Episode Details

A social anthropologist, with decades of scholarship on people striving to connect to another dimension, gives us her perspective on the Evangelical version of this phenomenon.

“It’s not a religion … it’s a relationship!” 

Many Christians claim this is what separates their faith from all others. 

There was a time when I myself made this claim.  I don’t anymore.  Not because “we broke up.”  But because, by any definition of the word “relationship” in every other context in my life, it was never there to begin with.  What I mean is, I do have many other relationships where there is a back-and-forth engagement … a sharing of presence, and even of ideas …. perceptible or even tangible exchanges.  But despite decades of sincerely trying to make any kind of connection with the Divine, I have essentially nothing to show for my efforts: any evidence that I might present to substantiate that relationship pales in comparison to the other ones I have with other people, with organizations, and even with my pets.

I know I’m not alone in feeling like this.

And yet others claim they have been and continue to be successful: they “hear from the Lord” and “sense his presence” all the time.  

As a wannabe-Christian, it’s hard not to feel left out.

We’ve already done one episode talking about this solely from our own perspective (Episode #42). In this episode, we talk to a social anthropologist — Dr. Tanya M. Luhrmann — who studied this phenomenon in detail, and wrote the book When God Talks Back: understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (2012).  She has done numerous studies of people groups around the world who believe they have a special connection to another dimension of reality that is not usually accessible to most other people.  But it was a conversation she had with an Evangelical Christian who claimed to “have coffee with Jesus all the time” that began her in-depth study of my own in-crowd.

And she noticed a recurring theme running through all those claims of spiritual experiences, whether they came from people practicing dark magic (a