Читать книгу The Art of Losing Control - Jules Evans - Страница 10
Оглавление2: The Revival Tent
I’m standing on a stage in a packed church, in front of 500 believers, next to the most famous Christian preacher in Britain, Nicky Gumbel. ‘So, Jules,’ he says, ‘what difference has Jesus made to your life?’
What am I going to tell the audience, I wonder? And how did I end up here?
It all started in 2012. When I finished my last book, Philosophy for Life, I’d become aware of the limits of Stoic philosophy: it was too rational, too individualistic; it left out important things like the arts, myth, ritual, sex, dancing and ecstatic experiences. I was searching for deeper community. I was a Stoic, single-dweller, bachelor, freelance writer – I was about as individualist as you could get. Philosophy clubs like the School of Life or my own London Philosophy Club were fun, but not the sort of loving community I imagined churches might provide. I was dating a Christian woman, and was impressed by how she and her Christian friends cared for one another. They seemed more open to ecstatic experiences than philosophers. One of my girlfriend’s mates, Jack, was a curate at Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB), home of the famous Alpha Course. Jack asked me if I fancied doing the course. I’d rejected Christianity when I was 16, never read the Bible and tended to think Christians were weird. But why not? If nothing else, it would be interesting research. ‘Careful you don’t get brainwashed,’ a friend told me, as I set off for HTB one Wednesday evening in January 2013.
There is a kind of self-consciousness the average English person now feels about going to church, more than if one went to a yoga session or Vipassana retreat. As the sceptic psychologist Richard Wiseman put it: ‘Being a Christian used to be shorthand for being good. Now it’s shorthand for being odd.’ In 2013, the UK became a post-Christian nation, with the majority now subscribing to no religion. There’s been a cataclysmic decline in church attendance since the 1960s, particularly in the last decade – only 750,000 people go to church on Sundays, less than 2 per cent of the population. The Anglican Church appears to be heading for extinction in England (although it’s booming in Africa). But you wouldn’t guess that if you visited HTB.1
As I approached the church in South Kensington, I joined a long line of people queuing to sign up for the Alpha Course, mainly well-dressed people in their 20s and 30s. There was a mixture of nationalities and ethnicities. HTB is particularly popular with new arrivals to the UK, and with single people – it’s been nicknamed Hunt the Bride. We were registered by a team of young volunteers, radiating positivity and wholesomeness, and divided into 40 or so groups. The groups of ten to 15 people sat in circles around the church, eating the free lasagne and introducing themselves. I was in a group with Nicky Gumbel, who is vicar at HTB. Nicky is a 60-something Old Etonian ex-barrister, grey-haired, charming, not the most obvious vessel for ecstasy – although he’s full of enthusiasm and says ‘amazing’ a lot, like everyone else in the church. He and his wife Pippa are good-looking, in love, and have charming children and grandchildren – they’re like the ideal mother and father of the extended HTB family.
When he speaks to you, Nicky fixes you with a sort of Aslan focus, as if he sees your potential role in the Great War. It’s flattering, you feel eager to sign up. He often mentions HTB’s vision: ‘the re-evangelisation of the nations, the revitalisation of the Church, and the transformation of society’. It seems a doomed mission in a country where church congregations are flat-lining, yet the success of HTB has been cited by everyone from historian Simon Schama to former Economist editor John Micklethwait as evidence that ‘God is back’.2 To date, the Alpha course has been taken by more than 29 million people in 169 countries. Hundreds of thousands have watched the Alpha videos, which feature a shirtless Bear Grylls (a member of HTB’s extended congregation). Nicky’s Bible app, Bible In One Year, has been downloaded more than a million times. In London, HTB attracts a Sunday congregation of 4,000 people, across ten services and four sites, and it has played an important role in making London the one English diocese in which the Church is growing. HTB curates have ventured forth like missionaries and opened at least 30 ‘church plants’ from Birmingham to Brighton. ‘Whenever people see a church unused or turned into a block of luxury flats, it’s like the empty palace of a long-forgotten king,’ Nicky says. ‘But when you see a church that’s full, people know the King lives!’ HTB’s influence spreads far and wide – Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, came from the HTB congregation; Tony Blair spoke at HTB’s leadership conference; David Cameron praised Alpha in his special Easter message; various celebrities have done Alpha, from Will Young to Geri Halliwell. When you’re in the warm cocoon of HTB, you really start to believe revival is possible.
Upon this rock I will build my church
After we’ve introduced ourselves and eaten our lasagne, the band on the stage starts to play. We rise for a couple of hymns, singing the words as they appear on the video screens. It’s at this point that I realise something has changed in the Church of England. Gone are the Victorian hymns and the wheezy organs; they’ve been replaced by rock bands and Coldplay-esque anthems. On Sundays, the congregation sings, arms aloft, or sways with their eyes closed beneath the twinkling lights. Initially, I found this very cheesy, sacrilege even – how dare Christians steal rock and roll? Later I learned how much rock and roll had stolen from the Church, how it’s always been a two-way stealing process. Besides, why shouldn’t people wave their hands in the air while worshipping God? We think that’s normal if we’re at a Bruce Springsteen concert, but if people behave like that for God, we think they’re getting carried away. I actually grew to like it, the feeling of 500 people all singing the same song, the feeling of surrendering and being carried on a wave of music. I’d loved being in a choir at school, and I realised how much I missed collective singing. But, sometimes, the sugariness of the songs got a bit cloying. They’re all love songs for Jesus. ‘There’s nothing I want more/You’re all that I adore’; ‘Everything I’ve lost/I have found in you’; ‘Your love never fails, it never gives up, it never runs out on me’; ‘Come and have your way.’ And they’re all sung in an American accent, so you don’t actually worship God, you worship Gaaahd.
After the singing, Nicky bounded on stage to welcome us to Alpha and assure us HTB is not a cult and we won’t be harassed if we decide to leave. He clearly recognises how alienated most young British people are from the Church, and he was eager to show that it’s not weird. Alpha talks are filled with reassuring references to pop culture – Russell Brand and Freddie Mercury are quoted, and we’re told Elton John, Madonna and Jennifer Lopez all wear crosses. The theology is straightforward: Christ died for us and was resurrected, and His sacrifice liberated us from sin and death and gave us new life. We can have a personal relationship with Jesus by letting the Holy Spirit into our hearts. The great intellectual challenges Christianity faced over the last 250 years – evolution, Biblical criticism – are brushed aside. ‘Science tells us how, but it doesn’t tell us why,’ said Nicky. Besides, there is a difference between ‘head knowledge’ and ‘heart knowledge’. The most important thing is not conceptual logic, but relationships – our relationship with God, our relationship with each other. Personal feelings and personal testimonies are key. Even in the Alpha session on ‘how to read the Bible’, the speaker spent most of the talk telling his own story.3
The power of small groups
The Alpha course runs for 10 sessions. Each Wednesday evening, after the worship and the 20-minute Alpha talks, we’d go into our ‘small groups’ to discuss the ideas we’d heard. In our group, Nicky, Pippa and Jack sat back and let the rest of us discuss the topic among ourselves, even when we raged against God and Christians. Gradually, over the ten sessions, people expended all their rage and cynicism, and started to open up about their own lives, their setbacks, their longing for God and community. It was a profoundly cathartic and bonding experience to meet regularly with the same group of strangers – people of different ages, nationalities and races – and be honest and vulnerable about what matters to you. Every Wednesday evening we could take off our masks, be real, and feel accepted and cared for. I hadn’t done that sort of thing since my early 20s, when I’d been in an anxiety support group, and I’d missed it. Bit by bit, Nicky and Jack introduced us to various Christian practices, teaching us how to pray and encouraging us to pray for each other. ‘Does anyone have someone they’d like us to pray for?’ asked Jack.
One lady, Sarah, spoke first. ‘I was in Spain on holiday last week and I saw a really mangy-looking cat, with one eye. It looked so unhappy. We could . . . pray for that?’
‘Jules,’ said Jack, eyes twinkling, ‘would you like to go first?’
So the first time I ever prayed out loud was for this anonymous cat. ‘Lord . . . there’s a cat in Spain, with one eye. Help this cat, O Lord.’ Praying aloud felt ridiculous at first. I even resented being prayed for. ‘How would you feel if someone prayed for you, Jules?’ Pippa Gumbel asked me. ‘Patronised,’ I replied. But, again, I grew to like praying for each other, with a hand on each other’s shoulder. Belonging to a small group, meeting once a week to hear each other’s problems, wish each other well, and wish the world well – what could be more normal and therapeutic? The sociologist Robert Putnam thinks this community of care is the reason people in religious communities typically report higher life satisfaction than the non-religious.4
Alpha directly addresses a basic problem most of us have: we don’t always feel loved. We feel there is something about us that is unworthy of love and will make people reject us. We feel small and alone and we know we’re going to die and be forgotten. So we try various strategies to feel more loved and significant. We try to please our parents, but we don’t always understand each other. We try to win love through achievements and status, but success doesn’t make us loved, just admired, envied, even disliked. We seek love through the internet, staring at our phones in the hope of likes and interactions, however casual. We seek love through sex, through substances, through therapy. But even in therapy we know it’s not really unconditional, that at the end of the hour we have to pay and leave. No one talks about our need to be loved because if we did we might have to admit that we feel lonely and needy, and that is pathetic in our individualistic and success-oriented culture. What if there was a God and He loved us? What if the creator of the universe had a special concern for us, even at our worst? What if that love was free? We could let go of our fear, our shame, our inhibitions, our sense that we’re not well and have to hide it to avoid others’ rejection. We could stop trying to prove our importance to the world. We could relax and expand in God’s love, like a sponge in a warm bath. This is what Alpha tries to teach: the Jesus cure. God’s love will cure you of your shame, your addictions, your hang-ups, your desperate striving for the world’s approval. Your Alpha group will love and accept you. The wider community of HTB will love you too, particularly if you’re a ‘seeker’. You are the prodigal son (or fatted calf), whose return to God is celebrated by the saints and angels. You will never be higher status than as a seeker on the Alpha course.
In week seven, all the groups went on the ‘Alpha weekend’, staying in a hotel on the coast in West Sussex. Nicky said we would learn how to invite the Holy Spirit into our hearts. The Holy Spirit doesn’t enter unless you invite him. ‘The Lord is a gentleman,’ another pastor explained, meaning that, unlike Zeus, Jesus doesn’t rape you – although the word ‘rapture’ comes from the Latin raptus, meaning ‘abduction’ or ‘rape’. Nicky explained that the Church had sometimes been suspicious of ‘manifestations of the Holy Spirit’, but they actually have a central role in the Bible, as in the Pentecost episode in the Acts of the Apostles. The Holy Spirit can grant all of us the charismatic power the apostles possessed. To get the fires burning, Nicky said we would pray the oldest prayer in Christianity: Come, Holy Spirit. ‘You might feel a warmth in your chest,’ he said, ‘or a tingling, or your palms might feel a bit sweaty . . . Come, Holy Spirit . . . Come . . . Thank you, Lord . . . Thank you . . . Even now, the Holy Spirit is here, at work in some of you.’ I could hear some people gently sobbing around me. One woman behind me started quietly singing in tongues, like a Mediterranean baby-talk. I opened my eyes and Nicky appeared by my elbow. ‘Can I pray for you, Jules?’ he asked. I was flattered. ‘Lord, we ask that you fill Jules with your Holy Spirit, and reveal Your amazing plan for his life.’ I opened my eyes and Nicky smiled at me eagerly. ‘How was it?’
A brief history of charismatic Christianity
It’s remarkable that the Church of England should have become so ecstatic, considering it was established back in the Reformation as a prophylactic against ecstasy. The Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, tells me that during the Reformation there was a ‘fear of the irrational, a fear of the ungovernable spirit’. This is unsurprising, given some Protestants were using the Holy Spirit as a justification to start revolutions. Luther dubbed such ecstatic revolutionaries ‘enthusiasts’, and insisted that it was heretical to claim special gifts or revelations from the Holy Spirit. The Church of England was, from its birth, suspicious of ecstasy – the Holy Spirit was ‘edited out’ of Thomas Cranmer’s 1540 prayer book, according to the Bishop of London. Monasteries and nunneries, which provided a cultural framework for ecstatic voyages, were dissolved by the state and their assets seized. In the second half of the seventeenth century, after the English Civil War and the Thirty Years War, the secular nation-state emerged triumphant and ‘enthusiasm’ was deemed a medical illness and threat to public order. Christianity was rationalised: all claims to personal revelation were subject to reason. God became distant, a blind watchmaker or Deist Supreme Ruler, and Christianity became a matter of agreeing with a handful of propositions.
There was always going to be a reaction to this repression of ecstasy. Christianity, suggests the Bishop of London, ‘exists as a massive symphony, where the truth is given by the interplay of the various parts. If you omit any part of it, then there is a reaction and exaggeration of the missing element.’ Ecstasy came back into Anglicanism with a vengeance in the mid-eighteenth century. To be precise, it came back on 24 May 1738, at 8.45 p.m., in Aldersgate Street in London. A pious young Christian called John Wesley felt his heart ‘strangely warmed’ after attending a gathering of ecstatic Protestants called the Moravians. His brother, Charles, had likewise experienced a ‘baptism of the Holy Spirit’ three days before. The Wesleys spread their new vision throughout the Anglican Church, although it later split from Anglicanism and became known as ‘Methodism’. At its heart is the idea that Christians can encounter the Holy Spirit today, and this baptism of the Spirit gives us the assurance that we are saved. Methodists became famous – or infamous – for their highly emotional services, their theatrical sermons, their wonderful hymns (many of them written by Charles Wesley) and their strenuous evangelism, particularly to the working class. They would organise ‘love-feasts’, where hundreds or even thousands of people would gather for open-air services and ‘camp meetings’, which could go on for hours or days. Attendees wept, fainted, shook, groaned, danced, laughed and leaped for joy as the Holy Spirit descended upon them and they committed their life to Jesus.
The Holy Spirit spread across the world, and is still spreading, through spectacular revivals. There was the Welsh Methodist revival of the 1730s–50s, in which ‘old men and women leaped around like roe deer’.5 There was the First Great Awakening of American Christianity in the 1730s and 1740s, and the Second Awakening of the early-nineteenth century; there was the Welsh revival of 1904, and the Azusa Street revival of 1905, which kickstarted Pentecostalism. Since the 1980s, Pentecostal churches have experienced extraordinary growth in the developing world, as people in Latin America, Africa and Asia move to the city and look to the Holy Spirit for life-guidance. Around 35,000 convert to Pentecostalism every day – think of that, 24.3 intense personal surrenders to the Holy Spirit every minute.
Ecstatic revivals tended to follow a similar script: someone had an ecstatic experience, it spread, and the religiosity of their community abruptly went through the roof, with people flocking to all-day all-night services, where they burst into prophecy or song as the Spirit came upon them. Sometimes charismatic preachers stirred the crowds to heights of emotion, but equally often the congregation themselves took charge, including working-class men, women, black people, people whose voices were not always heard in less ecstatic times. The Spirit was no respecter of order or hierarchy. Like wildfire, the revival would spread to a nearby community, and again people would be swept up in religious excitement, a sense that they were living in extraordinary times, perhaps even End Times, when great miracles were possible, when bodies were healed, sins cleansed, souls saved, churches revived.
Gifts of the Spirit
Sceptics, including many Christians, observed these revivals with a mixture of amusement and horror, as a regression to primitive irrationalism, like the flagellant craze or dancing manias of the Middle Ages. No wonder, critics sneered, revival ecstasy was so common among women, the working class, ethnic minorities – these groups were naturally more unstable, emotional and credulous. But in some ways, Methodism and its later descendants could be seen as a product of the sceptical Enlightenment, as well as a reaction to it – it was an ‘experimental religion’, as John Wesley put it, in which God’s existence and personal love for you was ‘proven’ by the intense physical and emotional experience of ecstasy, as well as in dreams, healing, prophecy and other ‘gifts of the Holy Spirit’. Mainstream Protestantism and Catholicism had, since the Reformation, insisted such gifts of the Spirit had ceased after the first generation of Christians (a doctrine known as ‘cessationism’). But the Wesleys helped to popularise a new form of ‘charismatic Christianity’, which insisted the Holy Spirit was still handing out the free gifts (charis in Greek means ‘grace’, ‘favour’ or ‘gift’). Like good Enlightenment scientists, churches kept statistical records of how many people made ‘commitments to follow Jesus’ as statistical proof of God’s power and love. In total, around a hundred thousand supposedly made ‘commitments’ in the Welsh revival of 1904, a tenth of the population, although it’s not clear how many were Christians already, or how many remained Christian once the collective ecstasy had subsided.
Revivals tended to take place in nonconformist Protestant congregations – Methodist, Mormon, Baptist, Pentecostalist, Shaker, Seventh-day Adventist and so forth. Mainstream middle-class Catholic and Anglican churches stoically resisted invasion by the Holy Spirit.6 But in the 1960s that changed. Baby-boomers sought spiritual experiences of all kinds and some of them stumbled across Christianity – specifically the charismatic Christianity found in Methodism and Pentecostalism. One charismatic young hippie called Lonnie Frisbee, who would later be rejected by the Church for being gay, encountered Jesus while tripping on LSD. Lonnie started zapping the Holy Spirit to other hippies, who became known as ‘Jesus Freaks’. They gathered at Calvary Chapel in southern California, and later at a network of Californian churches known as the Vineyard, run by John Wimber. The Jesus Freaks took the Holy Roller ecstasy of Pentecostalism and connected it to white middle-class congregations. They also adopted the rock and roll services of Pentecostalism – indeed, Vineyard attracted several rock converts, including Bob Dylan.
In the 1980s, John Wimber preached at HTB in London. Nicky Gumbel – then an uptight barrister in a three-piece suit – got zapped by the Holy Spirit, and reportedly had to be carried cataleptic through the church windows. ‘God is giving that man the ability to tell people about Jesus,’ Wimber said, as Nicky was carried out.
HTB caught fire again in the early 1990s, via a spectacular revival in Canada called the Toronto Blessing. A press report from that time reads: ‘Nicky Gumbel prays that the Holy Spirit will come upon the congregation. Soon a woman begins laughing. Others gradually join her with hearty belly laughs. A young worshipper falls on the floor, hands twitching. Another falls, then another and another. Within half an hour there are bodies everywhere as supplicants sob, shake, roar like lions, and strangest of all laugh uncontrollably.’7 But that was back in 1994. Since then, it has been quieter at HTB, although Alpha has kept on growing all over the world. I asked Nicky if he missed those tempestuous days: ‘I see it as like the ocean – there are always waves, but sometimes it’s more gentle and peaceful, and sometimes there are huge waves. What matters ultimately is the fruit, and whether people’s lives become more loving, gentle and peaceful.’ But I still felt that charismatic Christians, including Nicky, longed for another big wave to revive our secular culture and sweep us back into church. ‘More, Lord, more!’ I heard pastors pray eagerly. ‘Give us immeasurably more.’
Jesus as detergent
‘How was that?’ Nicky asked me eagerly.
‘I felt . . . er . . . peaceful.’
In fact, nothing spectacular happened on the Alpha weekend. The speaking in tongues sounded a bit silly to me. During the service, a lady came up and asked if she could pray for me. She’d had a vision: ‘You have a masculine exterior, but a floral heart.’ As in I’m gay? Well, it was a kind gesture. The weekend was epic. We all felt high. After inviting in the Holy Spirit, we watched England play rugby, drank beer and danced at a disco. Our small group danced in a circle to Beyoncé’s ‘Crazy In Love’. We were like a little family, in which I felt accepted and cherished.
When we were back at HTB, I said I wasn’t entirely sure about the whole Christian thing, but I was prepared to give it a go. Perhaps faith was like a relationship: you always had doubts but you discovered love through commitment. I was on board with the God of love, the grace of the Holy Spirit and the lovely community. I was less sure about the biblical infallibility, original sin, the Virgin Birth, the Devil, the sinfulness of homosexuality, the apocalypse, the entire Old Testament, the divinity of Jesus, or Christianity’s claim to be the only way to God. But I could ‘sit with that’, as HTB-ers put it.
In April, a month after Alpha had finished, I received an email from Nicky saying how much he’d enjoyed reading Philosophy for Life, and would I come to speak at HTB about my experience of Alpha? In my egotism, I envisaged the two of us sitting on stage as equals leisurely discussing Greek philosophy and Christianity. I envisaged a whole new audience for my books. I agreed and turned up one Sunday before the main service. There was Nicky. ‘Ah, Jules, amazing, thanks so much for coming. So, basically, there’ll be about five of you. You’ll each be on stage for maybe a minute. Think of it like an advert for detergent. Before, dirty shirt. Then Jesus. Now, clean shirt. Okay?’ I had a sudden sense of horror. I had misread the occasion. I watched from the wings as the other four converts told their incredible testimonies to the 500-strong congregation, each one received with whoops and cheers. ‘Next is Jules. Jules is a philosopher, he’s written a great book. So, Jules, what was your life like before you met Jesus?’
‘It was . . . er . . . okay, I guess.’
‘And how did you meet Jesus?’
‘Well, I had a sort of near-death experience when I was 21 . . . and that led me to Greek philosophy.’ There was an uneasy shifting in the seats. ‘But it seemed to me that Greek philosophy left some stuff out . . . so I did Alpha and . . . it was great!’ A smattering of half-hearted applause.
‘And how has Jesus changed your life?’
‘Oh, a lot.’ I limped off stage, to the least enthusiastic applause you’ll ever hear at HTB. And then I had to do it at two more services. I felt annoyed with Nicky for commodifying my story and turning it into an advert for Alpha (although, to be fair, that was obviously the point of the invitation). Perhaps he feels he is a general at war, fighting against the extinction of the Church, and everything and everyone is a weapon in that war. But I didn’t much like being weaponised.
For a few months I drifted in a sort of limbo, struggling to believe in Christianity but finding secular culture equally unsatisfying. I briefly played the drums in the Sunday Assembly, a humanist church somewhat modelled on charismatic Christianity, which offers a sort of ‘charismatic humanism’, with a rock band playing singalong covers of Bon Jovi and Queen, personal testimonies, gags and a high-energy ‘celebration of life’. It’s rapidly spreading all over the world. I loved the project and the people but missed the ‘surrender to God’ bit when I was feeling wretched. One evening, at a Christian folk charity fundraiser, I stood on the sidelines muttering to a friend, ‘How could I ever fit in with . . . this?’
‘Have you read a book called The Grace Outpouring?’ my friend asked. ‘It’s about a place in Pembrokeshire called Ffald y Brenin. It’s a “thin place”, close to God. Extraordinary things happen there. Why don’t you go?’
A man on fire
Ffald y Brenin is a small retreat in the hills near the Pembroke coast, run by Roy and Daphne Godwin. Since the mid-1990s, strange things have been happening there – miraculous healing, conversions, prophecies. I drove down for their summer conference, a three-day event in a nearby church. I arrived in time for dinner in the church hall. All the other attendees were over 55. I sat down at a table, feeling a little self-conscious, and asked one of the old ladies what I could expect from the conference. ‘You can expect to be invaded by God!’ she said testily.
After dinner we all drove to a nearby church. Roy Godwin took the mike. He’s a small man, with a tanned balding head, glasses, bad teeth and a quiet voice brimming with certainty. He spoke of the 1904 Welsh revival, of how the first drops of a new revival were starting to be felt. ‘But we want more. Come on, Lord. Bring it on. We want another revival.’ He told stories of all the miracles that took place at Ffald y Brenin – skin conditions vanished, cancer was ‘rebuked’, legs were extended (one of charismatic Christians’ favourite miracles is healing people who have one leg shorter than the other). ‘We now expect instant healings,’ he said. ‘This is real.’ He clearly had a very powerful expectation of the supernatural. Indeed, the air was thick with this expectation. The pensioners had come to call God down, like a dove from above. And sure enough God turned up. The pensioners laughed and twitched and groaned and even screamed as the Holy Spirit came upon them. My God, I thought. This is the worst holiday ever. I retreated to my hotel room in the nearby town of Newport to research the history of revivals and go for long walks along the coast.
But by the third day, the atmosphere of the place started to work on me. The other attendees were so friendly, their faith and hope so strong. I walked around Ffald y Brenin, this beautiful little hobbit house overlooking a valley, and felt the energy of the place. By Saturday evening, as the music engulfed me, a thought came into my head that I wanted to serve God rather than my own worldly ambitions. It was a commitment, I guess, an intention. Suddenly, I felt my chest fill with a powerful energy that pushed my head back, further, further, until it almost hurt my neck muscles. It took a real effort to push it forward, then another wave would sweep it back. It was as if painful pleasure was bursting from my chest, so powerful it literally took my breath away. A part of my brain was watching and thinking, This is weird, but I told that part of me that my ancestors had been Quakers – quaking was in my genes. This went on for three-quarters of an hour, as wave after wave of painful bliss hit me. At one point, Roy asked us to close our eyes, then raise our hands if we wanted to renew our commitment to Jesus. At the very back of the church, I raised my hand. The person next to me hugged me and wept. Then we sat down. I shakily went to the toilet to drink some water. I looked at my eyes in the mirror, my pupils were dilated and my stomach was churning slightly. Just like on E, I thought. Some sort of autonomic reaction. I offered some water to the guy next to me in the pew, like in a rave when you want to share your joy and your possessions with the people around you. Eunoia, the Greeks call it. Goodwill.
At the end of the final service, my legs still trembling – indeed, everyone was twitching, like there was a loose wire in the floorboards – I went to thank Roy and Daphne. I hadn’t spoken to them or introduced myself for the whole three days. Roy turned to me immediately and said: ‘God says that you can stand on the outside analysing, but He’s here, waiting for you.’
Then one of the volunteers came up, someone I hadn’t met, and said: ‘In that last session, I had a vision of you, with books flying off you.’
I drove all the way back to London, down the M4, my heart on fire.
Trying to fit into church
I announced my conversion to Christianity on my blog. Several of my newsletter subscribers unsubscribed immediately, assuming I’d lost the plot and become a homophobic fundamentalist. Academic colleagues also wondered if I had gone native. I told my publishers I intended to write a Christian book next. They were horrified. Didn’t they get it? Revival was coming! Meanwhile, in Christian Land, the story went round about the atheist philosopher who’d suddenly found God (in fact, I was never an atheist, but stories tend to get exaggerated on the Christian telegraph). A Christian friend assured me I had ‘a mission from God’. For a few months, I was high, convinced by my experience and jubilant about my part in the coming revival. But emotional highs die down, if they’re not backed up by good reasons and a strong community. The community bit was hard. The Alpha course wants to emphasise the normality of the Church. But, on the inside, you realise how different it is. As the sociologist Linda Woodhead has written, Anglican Christianity has become a subculture, a separate world from secular culture. As it’s shrunk, it’s become more ecstatic, and the moral barriers to membership have become higher.
The biggest barrier is sexuality. While secular culture embraces Tinder, YouPorn, bisexuality, polyamory, S&M and transgender dysphoria, charismatic Christianity insists on patriarchy, hetero-normativity, and no sex before marriage. Nicky Gumbel has said that, when he marries couples, he can always tell at the altar if they’d managed to resist having sex (presumably by the drooling). No sex before marriage is fine if you’re getting married in your early 20s, but HTB is full of single people in their 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 it’s not always bad for you: it can be healing and connecting. Indeed, Derren Brown’s latest show, Miracle, tries to recreate the world of Pentecostal faith-healing, in a tongue-in-cheek sceptical way. He gets audience members with physical complaints to come on stage, then ‘heals’ them with the Holy Spirit, while acting like a flamboyant revivalist preacher. It’s pretty offensive to Christians, but the weird thing is, it works. Brown tells me: ‘Not only does the healing work, but I’ve also “slain” people, so they fall down.’ I witnessed this when I saw Brown’s show – it was very strange to see sceptical Londoners abruptly pass out, then queue up to testify to how much better they felt. After the show, Twitter was full of testimonies – ‘It was incredible! Thanks for healing my feet’; ‘Thank you for healing my back’; ‘My legs started to buckle and I wet myself.’ When the show was screened a few months later, the papers were full of similar miracle stories: ‘Girl who suffered knee problems for 10 years claims Brown miraculously healed her in 10 seconds,’ said The Sun. ‘Derren Brown has god-like powers,’ declared the girl in question. It shows that just because a person can produce ecstatic experiences in others, it doesn’t mean they’re blessed with spiritual gifts. Such experiences seem more triggered by a person’s expectations than by the spiritual powers of the guru.12 But the response to Miracle also shows how healing ecstatic experiences can be - they unlock subliminal healing and give people the faith to believe a new narrative.
A few weeks after the show, I met Nicky Gumbel and asked him if some religious experiences are really ‘just’ hypnosis. On the Alpha course, when he told us ‘You may be feeling dizzy, or have sweaty palms or a warmth in your chest’, wasn’t that just hypnotic suggestion?
He said: ‘Someone once said the same thing to me on the Alpha course. So the next Alpha weekend, I didn’t say anything about what people might feel, and there were very powerful manifestations of the Holy Spirit, and someone came up to me afterwards and said, “Why didn’t you warn us?” So what I try to say now is “These things don’t need to happen, but if they do, that’s okay, it’s not wrong or weird.” The point I try to emphasise is, that’s not what matters.’ He suggested there are three possibilities about religious experiences: either it’s demonic, or psychological, or God. Or it could be a combination, particularly of the last two. ‘What matters,’ Nicky insisted, ‘is the fruit. If it leads to a ministry for Alpha in the prisons, I think that was God. If it leads to people coming off heroin, that was probably God. And if it was just psychological, maybe we need more of the psychological. When John Wimber came here, and a lot of friends of mine said, “What he’s doing is a well-known form of hypnosis”, I repeated this to my predecessor, and he replied, “Not well-enough known.”’
This is remarkably close to William James’s view of the matter: it may be God, it may be hypnosis, what matters is the fruit. Even secular psychologists arrived at similar conclusions. The psychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot initially pathologised religious experience, but his last essay on ‘the faith cure’ looked at Lourdes as a ‘system of mass suggestion’, which he admitted was often very healing.13 Religious healing may just be the well-proven placebo effect – but what ‘the placebo effect’ means is people’s expectations, beliefs and faith can have an extraordinary impact on the body, which can be triggered by ritual and role-play. So do we need the mass placebo of religious ritual to bring us healing, love and transcendence?
Set and setting
I know many of my atheist and agnostic friends were worried I’d joined a cult when I got into HTB. But I’d suggest it’s our secular individualist culture that’s weird in not providing ‘controlled spaces to lose control’ – places and rituals where people can come together to love each other, support each other, pray for each other, and dissolve their egos safely. That lack is unique in the history of Homo sapiens. Of course, there are risks in such places – one can lose one’s mind, get exploited by a guru, or end up turning against outsiders. In the Introduction I suggested that Timothy Leary’s idea of ‘set and setting’ are a good way to assess the risks of different contexts for ecstasy.
If we think about the ‘mindset’ of Anglican churches, in many ways they look a lot safer and more pro-social than other forms of contemporary ecstasy. Charismatic Christians engage with the Holy Spirit not for the thrill of it, not just to get high, but out of a sense of love of God, love of each other, and desire to help humanity. They’re fairly humble in their mindset: they’re so focused on worshipping Jesus that they avoid the risk of trying to be gods themselves. And the ecstasy is outward-looking; it’s channelled towards trying to improve society. Although charismatic Christians sometimes think the best way to improve society is by converting other people to Christianity, they’ve helped in other ways: a group of young HTB lawyers campaigned to pass the Modern Slavery Act (which gives police more powers against human traffickers), just as Methodists and Quakers worked to abolish slavery in the nineteenth century.
The main risk with the mindset of charismatic Christianity is that it can be over-attached to ecstasy. This is a risk in the whole of Christian culture, all the way back to the early church (St Paul warns against getting over-attached to charismatic gifts in 1 Corinthians). Christian ecstasy is a visitation from the Holy Spirit, proof of God’s love for you, an influx of charismatic power. It could bring healing, or children, or career opportunities. It could be proof you’re saved and going to Heaven. It could even be a sign of the coming Rapture. How could one not get attached to ecstasy with all these marvellous interpretations? Particularly when your community seizes on your experience and grants you status because of it. The flip-side of over-attachment to ecstasy is that people who don’t go into trance states wonder why God’s not into them. And people like me, who have experienced ecstatic moments, end up feeling confused and depressed when the ecstasy departs. We can easily end up chasing it.
The setting of Anglicanism
In terms of the ‘setting’ of charismatic Christianity, there are, of course, risks to churches as a place of collective trance. As Derren Brown notes, Pentecostal preachers are highly adept at hypnotising their congregations into giving them money. Forbes magazine estimates the combined worth of five Nigerian Pentecostal pastors at $200 million. Two American Pentecostal pastors attracted ridicule recently when they explained they needed private jets so they could spend more time with God.14 Church leaders may use their hypnotic influence to increase, then abuse, their power. This is a big problem in some of the Pentecostal ‘house churches’ now booming around the world, where priests have unchecked power. I interviewed one woman who described how she had suffered ‘spiritual abuse’ for 14 years in a London Pentecostal church, under a tyrannical pastor and his wife. She told me: ‘The mind control was very extreme. They’d say the Lord had given them power to come into our houses in the spirit, meaning their spirits would leave their bodies and watch what we were doing in the privacy of our homes.’ Many Pentecostal churches are also profoundly patriarchal and homophobic.
The Anglican Church seems relatively protected against these risks. Its priests are as poor as church mice, they have to report to superiors and, unlike Catholic priests, they can get married, which is a good, though not sure-fire, protection against sexual abuse. Anglicans have a healthy sense of priests’ fallibility (as Denis Thatcher once said to his priest before a sermon, ‘Padre, most of us know what the Sermon on the Mount is. Twelve minutes is your lot’). HTB has resisted becoming a cultish mega-church partly because Nicky insisted on remaining within the Anglican communion rather than splitting off into an ecstatic sect, like the Quakers or Methodists. He’s avoided the lure of becoming a guru, despite his global fame. He still cycles to church and is nicknamed Humble Gumbel. HTB is not a cult: it doesn’t try to prevent people leaving; it doesn’t try to get all your money; it is open to criticism. I’m grateful to Nicky and his church for being so kind and welcoming to me, and still feel love for the community.
However, HTB’s methods for soul-farming can feel somewhat industrial. It runs three Alpha courses a year: each convert feels uniquely loved, until the next batch moves on to the conveyor belt. It’s a dubious sales technique to ask people if they want to make a ‘personal commitment to Jesus’ in the middle of highly emotional services – that’s like asking someone to marry you when they’re high in Las Vegas. Like Vegas marriages, some Alpha conversions don’t last – mine didn’t, and the divorce was painful. The little family of our Alpha group didn’t last either. We kept meeting for a few months, but I don’t think any of us still go to HTB (most now go to smaller local churches).
Perhaps I looked to church for the wrong things – I was more hungry for community than for God. Communities and religions are man-made, imperfect. If you make an idol of church, you’re bound to be disappointed.
I don’t feel I can call myself a traditional Christian any more, because I decided I didn’t believe Jesus’s death saved humanity or that the only way to God is through Him. People have ecstatic experiences in many different cultural contexts; they don’t always lead to Jesus, but they can still be good for us. I struggle to believe the bold hypothesis put forward by Jesus: that there’s an omnipotent personal God who loves us and all we have to do for grace is ask for it (Matthew 7:7; John 14:13). My near-death experience felt like grace, but I’ve also seen awful suffering in people’s lives, where they have begged God for help, and it hasn’t obviously arrived. So I’m agnostic. Sometimes people seem to access help from beyond, but it’s not reliable, predictable or knowable.
