It’s not just the sounds that come out of your mouth, it’s also something that happens to your body. As I’ve pointed out previously in this thread (two years ago, I might add…) studies indicate that the brain experiences it as involuntary. I do think anyone could do it, with practice, but it’s not really something in the realm of typical human experience. It is accompanied by an intense physical sensation, a kind of total-body euphoria and a feeling that you are not in control of your speech. Pentecostals attribute this to the Holy Spirit. I attribute it to our weird fucking brains.
IME most evangelical families are perfectly nice people who I do not worry about. As I said, however, I live in California–albeit in the central valley which has a large conservative population–so my experience is a bit different than that of someone who lives in Alabama. Even the most isolationist folks come out and mix–I used to go to a certain homeschooling moms’ group, and I met Elizabeth Schatz there and some other folks who were probably pretty dang fundamentalist as well as the quite ordinary people.
The people I worry about are the Quiverfull/Vision Forum folks. They are a fairly new brand of fundamentalism, but they seem to be spreading. I’m not sure how long it will last, though–QF is such an exhausting lifestyle that several of the leading voices in it have left. You can look for the website/blog “No Longer Quivering” for some good insights.
My hope is that more conservative Christians will stand up and speak out against people like the Pearls and Vision Forum. It’s happening. More is needed.
Yes, that’s what I figured. Most evalingcals seem to be OK with balancing secularism with their flavor of Christianity. But yeah…the Ultra extreme fundies seem to be extremely scary. They make the kind of people who think rock and roll is of the DEVIL look sane. I think maybe they seem like they’re growing b/c overall Christianity in this country is dying. The fastest growing catagory of belief is " nothing in particular"
And I was reading No Longer Quivering last night. VERY interesting…and quite scary, seems to be almost a cult!
That, I have no problem with- I just object to their showing only the boys playing with it. Girls need arming also- even Narnian Santa recognized that.
You should get to know something about those folks, Ted, they’re quite interesting in a horrifying sort of way. The toys show a lot. Boys are to be warriors, leaders, and protectors–girls are to be homemakers and mothers and not one thing else. There is a lot of talk about wifely submission, to the point that girls are not to leave home, go to college, or learn about much besides homemaking and serving men. A daughter should practice her wifely skills on her father and submit even to her younger brothers, so that they learn to lead and take their rightful places in the home.
The guy who leads VF has a 200-year plan for all his descendants. There will be a lot of them, and they will all stay in the faith, and the boys will become national leaders to bring the US back to where it should be. Look up Geoffrey Botkin and Voddie Baucham. Botkin in particular gets talked about in terms that will kind of remind you of propaganda about Kim Il-Sung, which is a bit unsettling.
Having dabbled in Christian Reconstructionism, I do know of Doug Phillips & VF, and I think the damage they do will be limited to their own family & hardcore disciples (and I’m not minimizing that) but that they probably have a lot of subscribers & customers who aren’t nearly as extreme but who just like the resources they provide* & also like the sound of tight-knit families & churches restoring a Christian America, but aren’t gonna get all hardcore about it.
*Heck, looking at their site, there’s some cool stuff there I want to order!
Baucham I only heard of when he was denouncing the idea of a WOMAN as Vice-President, he didn’t care how Christian or conservative she claimed to be and he was appalled how conservative Christians could champion a woman candidate. Well, I think among cC’s, she’s win the popularity contest. Botkin I’ll have to look up.
Oh, I did notice they have a “pink-for-girls” Red Ryder BB gun- so even daughters can shoot their eyes out, too! So that’s a good sign.
I just had a sick fun idea “Biblical Weapons for Girls”- fruit (Eve), your father-in-law’s ID (Tamar), hammer and tent peg (Jael)…
I never saw that before; that’s pretty funny. I think the guy holding Borat’s hand in the opening clip is totally faking it. The syllables didn’t seem randomly disorganized and it sounded like voluntary speech. The preacher, though, wasn’t faking it. You can sort of tell by the trembling in the voice.
Glossolalia fascinates the hell out of me.
How does it work? Do you start talking weird and then the involuntary stuff follows? Like it becomes truly involuntary, what you say? Or is the act of speaking in tongues just something that happens when you’re praying really hard? Like you’re sitting there praying and all of a sudden you’re talking strange and you have no idea why?
In the Jesus Camp movie, it seemed less of the latter since Pastor Becky was all, “OK! Time now for speaking in tongues!” Though maybe they were all faking. The kids looked like they were. They were so bewildered and scared looking.
It’s been a long time since I saw the film (and a long time since I’ve been Pentecostal) but the way I remember my own experience is like this: I would be in church, singing, dancing, lifting my hands up, having a good old time, and a feeling of euphoria would start to creep over me. I would start praying and worshiping even more intensely. The euphoria was also accompanied by what I would describe as a kind of lightness in my body, and sometimes everything would seem blindingly bright. My body would feel so light that it would become almost… numb isn’t exactly the word, but there was a kind of dissociation from it. Kind of that feeling right before you pass out. At that point my body would start to shake. I felt that I was allowing this thing to happen to me, and that I could stop it at any time, but I did not feel that I was controlling it, and I did not know what was going to happen next.
Then the tongues just start rushing out of me, in a feeling that I can only describe as climax, in the sense that it feels like some kind of great release. The words made no literal sense to my mind, but my pastor would say they were the language of angels. And along with the tongues would come waves and waves of euphoria. And I didn’t really know what was going on but that’s okay because it felt really good and since I believed this is God’s way of showing His love, there was no reason to be afraid.
It definitely strikes me as weird to have a designated ‘‘tongue speaking’’ time. At my church the attitude was that when it comes, it comes. Everything was VERY spontaneous.
The more often I practiced this in church, the more speaking in tongues just began to take the place of usual prayer. My mother was a part of the church as well for a while, and once while driving down the interstate we passed a car accident and that wave of euphoria hit me and we both burst forth in a flood of glossolalia. Eventually the ‘‘angels and demons’’ stuff went too far and my mother removed me from the church.
I was approximately 11 when I first started speaking in tongues. My general impression from the Jesus Camp movie is that most kids were just faking it. But a few of them, in particular that dark-haired kid with the little rat-tail, that kid had got religion, man. That kid scared the hell out of me.
And while it’s totally batshit crazy to outsiders, the reality is that being a Pentecostal (as opposed to a Catholic or Baptist) is really freakin’ fun. We used to have people just bring in their musical instruments and do jam sessions for hours. You could show up in jeans and t-shirts and stand on pews and testify and run down the aisles with tambourines and if you add in all the constant, I would say almost addictive euphoria, it’s not hard to see the appeal of being a holy roller. While it’s a very extreme religion, it’s also a very passionate one.
It sounds passionate. When they talk about people “finding religion”–yikes. It’s like finding a drug or something.
I don’t think I even get THAT passionate or taken over during sex…
Ah yes, now I remember why that sounded familiar. I never saw the film but TAL did a segment on it. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/213/Devil-on-My-Shoulder