An Anthropologist Among the Evangelicals

T.M. Luhrmann, an anthropologist at Stanford University, begins "When God Talks Back" by acknowledging this reality: In 21st-century America, there are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of apparently well-adjusted people who believe not just that they can speak to God but that he hears and answers them. Though not herself a religious person, and certainly not an evangelical Christian, she aims neither to support nor to undermine the claims that evangelical Christians make about God and the Bible. Her intent, rather, is to suggest to an educated, nonbelieving audience that the religious conventions of evangelical Christians—particularly the practice of speaking to God in highly familiar ways and believing that they can discern his answers in their own thoughts—do not spring from mere ignorance or some aboriginal desire to imagine purpose where a rational person sees only chance. The God of evangelicals is more than just "a reaction to modernity," she says; he is "an expression of what it means to be modern."