Tanya Luhrmann is a professor of anthropology at Stanford University. Her work focuses on the edge of experience: voices, visions, and the world of the supernatural. From Chicago to London, and from India to Ghana, she has studied Zoroastrians, Evangelical Christians, Orthodox Jews, and people who practice magic. Two of her notable books include When God Talks Back and How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others. Tanya joins the podcast to discuss how people cultivate relationships with the divine in their everyday lives.
Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.
Tom Burnett: Welcome to the show, Tanya.
Tanya Luhrmann: It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Tom Burnett: I want to start us off, asking kind of about your formative experiences growing up. space
Tanya Luhrmann: the research that you’re known for, that you’ve conducted for decades, a lot of its focused on religious experiences, religious communities. Did you have a religious upbringing yourself?
Yes and no. My mom was the daughter of a Baptist pastor. She, like many pastors’ kids, she fell away from the church, but it was hard for her to let go of God.
My father grew up as the son of Christian scientists. And as you know, good Christian scientists don’t go to doctors. My father went to medical school. And we lived in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, because that’s where the good schools were.
So, I grew up with all these good, wise people who had very different understandings of ultimate reality. That probably influenced the kinds of questions that I ask today.
Tom Burnett: Yeah, absolutely. So, you, yeah, you had these experiences growing up. space when you arrived at college, what got you onto the anthropology track?
Tanya Luhrmann: I started out my college days in philosophy. And I remember, this is a very much a 17-year old’s point of view, but I remember reading, Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics and thinking, this is cheating, this is a set of ideas about the world, it doesn’t really answer how people come to think.
And as I began to take courses in anthropology and psychology, it seemed to me that anthropology was more interesting because you saw more of the irrational side of human thinking, and that fascinated me. I studying anthropology There’s a wide range of people groups and approaches you can take tell me it’s kind of how it started and what subjects you gravitated towards.
So, when I went off to graduate school, I went off to Cambridge, England, where my department was, uh, very philosophical, as it happened.
My advisor, Ernest Gellner, was a philosopher. I hung out with philosophers. I went to the lectures of Lisbeth Anscombe and Geoffrey Lloyd. And the book that the philosophers were interested in, in anthropology, was a book about a Sudanese community called the Azande, in which people practice witchcraft and magic.
What made the book interesting to philosophers was that it seemed to be about reasonable people who held unreasonable beliefs. And as I was exploring this, mentors said to me, Did I know that there were people in London, even now, who practiced witchcraft and magic? And I thought that I would be studying belief.
And instead, what I learned when I arrived there was that belief was. In a way, not very important. I mean, people would talk about what they took to be true of magical force. But what struck me more was that people felt magical power flowing through their body.
They felt like they were interacting with a goddess. They felt that they had some kinds of vivid, powerful experiences which to them were proof that the magic was real. And that came to fascinate me deeply because it was clear that if you wanted to understand magic, you had to do what magicians did. You had to do the practices that the groups did. That some people would be better than other people, and that everybody could learn to do something that would help them experience magic in a way that became evidence that magic was real in the world.
I’m wondering for our listeners, for you as an anthropologist, how do you study, religious or spiritual communities perhaps differently from a psychologist who says they want to study people’s religious beliefs or practices? Is there an important distinction that you would want to make?
Psychologists typically run experiments that give people questionnaires.
Tom Burnett: Mm.
Tanya Luhrmann: Anthropologists do fieldwork, and fieldwork is sometimes described as participant observation.
The anthropologist is the tool.
It’s really your experience, your field notes, your relationships, your sense of what happens in this world. And it is true because I began to have vivid, unusual experiences that I began to take them seriously. And of course, once I had those experiences, I also wanted to know whether I was going crazy.
Or whether these were the kinds of things that people in this social world experienced.
Tom Burnett: Right.
Tanya Luhrmann: And it turned out that it was the second.
Tom Burnett: So, with, in graduate school training, you studied witchcraft in London. I’m curious, moving forward, maybe for our listeners who are unfamiliar with your work, tell me about the different groups that you’ve studied over time, so we have a kind of a sense of the breadth of your studies.
Tanya Luhrmann: So, after we’re doing work with all these different groups in London who now you’d call spiritually but not religious folks, I thought, well, I’d really be curious to, to go someplace very different and try to look at religious experience and religious practices in a very different world.
And I went off to Bombay as it was then to study a community of people called Parsis or Zoroastrians who were seeking to revive their ancient religion. And what I noticed was that people who were trying to revive a religion are really helped when the practices they give to people lead to vivid experiences of God, that those really impress themselves upon people.
My next project was on psychiatry. I was intrigued by the way that psychiatric illness was shaped by cultural context, or at least by the claim that that was true. And I was spending time with young psychiatrists, listening to the way that psychiatry was taught. And I realized that even within this field, there were different cultures.
There was a more psychoanalytic oriented culture, a psychodynamic culture, And a more biomedical culture. But what I really learned was that when people develop psychiatric illness, particularly the illness that we call psychosis, when people have thoughts that seem to be wildly off base, and perceptions that just seem to be wrong, particularly when people hear voices.
Psychiatrists said, well, this is really a thought that somebody has that isn’t experienced as a thought. And so, the brain comes to assume that it has sensory qualities and that it comes from outside.
So, I sort of tucked that away as something that I was noticing. And then after that work, I began to spend time in the growing points of American religion.
And one of the things I had been quite taken with in this religious work were these evangelical congregants who said that God would talk to them.
And I became fascinated by that, and when I moved to Chicago for my next job, I started doing two projects simultaneously. On the one hand, I was hanging out on the streets of Chicago in an area of Chicago with the highest density of persons per capita who had serious psychotic disorder and were hearing voices and were obviously unambiguously ill.
Tom Burnett: Yep.
Tanya Luhrmann: And I was spending time in a community of charismatic Christians at the Binya Christian Fellowship with people I was persuaded were not ill, but were talking about hearing God speak. And I wrote a book about the Christians first, and I was startled because some of my scientific colleagues took the, that my description of people who learn to hear God speak as evidence that psychosis was distributed in the population.
I didn’t think that explains the Christian experience. And so I’ve really devoted the last couple of decades of my work to trying to understand the differences between the Christian experience and the psychotic experience, and trying to make sense of this question that really spoke to me, that really grabbed me when I was spending time with folks in London, which is How do people learn to have these experiences?
I kind of put aside the question of whether God really is speaking. My question was about the human side of the human God relationship. trying to understand how people came to have vivid experiences and trying to understand what we could learn from anthropology and psychology about the nature of these experiences and the conditions under which some people heard God speak and some people did not.
Tom Burnett: I read your book, How God Becomes Real, and I was struck at the very beginning you pointed out two fundamental pillars of religion,
The one fundamental feature of religion is people who strive to contact an invisible other. I think intuitive, check that box. I could imagine many different religious or spiritual groups saying, yeah, absolutely.
But then two, another fundamental feature, of religion is that it is comprised of people who want change. I just have an assumption that for many people who are involved in religion, that they are really enamored with the traditions that remain constant across time. And I thought, wait, I thought the people who didn’t want change are more likely to want religion. So, can you explain to me a little bit about this, fundamental feature of wanting change being integral to religion?
Tanya Luhrmann: Well, I think people who are members of the faith want to be different kinds of people. They want to be better people, they want to be purer people, they want to be more effective people. They want to be changed through their relationship with God, however that’s imagined. charismatic Christians, evangelical Christians often imagine A very intimate relationship.
I think, Muslims are less likely to imagine God that way. But nevertheless, the whole point of praying is to be more grateful, to be happier, to be more settled, to be an improved version of themselves.
Tom Burnett: another point you made that I want to reflect on. Is that you said that Belief in invisible beings, whatever form that takes and whatever culture one’s a part of, is not a default. It’s something that takes work and time and practice. And I’m wondering if there’s a counterpoint or a different take that, why can’t religious belief just be thought of as an extension of childhood imaginary friends?
Or those monsters that are under the bed? Then somehow Stick with people in certain cultures into their adulthood.
Tanya Luhrmann: Well, to some extent, I think God ideas are like the monster under the bed or the imaginary friend, but imaginary friends go away.
In “Puff the Magic Dragon”, it’s Puff who goes disconsolate into his cave because Jackie Piper is like goes on to the different toys that’s what kids do.
They stop taking their imaginary friend seriously. When I listen to people of faith, I hear that they don’t believe as much as they want to. It’s something that people say again and again. Even people who sound as if they believe absolutely without any doubt.
In fact, I go to church, and they resolve to be like Jesus, and they get into their car, and they yell at them, their kids and they feel terrible, and they know that They don’t really take God seriously enough. They know that God can do anything, but you know, if they lose their job, they’ve got to go out and get another one.
They don’t ask God to do things like feed the dog. There are these constraint limits within which, people engage with God. And I began to realize that people go to church to remind themselves that God really matters, you’ve got to learn to take God seriously. And so, practices that help God feel more real really matter. And I began to see those in religion and to try to understand them.
Tom Burnett: Yeah. Can you tell me about the relationship between religious beliefs and practices? what is the interplay between those two things? space
Tanya Luhrmann: There’s sort of a faith frame, the way in which you think when you’re thinking about God. Then there are the things you do which help to kindle the sense that God is there for you.
I’m talking to people who are pretty committed to the abstract belief that God is, real. But again, I was just so struck that, I would spend time in this evangelical church, hours and hours and months and years of time. And I’d interviewed people and there’d be this moment that would come in the conversation when somebody would start to cry.
And often when they were crying, they were remembering a moment when they got it. that God really loved them. And then the moment would disappear.
Tom Burnett:
Tanya Luhrmann: I think that it is not trivial for people of faith to really feel the realness of their God, to hang on to God and to have that sense that God is real and matters, to have that sustain over time. And I do think that that requires effort. That’s what the practices are about.
Tom Burnett: What is the role of stories in, in religion and spirituality?
Tanya Luhrmann: So, when I write in this book, I talk about a parados as a shared imaginative world, in any faith community. And I argue that the richer and more detailed the parados, the more detailed the stories, the more intricate that they’re connected, the easier it is for people to apply them to their lives and to feel that they matter it’s like the world of Harry Potter, which is a, which is probably our most available parados.
Tom Burnett: Mm
Tanya Luhrmann: There’s this, there’s this funny feature of Harry Potter, which is it’s so detailed. There’s so many small stories that it becomes easier for somebody to make it into a story that they relate to.
That it becomes a story where somebody can write fan fiction develop the story so that, Hermione and Snape have an affair. You can only do that if you have a lot of ideas about Hermione and Snape. And then you retell the story to yourself. And then retelling the story, you can master it.
You can make it feel like it’s your story, that you’re living within that story. And those characters then start to be more real.
I mean, it’s a complicated account because I think when people allow themselves to live within biblical stories. Then, there’s also this epistemic tag that those stories are true or quasi true At least they’re not fiction. And Harry Potter, the tag is that it’s fiction. But nevertheless, there’s a sense in which the more you can dream about these stories, the more you can describe yourself within the context of these stories, the more you can remake, tell the story again and differently, and maybe better from your point of view, the more it can be.
Tom Burnett: I want to ask next about, some of the similarities in different religious traditions, in particular, prayer and fasting seem so pervasive. Are there something about those two practices what makes them so prevalent?
Tanya Luhrmann: Prayer is a remaking of the inner world. there are varieties of prayer. many prayers involve some degree of storytelling and re description of yourself in relationship to this invisible being that you’re trying to imagine in your mind’s eye because you can’t see the being in front of you.
So, you have some kind of conversation. And of course, once you’ve had years of conversations, then you’re building up a character, a sense of this, this being with qualities that you come to know and interact with.
Even if you’re just reciting a rote prayer, I mean, C. S. Lewis said that, when you recite the Our Father, you’re dressing up as God’s son, invites you into a way of being in, in the story.
Tom Burnett: That’s helpful. Yeah. and then fasting. Fasting I know is part of Jewish tradition, Christian tradition, Muslim tradition, I imagine many others. What’s the role of, restraining oneself, and not partaking of some of the basic life needs?
Tanya Luhrmann: So that turns out to be a deep question. What are the psychological effects of fasting? at least part of the simple story, is that in fasting you’re breaking your everyday relationship with the world. So, one of the things that any faith demands Is that you attend to the world differently and affect you being asked to see the world as it should be rather than the world as it is.
You’re being asked to see the world as more just, kind, merciful, and righteous. Then the everyday world that you know, and so one of the things that fasting does is that it shifts the way that you attend to the everyday world. It probably draws your attention more to the inner world anyway, fasting, it might put you into something that looks more like a trance state.
Tom Burnett: In a trance state, you are quite literally entering into a kind of a, a dreaming state where What you imagine in your mind can start to feel as real as the matter-of-fact world around you. Yeah. I imagine in, your studies, you’ve, heard a lot of people pray many different forms of prayer. can you kind of walk me through some of the different features or maybe I categories I guess within prayer? Yeah. Hm.
Tanya Luhrmann: I think what struck me most when I was listening to people talk about prayer is how much prayer was like cognitive behavioral therapy. let’s say you go because you’re having a rough time sleeping. And, you know, you wake up in the middle of the night and you can’t get to sleep because these thoughts are running through your mind, including the thought, if I don’t get back to sleep, I won’t be able to function tomorrow.
And you know, the therapist will say to the client, that’s not a very helpful thought. What is a more helpful thought? A more helpful thought is, I’ll be a bit tired. No biggie. It’s not a big deal. And so, you, the client, practice saying those more helpful thoughts at 3 a. m. when you can’t get to sleep, s pace I think that happens in prayer a lot, and I think that people, you know, must turn their attention to whoever they’re praying to, and typically they are expressing gratitude. And what it means to express gratitude is to think about something that’s going well, rather than something that’s going badly.
Tom Burnett: hmm.
Tanya Luhrmann: often in prayer, you’re setting small goals. You are resolving to do something differently tomorrow. And in prayer, you, often pause and shift your attention from the world as it is, to the world as you imagine being able to be. I think it’s a very powerful practice for people.
Tom Burnett: Think about Prayer in today’s world. The practice of meditation has become more elevated and pronounced, talked about, perhaps even more commonly practiced, at least in the United States. I even noticed differences between the East Coast and the West Coast. do you see prayer and meditation being interchangeable? Or is something quite different going on there?
Tanya Luhrmann: I think that they are alike and different. So, they’re both alike in shifting your everyday tracking of the world around you. They are different in that meditation, depends on your meditation style the classic distinction is between practices that attempt to rid the mind of thoughts, to disattend to thoughts, and practices that seek to shift the way that you attend to thoughts.
And so, in the Christian tradition, this is sometimes called apophatic and cataphatic. apophatic practice when done particularly in modern American Buddhism. it is an attempt to not think and simply to still your attention. In a lot of other prayer like practices.
There are a lot of words and there are a lot of pictures there’s a lot of stuff going on the mind, but you’re trying to structure that so, I think the question of how they are like and different from each other’s is quite an interesting question
Everybody can tell themselves a story, get lost in certain words, repeat a set of words. Prayer is easier.
Tom Burnett: Something else I’ve noticed over the years and talking to many people is that it seems that some people strive to participate in their religious community of choice out of love. I’m thinking of metaphors like God is the good shepherd, and a lot of people, they’re participating out of fear. have you noticed those kinds of different underlying motivations? And if so, like, how do you see the effects playing out,
Tanya Luhrmann: this is a great question. We certainly know that as the world has become less precarious, God has become more loving.
As you look over the past few millennia, Hebrew God, the Christian God, have become imagined as kinder over time and I think it does have to do with the fear people have of their world. those of us who study the effect of religious imagining and religious practice on humans, I have observed that people who have a rich relationship with a God they understand to be merciful, report fewer symptoms of mental illness.
That people who has a relationship with a god they fear, that seems to be true.
I winna, with a Time we have remaining ask you a few personal questions Wondering what are some of the biggest surprises you’ve encountered in your career as an anthropologist?
I think the most surprising thing I have seen as an anthropologist It’s that it’s possible for people to learn to experience an invisible being as a person. It’s not something that I really understood about faith before I began spending time as an anthropologist with people in different faith practices, but the sense of the personal quality that, for my magicians, that Artemis could be a friend, that was striking to me.
That Ahura Mazda, for the Parsis. Could be a person they related to. That a Christian God or a Hebraic God could be. a being with whom they felt a sense of give and take. I think that was quite striking to me.
Tom Burnett: how has your study of other people’s religious experiences? How does it shape the way that you find yourself viewing the world?
Tanya Luhrmann: I have a lot more respect for the different, commitments people make. I have also a lot more respect for the differences between people in different religious settings.
I do go to church myself these days, although to a liturgically oriented church.
I find that it, helps me to feel calm, to, uh, remind myself that people have had faith that the world is just and kind, despite evidence to the contrary for so many hundreds and hundreds of years.
Tanya Luhrmann: What advice would you have for somebody who’s interested in exploring a religious or spiritual tradition but just feels overwhelmed? Like there’s just too many options, where do I even start? There’s no cost to exploration.
There are many books in any tradition these days that will teach you about the tradition Invite you to explore it there are many, many services that you can just go to just to see what happens. I mean, these days with many people drifting away from formal faith, there are lots of cool, odd things that you can do just to see what, what it’s like.
Tom Burnett: There’s no reason why one can’t explore.
