30s, 40s, 50s. That’s a long time to remain celibate if you’re not a monk or nun. Porn is also often condemned in sermons. When you mix this sexual puritanism with spiritual ecstasy, and throw in a lot of attractive single men and women, you end up with a messy blend of the spiritual and the erotic – I remember praying for one attractive woman, and her whispering sweet prayers for me, and I wondered if this was basically a weird sex game that we’ve dragged God into? ‘You know what they say – flirt to convert!’ another girl said to me, with a coy wink.
At times I longed for the simplicity and honesty of Tinder. It’s even worse, of course, if you’re an evangelical who fancies your own sex. That’s considered a ‘lifestyle choice’, which some evangelicals believe can be overcome through prayer or exorcism. Nicky says he wants HTB to be a church ‘famous for love’, but it’s better known by its critics for condemning homosexuality. There are signs the church is finally changing: gay couples are now welcomed on HTB’s marriage course, which is a major shift for such a prominent charismatic church.
I particularly resented the idea, taught to me at a theology college connected to HTB, that the Bible is an infallible book.8 Why must I agree with everything St Paul writes? I asked. Because all Scripture is ‘God-breathed’, I was told. Who says so? St Paul (assuming he actually wrote 2 Timothy – scholars are still arguing about which letters are genuinely by him). Rather than accept judgements that now seem inhumane, because they’re in a sacred book that’s never wrong, can’t we just say that Paul was an inspired human, like Socrates or the Buddha, but on some matters we now disagree? After all, the Bible disagrees with itself, copies are filled with errors, inconsistencies and forgeries, and very few Biblical scholars think all the books of the New Testament were genuinely written by the apostles.9 The Biblical canon was set three centuries after Christ, and before that Christians believed a wide variety of different things regarding who Jesus was, what happened in His life, and how we should follow Him. Even Jesus’s teachings are not perfect. Some of them are sublime – the Kingdom of Heaven is within, like buried treasure; God’s love is waiting to find us and lift us out of our prisons; we must overcome pride, go beyond the ego, surrender to love, and humbly serve the outcasts of society. But Jesus was also clearly a man of His culture, i.e, first-century Jewish apocalypticism. Accept God’s merciful love, or else. To me, it seems that He and his apostles expected the End Times any day, when evil would be utterly vanquished, the dead would rise out of their graves, and a New Jerusalem would appear. They were wrong.
Devils and miracles
Despite the apparent failure of Christ’s apocalyptic predictions, contemporary charismatics continue to embrace the world-view described in Acts, in which the kingdom of Heaven is breaking out, God will answer all our prayers, and Christians have supernatural gifts of healing and prophecy. How do they sustain this belief in such a cruel and imperfect world? One way is by believing also in the Devil. In the Alpha session after the Holy Spirit weekend, a polite lady in a pearl necklace told us that, if we became Christian, we immediately became a target for Satan. The Devil is powerful, and out to attack us (but we shouldn’t get too morbid about it). This was a grim message amid HTB’s cheery cosmopolitanism, like Four Weddings and a Funeral veering into Rosemary’s Baby. Some charismatics think we’re in the middle of a cosmic battle between God and ‘the Enemy’. This is the oldest story in the book, from the Narnia chronicles to The Lord of the Rings. ‘God is on the move!’ they say, quoting C. S. Lewis.
It may very well be that there are malevolent non-human intelligences out there – why should everything in the spiritual ecosystem wish us well? But the risk of a starkly divided apocalyptic world-view is that you start to see anyone who opposes you as demonic. And that’s dangerous in a multicultural society. We were told Islamist terrorism is demonic. I heard charismatics say the ‘gay lobby’ is demonic. Some suggested Hinduism is demonic. Others saw the EU as demonic (that’s why so many voted for Brexit). The New Age is definitely demonic. Some other denominations thought HTB itself was demonic. Once you start looking, you can see little pointy horns jutting out everywhere.
The other way charismatics maintain their belief in an omnipotent, loving and interventionist God is by surrounding themselves with people who share that belief. It’s hard to have faith when you live in a culture that barely mentions God, but it’s easier if you immerse yourself in a subculture that still believes in the supernatural. Charismatic Christians mainly socialise with other charismatic Christians, and they constantly talk about the amazing things God’s doing in their life. Within the subculture, there’s a strong confirmation bias. Any anecdote of an answered prayer or healing miracle is greeted with whoops of ‘Come on!’ and ‘Praise Jesus!’ There was this lady who had cancer, and she prayed, and the doctor couldn’t believe what he saw. Hallelujah! And the eight million who die of cancer each year – are they proof of God’s hate or indifference?
I asked Nicky Gumbel about this confirmation bias. He replied: ‘We used to have a newspaper called Alpha News. People used to say, “This is just full of good news stories of healing and conversions. What about the bad news stories?” My predecessor would say, “Let the Devil publish the bad news. Who’s telling the good news?”’
Christianity as yet hasn’t gone down the route of mindfulness, trying to prove that prayer works through randomised controlled trials, although there is a lot of evidence that belonging to a religious community is good for your health. My colleague at Queen Mary University of London, the psychiatrist Simon Dein, has studied religious healing among Pentecostals. He notes: ‘There’s no doubt prayer can be psychologically healing, but it can’t cure cancer.’10 I don’t think one can easily separate the psychological from the physical: prayer, like self-hypnosis, can strengthen the psycho-immune system, which helps in the recovery from illness and injury. In any case, I never fully understood the focus on miraculous healing in charismatic churches – we’re all going to die in the end, aren’t we? It seemed to reduce God to a physiotherapist. But it is faithful to the gospels: Jesus made physical healings a central part of his mission.
Is religious experience just hypnosis?
I wondered if my experience in Wales was some sort of subliminal state I’d gone into through social contagion. I went to meet the hypnotist Derren Brown to ask him what he thought, and interviewed him in his extraordinary house filled with optical illusions, stuffed animals, and a fish-tank inhabited by conger eels. We chatted while a jealous parakeet buzzed around my head. Brown was a teenage Pentecostalist, but lost his faith when he was an undergraduate and became interested in hypnotism. He’s now famous for using hypnotism to brainwash audiences in his shows. I asked him if he thought charismatic churches used a form of hypnotism to induce ecstasy in their congregations: ‘Yes, I do. But it’s complicated. It’s difficult to pin down what hypnosis is.’
The two competing theories of hypnosis are the ‘altered state theory’, which suggests hypnosis transports us into some non-rational, subliminal altered state of consciousness, and the ‘role-theory’, where people just go along with the role-play to conform with social expectations. I’d suggest they’re both right. Context and cultural expectation matter. The anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann has shown the extent to which charismatic Christians learn to lose control.11 At Alpha, we were taught how to open ourselves to the Holy Spirit, even how to speak in tongues. We also learned by imitating the ecstatic behaviour of others. But cultural expectations and role-play can also trigger powerful neurophysical states, which feel involuntary and automatic. You become deeply absorbed in a script, you become highly suggestible to commands from a high-status figure, and you lose control. Initially you’re just going along with a game, but suddenly it feels really real. You’re not being ‘brainwashed’, exactly. Rather, you’re finding a context in which you have permission to let go. That surrender can happen in a range of contexts, not just religious ones – it may happen at the doctor’s, at an alternative healer’s, at a rock concert, at the theatre, at a stage-hypnotist’s show.
And
