Text extracted via OCR from the original document. May contain errors from the scanning process.
companion. They may be more capable
of responding to God emotionally.
All theologies have trade-offs.
This one offers an intensely personal and
person-like God. He can comfort, like a
friend, and respond directly, like a
friend. He can be like a real social
relationship for those who make the
effort to experience him in this way. But
because that social relationship lacks so
many features of actual human
sociality—no visible body, no
responsive face, no spoken voice—such
a theology demands a great deal of effort
from those who follow it. They must
constantly work with their attention,
reinterpreting the ordinary and natural
into the presence of the extra-ordinary
and super-natural. Faiths which manage
God differently—less personal, more
present in the everyday natural world—
make fewer demands on their followers’
attentional habits. But it may be,
perhaps, that such a God may be easier
to take for granted. Paradoxically, it may
be that this high-maintenance, effortful
God appeals to so many modern people
(as many as a quarter of all Americans,
according to a recent Pew study)
precisely because the work demanded
makes the God feel more real in a world
in which disbelief is such a real social
option.
References
' Scholars who contribute to this
perspective include Scott Atran, Justin
Barrett, Pascal Boyer, Stewart Guthrie,
and Harvey Whitehouse.
* These churches have been described by
Miller, D. 1997. Reinventing American
Protestantism. Berkeley: University of
California; see also Wuthnow, R. 1998.
After heaven: spirituality in America
since the 1950s. Berkeley: University of
California Press. A survey by the Pew
Page |118
Foundation 2006 (Pew, 2006, Spirit and
Power: Ten nation survey. Pew Forum
on Religion and Public Life) found that
23% of all Americans belong to a
loosely similar style of “renewalist
Christianity.”
* Good summaries of work on hypnosis
and dissociation, with some reference to
absorption, can be found in Spiegel, H.
and D. Spiegel. 2004[ 1978], Trance and
treatment. New York: Basic Books;
Seligman, R. and L. Kirmayer. 2008,
“Dissociative experience and cultural
neuroscience.” Culture, Medicine and
Psychiatry 32(1): 31-64; and Butler, L.
2006, “Normative dissociation.”
Psychiatric Clinics of North America.
29: 45-62.
“The empirical work is presented in
Luhrmann, T., H. Nusbaum and R.
Thisted. 2010. “The absorption
hypothesis.” American Anthropologist.
March; cf. Tellegen, A. and G. Atkinson.
1974, “Openness to absorption and self
altering experiences (“absorption”), a
trait related to hypnotic susceptibility.”
Journal of Abnormal Psychology 83:
268-277
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