Twenty-Third Wednesday after Pentecost

Thanks to Francis and Chris for their comments. I'll talk about Chris's question in the next Bible Study blog.

Wednesday is theology day on the blog. Yesterday I read a lengthy book review, really more than an essay than a book review, in the latest issue of the New Yorker magazine. The title of the review was "Creating God." The reviewer was James Wood. The book reviewed was entitled How God Becomes Real. The author is T.M. Luhrman. She is an anthropology professor at Stanford, who specializes in research on Evangelical Christians. The publisher is Princeton University Press. 

Wood is English and an atheist who grew up in a charismatic Anglican church in Durham, England. He rejected faith in his teen years and has never gone back. Luhrman is an agnostic, or at least Wood thinks she's an agnostic. She is utterly non-committal in her book.

What amazed me throughout the review was Wood's lack of understanding on numerous levels. He conflates Evangelicals with Charismatics at numerous points. Moreover, he shows no understanding that there are all sorts of different kinds of Evangelicals and all sorts of different kinds of Charismatics. Not all Charismatics are Evangelicals. Many are Catholics. The most recent newsworthy example of a Charismatic Catholic is Amy Coney Barrett. Not all Evangelicals are Charismatics. In fact, the vast majority are not. Charismatics and Evangelicals overlap but are not the same. They both defy precise definition, although Mainline Protestants and virtually all secular people like to oversimplify them.

Add to this mix Prosperity Gospel and you have far more confusion. Wood seems only vaguely aware of Prosperity Gospel. Add Pentecostals and it gets more complicated than that.

Among both Evangelicals and Charismatics is the belief that God is imminent. God is very close to the believer. God is intimately concerned with every aspect of the believers life. God answers prayers, often with actions, often with a non-auditory inner voice to the believer. Evangelicals and Charismatics often user phrases like, "God told me that...," or "God led me to do...' God is particularly involved in decision making. Although Catholics and Mainline Protestants seldom talk about personal experience of God in normal conversation (though they will talk about the church, ethics, theology, etc.), Evangelicals and Charismatics are quite comfortable in talking about their personal interactions with God, quite comfortable in praying together, and quite comfortable in praying aloud in groups, with other individual people, or even on the phone. 

All this seems incomprehensible to Wood and to secular people in general. Wood asks the common sort of secular question, "Why would God care about whether you're going to call your mother tonight, or what you're going to have for lunch tomorrow, and not seem to care about the slaughter of six million Jews in the Holocaust or the death of now over a million world-wide from Coronavirus?" Evangelicals and Charismatics seldom have good answers for those questions.

Seculars and a lot of Mainliners find intimate talk of experience with God scary. They have a sense that the kinds of folks who do such talk are mentally not quite right. This may seem odd for me to say, but I find that Evangelicals and Charismatics have a much better understanding of Mainliners and seculars than Mainliners and seculars have of Evangelicals and Charismatics. James Wood exemplifies this lack of understanding. 

I think I will read Luhrman's book.

Faithfully,

Christian