Book of the week: When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God by T.M. Luhrmann

(Knopf, $29)

One of the biggest cultural divides in America just got a little narrower, said Don Troop in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Tanya M. Luhrmann, a Stanford University anthropologist, set out a few years ago to understand how it could be that so many evangelical Christians claim to have “a personal relationship” with an invisible God, and her conclusions might help agnostics make sense even of believers who schedule “date nights” with Jesus. Luhrmann is not afraid to ask if self-delusion explains the millions of Americans who speak to God and believe he answers back, said Daniel Dyer in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “The short answer is no,” she writes. “The longer answer is perhaps yes.” Her openness proves “refreshing.”

Luhrmann “occasionally doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” said Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. Her conclusions all derive from the four years she spent closely studying two Vineyard Christian Fellowship congregations on Martha’s Vineyard, but “writing a book about American evangelicals and interviewing only Vineyardites is a bit like writing a book about the British Isles without ever leaving Inverness,” in the Scottish Highlands. The Vineyard movement is a small offshoot of 1960s charismatic Christianity, and millions of evangelicals would object to the “laughably simplistic” way that some Vineyardites see God’s constant intervention in everyday occurrences. Besides, “there really is no mystery” why Christians in a supportive environment would believe that God speaks to them in signs or as an inner voice, said Peter L. Berger in First Things. We’re social creatures, so “we accept the reality that is taken as such by those around us.”

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But this book’s refusal to settle on an easy explanation is “the thing that makes it most intriguing,” said Joan Acocella in The New Yorker. “From chapter to chapter, you can’t quite figure out” whether Luhrmann admires or pities the Vineyardites’ efforts to open their minds—through prayer journals, playacting, and workshops—to incoming messages from a divine being. Near the book’s conclusion, Luhrmann claims not to believe in a God that “sits out there,” but also says that she’s “come to know God” in her own way while spending so much time with evangelicals. But we shouldn’t criticize her for failing to decide this question in favor of either secularists or believers. Indeed, “we should thank her.”