The Vineyard Christian Fellowship
Luhrmann joined a ‘new paradigm’ Christian church in California, in 2004 as an ethnographer and formally interviewed thirty members and talked with many more. She attended Sunday worship and many of the courses and activities. She focussed on how members ‘learned to feel God in their bodies and in their minds’. For these evangelical Christians, humans can experience divinity intimately in such a way that internal mind and external reality in some each participate in the other in some way. They ‘develop a direct personal and vividly felt relationship with their creator experienced through dialogue through
an interaction between two intentional consciousnesses’ (Luhrmann, 2007:32). She found that ‘people are encouraged to interpret God’s presence in the everyday flow of their own awareness, and to seek in it evidence that they might be hearing a voice spoken by another’ (Luhrmann, 2007:84). Luhrmann thus summaries her theoretical focus:
The experiential dimension of religion rests upon the way people learn to use cognitive concepts to interpret their minds and bodies, and the practices people learn which change bodily experiences in relation to those concepts, to make those concepts real. That is what they are learning to do when they learn to experience participation (Luhrmann, 2007:84).
Luhrmann was able to chart the practices that members used. The congregation were encouraged to become absorbed in their own thoughts. In order to do this they imported, ‘techniques that we think of as part of older eras and more exotic spiritualities – Christian mysticism, Zen Buddhism, Siberian Shamanism’ (Luhrmann, 2007;86). They were also to go to a quiet place to calm their thoughts and emotions to allow for the spontaneous flow of God within. They ‘wait on God’ to see if they can identify something in their thoughts, their minds and bodies as God. (Luhrmann, 2007:88) They were recommended breathing techniques, and encouraged to keep a journal in which they were to write the dialogue with God. The members also used the notion of ‘promptings’ of the Holy Spirit and these are described as ‘tingling, peace, warmth, crying, and images that seem to come from God’. The practices generate these experiences, which are then subject to what Luhrmann calls the ‘problem of discernment’. This entails various tests. A thought should not be your thought; it should be the kind of thing that God
would say. It should be shared by others in similar images. It should emerge through spiritual practices, and it should bring a feeling of comfort and peace, a settled acceptance.
Discernment thus is clearly a social process, in that there are socially taught rules through which God is identified. These social rules interact with the psychological consequences of practising absorption states. Those who experience heightened absorption and its associated consequences – greater imagery, greater imaginative engagement and increased internal or external sensory phenomena learn to interpret those phenomena as signs of God’s intentional presence in their lives (Luhrmann, 2007:90).
Luhrmann charts the process of reframing perceptions and notes that this process is not primarily about either belief or cognition.
As God comes to be experienced as an interlocutor, as concrete events in body and psyche come to be recognised as his responses, in the moment, to the worshipper’s prayer, God emerges as a real person – what psychoanalysts would call an object – in the worshipper’s emotional life. As this happens the problem of disconfirmation is no longer the challenge to an abstract hypothesis, a theory of reality (Luhrmann, 2007:95).
The members of the church are not modelling the world by different constraints. In a real way they live in a different world; things are changed utterly. They then draw on different evidence for their ideas, so the initial sense of continuity and seamlessness with everyday life results in discontinuity when everyday life is reframed as a dialogue with God. Luhrmann notes that belief in the truth of the senses is a ‘primitive zero-order belief’ (Luhrmann, 2007:101). She concludes her study by noting that these outcomes are the results both of learning and of social processes
The Word of Life Christian Ministry
The Swedish Word of Life charismatic revival church was studied by Coleman in the 1980s and written up through a series of publications (Coleman, 2000, 2007). He notes that such groups are often thought to be naively literal and engage in the suppression of semantic content to achieve certain kinds of meaninglessness. Coleman shows that this apparent literalness is more a mode of being in and acting upon the world than a cognitive focus on the specificities of chapter and verse. He shows how the elements of listening, speaking, hearing, text, readings from text, preaching and ministry become disciplines and combine and reinforce a ‘metaliteral’ understanding of actions in relation to words (Coleman, 2007:51).
The Word of Life church, as its name implies, is centrally concerned with how the Word is heard, received and acted upon. Coleman notes:
…silence and stillness are hardly strangers to ritual. Bell and Collins (1998) have juxtaposed British Quakerism and Buddhism and argued for the positive, communicative function of silence, since it can imply much more than the absence of sound, and can signify messages ranging from political protest to a marked receptivity to the divine. Bauman (1974:146) shows how the language ideology of the early Quakers stressed that speaking was seen as a faculty of the natural, outward person, and was therefore not perceived to be as valuable as the inward communion with God (Coleman, 2007:41).
Coleman argues that literalist interpretations focus on the semantic dimension of language and not on its pragmatic, performative and context-related
aspects. Coleman further notes that the Protestant subject is characterised by a normative ideal of sincerity in which words and interior states are made transparent and sincere and where the emphasis is on ‘truthful propositions rather than on ritual and bodily disciplines’ (Coleman, 2007:39). He focuses therefore on the practices of reading, hearing and speaking. He identifies a charismatic process whereby an ideology of literalism does not itself constitute literalism but is subverted. Coleman shows how the modes of hearing (sermons), ‘listening with the heart’, reading and speaking, accepting and applying the Word are linked in a rhetorical process which involves the performative engagement by members and creates agency. Preachers urge listeners to speak rather than inwardly register what they read or what they
hear, ‘the words must be sounded so that a description of one’s identity is
intended performatively to create that identity within the self’ (Coleman, 2007:47)
So, several modes of perception are activated. The listening to and hearing of the preached Word activates the bodily thought, the Word within, and this is sounded, spoken to become an embodied participation at worship and the basis of guided agency in the world. Worshippers develop ‘spiritual ears and eyes’ The metaphors of walking by faith and doing God’s word are made concrete. A key element in this is the connection between what the preacher says and the replication of that discourse in the words of others. What the preacher says and asks the congregation to do become the property of the group and the individuals that make it up. The literal passing on of the message from listener to listener through greetings shows the transitional process from the speaker’s words to the social currency of the group. The
apparent simplicity and literalness of this is complex when the rhetorical devices used by preachers and the performative engagement of modes of perception by listeners are examined. Literalism has ‘its own ambiguities and subtleties’ (Coleman, 2007:58)
These studies show varieties of Christian practices. They show the ways in which the elements of silence, waiting, giving attention, text, authoritative speech, speaking and hearing are combined as sources of evidence for God’s word. These themes, the combining of elements from the Christian tradition in new ways by marginal enclaves, will be further illustrated in the ethnography of Quaker practices.
2.2.3. The Category of Religion and the Concept of Belief.
Central to the Quaker tradition and operative today, is the rejection of features of traditional religion. Priests, creeds, steeplehouses, doctrine and dogma were all thought to create unnecessary and falsely authoritative mediation of what was expected to be inspiration by the Spirit and not the letter. The category of religion and the concept of belief have both been problematised in anthropology. I therefore examine how these discourses might inflect each other and some misunderstandings that may arise as a result.
Asad (1993) argued that there is no autonomous essence in religion and nor are its symbols embodied with essential meaning and, from this he concluded that there cannot be a universal definition of religion. He considered the elements of religious practice to be historically specific, that any definition is the result of discursive processes and that Christianity is not paradigmatic of religion in general. Asad traces this perspective to modern Christian hermeneutics, claiming that the attempt to construct a universal definition of religion ‘ought to be seen in the context of Christian attempts to achieve a coherence in doctrine, practices, rules and regulations’ (Asad quoted in Engelke & Tomlinson, 2007:3). Asad’s position is not without its critics. Engelke and Tomlinson (2007:4) suggest that ‘problems of meaning continue to impel people in modern societies towards religion’. Pine and Cabral (2008:8) also note that ‘Needham’s critique of religion continues to rankle on as a source of contention’. Needham’s (1972) contribution to questions of definition is to suggest that religions share ‘family resemblances’ and can be classified polythetically and this can be achieved without making belief a necessary feature.
Taylor avoids the task of trying to define ‘religion’ and adopts a reading of religion in terms of a transcendent-immanent dialectic. He recognises that religion in general cannot be defined in terms of this distinction. He justifies his dialectic as ‘taylor-made for our culture’ (Taylor, 2007:16). Heelas and Woodhead (2005) identify a shift from religion to spirituality. Collins (2002b) asserted that in taking part in Quaker worship he was not taking part in a
primarily religious event. Cabral and Pine (2008:10-12)60 suggest that while
religion is a ‘constant of human existence’ there is ‘a challenge to the very notion of religion as a clearly defined domain’. Religion has been conceptualised as a quality entailing sacralisation and ritualisation embedded in social practices. These practices include, for example, performances such as the ‘Whit Walk’ (Jenkins, 1999) or a dispersed ‘believing without belonging’ (Davie, 1994) and can be taken to counter Bruce’s narrower definition of ‘church going’. Religion for Jenkins is the way in which we pay attention to human wellbeing in a concentrated way.
The expression of the human aspiration to flourish, or – to put it another way – as the expression of the desire to be human in a particular form (Jenkins, 1999:13,14).
Jenkins wonders if an ethnography of religion is possible since it is not clear whether the term is necessary or useful.
A part of the point of anthropological method is that its argument springs from the ethnographic description, so it sheds or defers the whole business of prior definition and justification of its object. But it does so at first sight at the cost of reducing its ambition and speaking only of particular events, moments and contexts. In which case, it cannot be clear in advance that the category of ‘religion’ in any form will have place in the ethnographic account: after all, a whole anthropological literature exists dissolving comparable overarching categories (Jenkins, 1999:5).
So a key feature of the spiritual landscape is the way religion is conceptualised and the way Quakers understand religion. Both analytical uses and everyday discourse can be viewed in the following way. On the one
60 The published collection of papers is correctly referenced to Pine and Cabral,
hand, there is a perspective of continuity. Here religion and spirituality are seen as part of a seamless spectrum of practices, and definitions and generic
descriptions such as ‘orderings of the sacred’ are preferred. On the other
hand, there is the discontinuity perspective which sees religion as pertaining to the character that may manifest some transcendent source of creative animation as an ‘other’ to the human condition. Here religious practice is set apart from daily life as an encounter with this possibility under certain conditions, at particular times and in places and usually entailing ritual. Even those who accept the latter position divide into those who stress the givenness of the ‘other’ and its possible discovery by its manifestations (a ‘top-down’ realist view) and those who stress the constructed emergent, creative and language determined construction of religion, (a ‘bottom up’ critical realist view). Most of these perspectives may be found amongst Quakers.
These positions can be seen as falling within the cross-pressures that Taylor identifies, namely his dialectic of ‘transcendence-immanence’.
These positions themselves are defined in a field in which the extreme
ones, transcendental religion and reductive materialism are crucial reference points. Yet the cross pressures can
lead to a condition in which many people hesitate for a long time in their attitude to religion. But where they do not lead to prolonged uncertainty, cross pressures of this kind have been responsible for a host
of new positions which constitute what I call the ‘Nova’. We are torn between an anti-Christian thrust and a repulsion towards some (to us) extreme form of reduction, so we invent new positions (Taylor, 2007:599).
One of the key dilemmas in the cross-pressures that Taylor identifies is what I described above as the continuity-discontinuity perspective, one pole of which locates the possibility of religious experience within the immanent frame and rules out therefore any image of a transcendent function.
The Concept of Belief.
The central element of Needham’s (1972,1981) critique was the deployment by western anthropologists of the concept of ‘belief’ and its general application to religions. He criticised this description of belief as a neutral term ‘for all that people claim to know and affirm or take for granted’ (James, 2003:123). The effects of his position can be summarised thus:
‘Belief’ as a species of internal creed is not a ‘natural’ human capacity, but a component of the way that images of the human psychology and of the nature of knowledge, especially of the divine, have been constructed in human history. Malcolm Ruel has pursued a parallel argument, locating the notion of ‘belief’, as something to be opted for by the individual in specific periods of Christian history. He comments on the ‘monumental peculiarity of Christian “belief”, as it emerged from the older Hebrew sense of ‘trust’ to become an ‘acceptance of teachings’ after Christ’s death and resurrection. Belief in the sense of required personal commitment is a relatively modern, post-Reformation idea; it has a close connection with the modern spread of Christianity and missions in the context of imperial rule (James, 2003:123).
How does Needham’s critique and the debate that surrounds it impact on a study of Quakerism? Quakers may agree with Needham that religion is not ‘a critical apparatus for epistemological speculation’ (Needham, 1972:75). They may also agree that although the tenets ‘can be represented as a set of
propositions’ (Needham,1972:75.) it is not a general characteristic of Quakers ‘that the tenets are generally said by their proponents to be true’ (Needham, 1975:75). Indeed, Quakers would agree that in many cases practices entail ‘abstention from such judgements’ (Needham, 1972:77). Quakers may also agree that belief in the propositional sense is a modern characteristic with specific Judeo-Christian roots from which they have marked themselves off and is ‘not to be found in the Bible’ (Needham, 1972:77ff). However, Quakers would assert that if, as Needham speculates, the etymology of the word ‘religion’ is ‘recollection’, and speaks to the ‘doubtful quality of a troubled conscience’ then this is traditionally a defining quality of Quaker practice (Moore, 2000:81,82,86). It is also thought amongst Quakers to be universal and also an inner state as in the idea of ‘that of God in everyone’. Of course, Quakers are not arguing that all religions are concerned with these matters, but that the ‘human condition’ (Cabral, 2009:163ff) has this characteristic at its centre. It is important to note other features that Needham accepts such as the aspects of ‘adherence’, ‘commitments’, ‘symbolic classification’, ‘communal undertakings’, ‘conversion’, and ‘notions of good and bad’ (falling short of hypostasised evil) (Needham, 1972:76,76,86,84,80,81 respectively) in the raft of characteristics that argue for religions sharing some characteristic features.
Quaker practice also provides a cautionary note for the tendency, following Needham, to discount or marginalise beliefs, ruling them out as a characteristic of religious practice because of their lack of anthropological universalisability. Quakers hold a universal idea of ‘that of God in everyone’ in
the face of obvious cultural differences, and in cases where the attribution would be rejected, Quakers persist in holding the belief.
Therefore, to assert that religion ought not to be defined universally or generally by the Christian paradigm is not to suggest that Christians do not describe or understand themselves as performing religion and defining it by what they do. To assert that belief is not a description of an inner state with descriptions in all other languages so that it could be universalised does not claim that it is not used in various Christian-rooted movements to refer to certain trusting orientations that might reasonably be described as belief. In other words, although I accept the rejection of these Christian-rooted definitions as being able to provide an adequate general anthropological gloss, I do not wish to overlook the residual particularity of their use. I also retain the possibility that some of the actors in this study may make a sharp distinction between the domains of religion, ritual and daily life. They may consider that worship is an activity set apart and discontinuous from quotidian life, hence my use of Taylor’s (2007) framework which, in the transcendent- immanent dialectic of the nova, gives space for the continuity and discontinuity perspectives to co-exist.