Thus Christina Toren:

We [anthropologists] may characterise as belief what our informants know and, in so doing, misrepresent them. If I am to correctly represent my Fijian informants, for example, I should say that they know the ancestors inhabit the places that were theirs. (Toren 2007: 307–8)

They do not “believe.” They “know.”

When anthropologists insist that the people they study know, rather than believe, that their gods are real, they are often making a claim about the foolish mistakes modern people make. They are often asserting that “believing in” is a Western or Christian thing, an argument made vigorously by Talal Asad (1993). Sometimes they are insisting that when anthropologists talk about the beliefs of other people, it is really a way to dismiss them. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (e.g., 2011), Morten Pedersen (2011), and Martin Holbraad (2009) have written fiery texts about the ways that anthropologists have examined the belief commitments of people like those in Amazonia, Mongolia, and Cuba. They argue that most anthropological observers write as if they presume that such beliefs are wrong—and that view, they argue, is driven by deep-seated colonialist impulses or by a scientific imperialism. This is Viveiros de Castro (2011: 133): “Anthropologists must allow that ‘visions’ are not beliefs, nor consensual views, but rather worlds seen objectively; not world views, but worlds of vision.”

I agree that there is something quite culturally specific about the way that people in the modern West think about what is real, both because of the Enlightenment heritage of their society and because of its Christian roots. I completely disagree that other people do not distinguish between the realness of humans, trees, and rocks and the realness of ghosts, gods, and spirits, and that they do not have to go to any effort to experience the latter as real. I think that the evidence suggests that all human groups distinguish what counts as natural from what is beyond the natural, even though they may draw the line in different ways and come to different conclusions at different times about what is on which side of the line. As Robert Bartlett points out in The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages, people can have unstable views about what is natural without rejecting the idea that some things are natural and other things come from a god. In fact, to me it seems somewhat insulting to assume that non-Western people don’t think of objects like rocks and gods as being real in different ways, as if they had a less subtle ontology than we moderns. I suspect that all humans have flexible ontologies, and that they hold ideas about gods and spirits (on the one hand) and the everyday world (on the other) in different ways.

FLEXIBLE ONTOLOGIES

To understand the point, let us turn first to what philosophers and psychologists have taught us about human thought in recent years. Over the last four decades or so, it has become clear that humans use two different patterns of reasoning. The terms used to describe these two patterns vary: heuristic and analytic reasoning (Evans 1984); system one (intuition) and system two (deliberate reasoning) (Kahneman 2003); implicit and explicit beliefs (Boyer 2001); unreflective and reflective beliefs (Barrett 2004); and alief and belief (Gendler 2008). Each pair emphasizes somewhat different phenomena, but all point out that humans come to different conclusions when they think quickly, automatically, and intuitively as compared to when they think slowly, carefully, and deliberatively.

We call ideas produced by the first pattern of reasoning “intuitions,” the beliefs people generate when they think “from the gut.” Some intuitions seem more part of the package of being human. Even infants expect solid objects that bump into other solid objects to bounce back. They act more surprised if the objects seem to ooze into each other. We seem to have not only an “innate physics” but also an innate biology, an innate psychology, and even an innate mathematics (Spelke and Kinzler 2007). Other intuitions are based on acquired knowledge. When people are asked whether it is more likely that “a flood caused many people to die in California” or that “an earthquake caused a flood to cause many people to die in California,” many pick the latter because they have learned that California is associated with earthquakes, not floods, even though logically the first is more likely than the second. When they are asked whether a young female Berkeley philosophy graduate became a bank-teller or a bank-teller and a feminist, they often pick the latter because they have learned that people at Berkeley are politically progressive, even though (statistically speaking) the latter is less likely than the former (the existence of something that is both “a and b” is less likely than of something that is only “a”).

These examples are among the many illustrations generated by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in their remarkable research, summarized in Kahneman’s (2003) Nobel acceptance speech. (Tversky died before the prize was awarded.) They use them to show that our quick judgments are shaped in specific ways: representativeness (earthquakes are more representative of California than floods, feminists are more representative of female Berkeley graduates than bank-tellers); salience (a vertical line and two vertical semicircles can look like a “13” in a line of numbers, but like a “B” in a line of letters); and framing effects (tell people that a program will save half the lives of a population, and they will like it more than a program that leads to the death of half the population). These are principles that help people make rapid decisions based on prior knowledge, and in many settings they help people save cognitive effort and likely help keep them safe.

By contrast, deliberative thinking is what we do when we come to what we call a rational decision, or when we write an analytical paper. At these times, we are aware of the steps in the argument. We think those steps through consciously, and we consider carefully whether they are supported by the evidence. Deliberative thinking may be fueled by intuitions, but when thinking deliberatively, people try to lay out the analytical elements clearly enough so that someone else is not confused. Deliberative thinking is hard, as anyone who has written a research paper can testify.

The models behind these two modes of thinking suggest that humans are constantly generating intuitions to help us solve all kinds of problems: where to sit on the train, whether there is anyone else in the house, whether we should trust the person we are talking to. More information will usually help us to overturn initial intuitions. If I hear a crash in the next room, I might initially worry that an intruder is there—but if I go into the room to investigate and see that the dog has knocked something down, my fear would give way to annoyance. We have intuitions about all sorts of things that we quickly decide are not true when we learn more—intuitions that we trust someone, or that the shirt on the rack on will look good on us, or that the dish we ordered will be tasty.

The great achievement of the field now called “the cognitive science of religion” has been to show that our evolved mental habits generate many intuitions that might support more reasoned, deliberative commitments to a supernatural presence. Pascal Boyer (2008) summarized several of these features for a paper in Nature.

First, he pointed out, humans are wildly anthropomorphic. Humans see agents everywhere—at least when thinking quickly. Humans see faces in the clouds and eyes on cars. When two geometric shapes move sequentially around a computer screen, people ascribe intentions to them. Second, humans are not only able to hold people in mind when they are absent, but they form enduring relationships with absent and even imagined others. Third, when humans are young, before they develop an understanding that humans have minds, they assume that what they know, everyone knows. The idea of an omniscient knower, then, is in some sense familiar to anyone who has been a child. Fourth, humans form groups in which they are sensitive to trust and to hard-to-fake signals of commitment. The willingness to assert claims for which there is no evidence but that entail costs (tithing, scarification, time) may facilitate the building of those groups. Fifth, humans are highly alert to danger. They seem to be acutely aware of the possibilities of predation and contamination. Our ancestors were probably more likely to survive if they treated unfamiliar noise as a signal that a predator might be present. Possibly as a result (although perhaps there are also other causes), we do see agents everywhere.

The intuitions that these mental habits produce likely do, indeed, make the apparently irrational idea of an invisible agent seem plausible. “When a reflective belief nicely matches what our nonconscious mental tools tell us through nonreflective beliefs,” Justin Barrett (2004: 13) remarks, “the reflective beliefs just seem more reasonable.” In fact, when people hold a deliberative commitment (God is everywhere always) that does not seem to make intuitive sense, you can interpret some of the work they do (seeking to find God’s presence all the time) as an attempt to make these deliberative commitments feel more intuitive (Boyer 2013).

But the observation that people have different patterns of reasoning—system one and system two, Kahneman and Tversky called them, or thinking fast and slow, to borrow the title of Kahneman’s (2011) famous book—should not only tell us that there is a difference between the plausibility of an idea and sustained commitment to that idea, but also remind us that belief is not one kind of thing. People have all sorts of ideas they call beliefs. They believe that the train will arrive at 10:12; that the coffee at Peet’s is better than the coffee at Starbucks; that in the Harry Potter series Hermione should have fallen for Harry and not for Ron; that gravitational force draws all objects; that there’s a carpet on the study floor; that there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His prophet. These are beliefs wit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Faith Frame
• 2. Making Paracosms
• 3. Talent and Training
• 4. How the Mind Matters
• 5. Evidence for the Way Gods and Spirits Respond
• 6. Why Prayer Works
• 7. A God Who Responds
• Acknowledgments
• General Notes on Methods
• Bibliographic Essays and Notes
• Bibliography
• Index