companion. They may be more capable of responding to God emotionally.
All theologies have trade-offs. This one offers an intensely personal and person-like God. He can comfort, like a friend, and respond directly, like a friend. He can be like a real social relationship for those who make the effort to experience him in this way. But because that social relationship lacks so many features of actual human sociality—no visible body, no responsive face, no spoken voice—such a theology demands a great deal of effort from those who follow it. They must constantly work with their attention, reinterpreting the ordinary and natural into the presence of the extra-ordinary and super-natural. Faiths which manage God differently—less personal, more present in the everyday natural world— make fewer demands on their followers’ attentional habits. But it may be, perhaps, that such a God may be easier to take for granted. Paradoxically, it may be that this high-maintenance, effortful God appeals to so many modern people (as many as a quarter of all Americans, according to a recent Pew study) precisely because the work demanded makes the God feel more real in a world in which disbelief is such a real social option.
References
' Scholars who contribute to this perspective include Scott Atran, Justin Barrett, Pascal Boyer, Stewart Guthrie, and Harvey Whitehouse.
* These churches have been described by Miller, D. 1997. Reinventing American Protestantism. Berkeley: University of California; see also Wuthnow, R. 1998. After heaven: spirituality in America since the 1950s. Berkeley: University of California Press. A survey by the Pew
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Foundation 2006 (Pew, 2006, Spirit and Power: Ten nation survey. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life) found that 23% of all Americans belong to a loosely similar style of “renewalist Christianity.”
* Good summaries of work on hypnosis and dissociation, with some reference to absorption, can be found in Spiegel, H. and D. Spiegel. 2004[ 1978], Trance and treatment. New York: Basic Books; Seligman, R. and L. Kirmayer. 2008, “Dissociative experience and cultural neuroscience.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 32(1): 31-64; and Butler, L. 2006, “Normative dissociation.” Psychiatric Clinics of North America. 29: 45-62.
“The empirical work is presented in Luhrmann, T., H. Nusbaum and R. Thisted. 2010. “The absorption hypothesis.” American Anthropologist. March; cf. Tellegen, A. and G. Atkinson. 1974, “Openness to absorption and self altering experiences (“absorption”), a trait related to hypnotic susceptibility.” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 83: 268-277
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