Episode 19: Sarah Lane Ritchie – Belief & the Brain

Jared  

You’re listening to Faith for Normal People, the only other God-ordained podcast on the internet.

Pete  

I’m Pete Enns.

Jared  

And I’m Jared Byas.

Intro  

Pete  

Well, folks, this is the last call for our June summer school class: “Not Kirk Cameron’s Apocalypse: A More Robust and Colorful Look at the End Times Described in John’s Revelation.” That is a long title-  That’s longer than my book title.

Jared  

We asked Kirk Cameron if this is not his apocalypse? I don’t know if we’ve actually asked that…

Pete  

Yeah, that’s a good point.

Jared  

We’re making assumptions—

Pete  

It’s too late because we’ve been advertising this so we’re going to go with this—

Jared  

This is true, okay, well, let’s carry on.

Pete  

Anyway it’s taught by Dr. Lynn R. Huber.

Jared  

And the class is going to be live on June 28th, from 8-9:30PM Eastern Time—put it on the calendar, folks—and it’s going to cover defining what an apocalypse is and isn’t, who wrote Revelation and why the author uses apocalyptic imagery, how have people read Revelation throughout history, and of course, there’ll be a lot more.

Pete  

A lot more and this class is pay-what-you-can, as always, for a couple more days, and then it’ll cost $25 bucks to download. So head to www.TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/SummerSchool to sign up. 

Jared  

And for those of you who want extra credit, you can buy a hall pass which gets you all three courses in this 2023 Summer School series here: “Not Kirk Cameron’s Apocalypse,” “Heaven and Hell in Black Theology” and “Universal Salvation is Not Modern.” Plus a fun little bonus gift for your support. So again, go to www.TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/SummerSchool.

Pete  

Folks, today on Faith for Normal People, we’re talking about belief and the brain with Sarah Lane Ritchie. 

Jared  

Yep. And Sarah is a former lecturer in Theology and Science at the University of Edinburgh.

Pete  

Right, and don’t forget to stay tuned at the end of the episode for Quiet Time where we reflect on the conversation and connect Sarah’s research to our own lives.

Jared  

And I think there’ll be a lot to connect around. 

Pete  

If we understand it. 

Jared  

Oh, my goodness. We’ll have to have her back on-

Pete  

Yeah.

Jared  

Or somebody. More conversation. Alright, folks, let’s get into this great conversation with Sarah Lane Ritchie.

Sarah  

Jared  

Well welcome, Sarah, to the podcast. It’s great to have you, I’m so looking forward to jumping into what is sure to be, a nerdy topic.

Sarah  

Jared  

Sarah  

Sure. So, put simply, the cognitive science of religion is this scientific study of how humans became religious. How and why we started forming religious beliefs at some point in our evolutionary path, what sorts of gods or god we started believing in, and why we would have started believing in those types of gods. It looks at what sorts of experiences and rituals and communities and beliefs may have supported continued belief in God. And so really, it’s just a scientific study of like, how religion came to be in the world.

So cognitive science of religion, like how is that different from say, neuroscience or psychology or anthropology? And the short answer there is that it’s complicated. cognitive science of religion is sort of a catch-all term to describe the study of religion from a bunch of different angles. So you have psychologists looking at it, anthropologists who are looking at sort of the rituals and communities that formed human society as we now know it. And a little bit of neuroscience. But there’s a big difference between neuroscience and cognitive science. 

So the metaphor I like to use is around cars. So say you have a really awesome sports car. And you want to understand what makes that sports car the sports car that it is. One approach is to lift up the hood and look at the nuts and the bolts and all the individual pieces and try and figure out how they connect together. That’s sort of what neuroscience is. Neuroscience is looking at the neurons and the synapses, and basically the neurochemistry of what’s happening in the physical brain. They don’t really get to sort of the larger, more—what I think are—more interesting questions about how that like hardware in our brain translates to the meaningful, transcendent experiences that we have, the sorts of complex beliefs that we formed about God and each other. And so with the car analogy, cognitive science of religion is acknowledging the importance of the parts under the hood, but also wanting to understand how those parts translate into an incredible driving experience. The acceleration, the color, the smell, like the feel of the engine, right? So CSR—we can call it CSR, for cognitive science of religion—is trying to do something a bit more… It’s a bit bigger and more complex, trying to get at the full human experience of religion, and not just looking at the nuts and bolts of what’s happening in our brains.

Pete  

You mentioned something before that might spark some thoughts in our listeners, and frankly, me as well: The role of evolution in the development of, I guess, religious experience. Could you just unpack that a little bit, because that is going to sound a bit new for many of us.

Sarah  

So there are a couple of different ways of trying to understand the evolution of religion, and there are many different theories about this. One way of looking at it is trying to understand how people may have started having religious experiences. So we do know that people throughout history have had very powerful religious experiences and those experiences have changed their lives, and the content of those experiences—sort of like what kind of god they’re experiencing, what the quality of those experiences are—that changes from person to person, but religious experiences have been recorded throughout human history. So the evolutionary study of religion wants to look at the way that those religious experiences might have intersected with other natural evolutionary processes to result in religious communities and rituals and doctrine. 

So cognitive science of religion, these scholars will often look at, for example, the ways that religious beliefs might be a byproduct of the ways that our minds naturally work. For example, throughout human evolution, our brains would have devised for us, our minds that have devised for us, ways of coping and surviving in the world. And that, in many contexts, has meant needing to be overly cautious about our environments, so there’s this idea that’s come up in CSR around agency detection. The core idea here is that if you’re walking in a forest at night, and you hear a branch snap in the woods, you’re going to be very well suited to think that an agent—so another human—like broke that breach, and there’s a tiger or a human coming to stalk you and hunt you. Because if you attribute agency to that sound, you’re more likely to get the heck out of there and run to safety, more likely to survive another day. 

And so CSR theorists want to say something like, “Okay, the propensity in the human mind to attribute agency to things in the natural world, to assume a mind behind the natural world, may have been a natural byproduct of what it took for us to survive.” So when there’s a drought, or a famine, or a flood, perhaps we were well suited to think that “Hmm, maybe a divine being, a god, caused that drought because of something we did wrong,” something like that. And I’ll just mention the other very popular theory in CSR is the adaptation theory and this is saying, “Hey, God’s not a byproduct, God helped us to evolve. God is a helpful idea for us as humans to absorb and to work with, because it makes us better people.” So if you think there’s a big God in the sky, who’s watching everything that you’re doing, you’re much more likely to not steal from your neighbor, to be kind to the people in your community, because you have an external reason to avoid divine punishment or earn divine favor. So there’s like the byproduct approach and the adaptation approach, and then the third approach has sort of wanting to integrate those two with the reality that people have had these dramatic religious experiences throughout history. And they’re trying to come up with a cumulative picture of how all of that resulted in the very religious people that we are today.

Jared  

I think it probably is worth taking a step back. We’ve jumped to two different things that I think it may take a little bit of time to, for people to process. So I want to go back to, even the very beginning of; What is the cognitive science of religion? And that difference between neuroscience and cognitive science where—yeah, I just think that’s a big concept for people who really don’t have an understanding of these categories where neuroscientists with these nuts and bolts approach are really looking at the biological mechanics of how a brain works and how a brain functions. But then cognitive science of religion really takes into account this added ingredient of consciousness, which is our experience of this stuff as humans, which isn’t accounted for in the way the brain works. Is that another way of saying it?

Sarah  

Yes, absolutely. It takes into account our values, our communities, our relationships, our rituals, our practices, and those are all things that neuroscience doesn’t do too well with. So, cognitive science of religion is sort of taking on board the whole human, the whole community. 

Jared  

So then from there, so if we’re going to take all of those and not just look at the nuts and bolts of our brain function, but look at how a religion has been shaped and how it’s come to be and how it currently expresses itself, there’s these different theories of how that came to be or what the influences were, evolutionarily. Sort of, how did it come to be that we did this kind of thing? And I go back to, because I think it’s a new way of thinking for folks who maybe haven’t ever had the thought that—that would even need to happen, because—again, for me growing up, these were questions that didn’t need to be asked, because it was sort of like, you’re just down—Like whether it was Adam and Eve, who had an obvious relationship—

Pete  

Yeah, evolution wasn’t on the table really.

Jared  

Right, Adam and Eve had a relationship with God and that’s how we know there’s a God, is because Adam and Eve were created by God and had an intimate relationship with God, and then that just got passed down from generation to generation. And so I just think it’s a new concept. How do you square those two things for people where they may have moved beyond, say, a literal reading of Adam and Eve, but the vestiges of that are still there in some sort of way? They’re still trying to hold onto their religious faith, and yet, what you’re saying around agency, right, that maybe we evolved to sense agency, and then maybe that got, in some ways that maybe, almost we got overactive in our agency detection and started attributing agency to things that maybe don’t have agency like floods or rains and we attribute that to God. That seems to be pushing a god figure or divine figure out of the reality, right? How would you talk to someone who’s sort of like getting their mind blown, and these things are kind of in conflict?

Sarah  

Right. So when people are first exposed to cognitive science of religion, especially when they’ve come from a religious background, the first response is often one of extreme anxiety. I certainly was one of these people, I’m like, “Alright. If science can explain how religious belief evolved, then therefore, everything I ever have ever believed about God, everything I’ve ever wanted to believe about God is completely false.” That is a very normal first response. And thankfully, people have done a lot of work in this area, philosophers and theologians and even scientists themselves. So what you’re getting at, Jared, is the naturalness thesis. So this is the sort of upshot of all cognitive science of religion. It’s this claim that at the end of the day, religion is very natural. But it’s a double edged sword, this naturalness thing, right? So on one hand, it can make people very, very anxious. So if religion is natural, if there are understandable mechanisms in evolution that would have resulted in us believing the things that we believe, then doesn’t that mean that none of this is true? 

But then it goes the other way. And this is where the hope, I think, comes in. Because if you believe in some sort of God, or ultimate reality, that can act creatively in the world through evolution—theistic evolution, or some variety of that—then wouldn’t you expect humans to have evolved with the capacity to understand and know and interact with God? Wouldn’t we need to have naturally evolved the capacity to form the sorts of beliefs that we have? And so these people—Justin Barrett is a big proponent of this, he’s actually the leading figure in cognitive science of religion, and his sort of bottom line here is like, “Why is it a problem for religion to be natural? We should be encouraged by that, because it means that God was… Our minds were designed, but God was, in some way, active in the process of evolution, to end up, to sort of lead humans to be the sorts of creatures that were capable of this remarkable religious relationship and existence in the world.”

Pete  

Sarah, do you think that we need to, in light of what you just said—which I find fascinating, and actually pretty encouraging, to be honest—but words like revelation, of revealed religion, and things like that, do we need to rethink those concepts like, you know, authority, revelation, inspiration, keywords that a lot of people have used to talk about Christian religious experience, at least? It seems like we have to think differently about those terms. Is that right?

Sarah  

So, cognitive science of religion only gets us so far. So it can explain why we might be predisposed to forming religious beliefs, but it says very little about metaphysics. So it says very little about how God is acting in the world or how God might be revealing God’s self to humanity and the rest of creation. And it sort of just describes how the building blocks in the architecture of our minds came to be how they are. It kind of describes the necessary grounds for then developing all of theology and having the sorts of experiences that lead to a revealed understanding of God. I would say that, here, we can actually downplay the importance of cognitive science of religion. It might tell us why we are religious, but it doesn’t necessarily tell us like how God then interacts with us, or very much at all about any particular doctrinal content.

Pete  

Yeah, what I’m hearing is that the cognitive science of religion can’t actually address the nature of revelation or inspiration or authority. That’s…those are different categories, you know, recognizing the limitations of a great theory.

Sarah  

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Jared  

So then, maybe that’s a good segue into another question, which is: Then when we’re talking about belief, religious belief, what are we talking about? Because I think we use words like—cognitive science of religion or using words like our “capacity” for belief, but then things like what we actually believe about revelation or inspiration, or those things aren’t covered by the cognitive science of religion. So what, then cognitive science of religion proponents or scientists talk about belief? What are they talking about?

Sarah  

This is a huge area of debate. I think most people in the pews will take one of two directions, right, with religious belief. If you ask them, “What is religious belief?” They might say, “Well, it’s just what I know to be true. I just know this in my heart, I know, I just have this, I just have it,” right? Other people, other traditions, might say, “Well, you choose what you believe. You have to sort of make a commitment in order to get access to religious belief,” right? And then, amongst people, like theologians and philosophers who work on this stuff, there’s huge debate. There’s no scientific or philosophical consensus about whether or not beliefs are something that just appear to you to be real, just like, kind of land on you, and you’re like, “Ah, well, this is true about the world.” Or if these religious beliefs can be chosen, like do you have any agency at all in what you believe? Or is religious belief just something that appears true to you? So there’s actually a huge psychological disagreement on this and philosophical disagreement on it. 

My view on this is somewhere in the middle. So the research I’ve done suggests that you can’t directly choose what you believe. But you do have a ton of agency, when it comes to putting yourself in the sorts of communities, engaging in the sorts of practices, and exposing yourself to particular sorts of experiences that will make particular beliefs, like God, become more true to you. And then we’re getting into like neuroplasticity stuff. But I would say like the hopeful aspect of all of this research is that you do have indirect ways of directing or having some say in what you believe, but it’s not just rational. It’s a whole body thing. It’s not just a sort of like, a logical proof that you write out on a piece of paper. This involves deep commitment to a community, relationships, some sort of engagement with a sacred text, perhaps, and the right sorts of experiences. You have to have your emotion involved, and that’s not always very popular in churches today, but it is really important that your emotions, and your relational experiences with God and others are being activated. Those things make belief stronger.

Jared  

Yeah, that’s directly opposed to what I was taught as a kid. That our emotions are a part of us. I was told to bracket out my emotions…

Pete  

Yeah, because who cares about those? 

Jared  

Those are gonna get in the way of true beliefs.

Pete  

Those don’t even make us human.

Pete  

Hey, Sarah, can I ask a question here? A term that you’ve used, “embodied belief” or something, “religious belief is embodied,” and that sounds like a very important concept. Could you sort of weave that into what we’re talking about here? And CSR?

Sarah  

Yeah so, we might be conscious animals, but we are animals. We are creatures. We are, we are not just brains existing in like a box somewhere. Our consciousness—there’s so much research now on how our perception of the world, our conscious experience of the world is directly tied to what our hands, our bodies, our feet, our senses are experiencing in the world, and that isn’t just about our like immediate physical environment. It’s also about the relational engagements that we’re having. It’s also about music and art. It’s about the way that we move our body in the world, like everything from like dancing, to sports, to exercise, all of these things affect our cognition, affect our emotional experiences. And it’s just not scientifically the case that beliefs occur in some disembodied rational deliberation process.

Pete  

You just deconstructed my entire seminary experience. 

Jared  

Pete  

Thank you. 

Jared  

Well, and I think that’s important because—again, to highlight, maybe all of our past experiences—It was the idea that we have to bracket all these things out which, you know, the way you’ve explained it and the way I’ve kind of understood is; it’s not just that that’s a bad way to do it, it is an impossibility. And all of those things are already present, we just aren’t recognizing it, which is, for me, the more dangerous thing, that we’re not allowing those things to inform it.

Sarah  

That’s exactly right. And you see this so clearly—I’m just going to pick on megachurches—you see this so clearly in megachurches. Because in many of these sorts of conservative evangelical traditions, they will absolutely say “Your emotions are bad. Do you not trust your heart, do not trust your emotions, do not trust your body, but come to these worship services.” And then you go to these worship services, and what you find is the most aesthetically complex scenario that you find almost anywhere in culture. 

You have mood lighting, you have four chord worship songs that go on endlessly in a rhythmic, repetitive way, you have people swaying and moving. And some of these situations you have speaking in tongues, laying on of hands, like you have extremely like touch-oriented experiences. So it is disingenuous for most churches to say that they are not utilizing some tacit knowledge of the embodiment of human experience. They might not say that’s what they’re doing. They might not say they’re manipulating people, but they absolutely are using what I call spiritual technologies. Stuff in the world that enhances our spiritual experiences.

Jared  

I want to go back to—because of that—like things that enhance our spiritual experiences, and it ties back to the conversation we were having a minute ago about agency and how much do we have control over our beliefs and commitments? There’s a large degree by which when and where we’re born, our own makeup and our family situations and things will put us in a lane, so to speak, that we don’t have a lot of choice over. But then you said that there’s places where we have a ton of agency and you talked about neuroplasticity. Can you talk more about neuroplasticity? And how that fits into this idea. Because I think a lot of people, when they come out of, say, a more conservative theological tradition, this is a new idea. It’s almost like, “Oh, I thought all the time that I was choosing this, but it actually was because my parents were this,” and like, I didn’t really have a lot of agency as a six year old being asked to say a prayer because I had done the thing every single week. But then as we get older, how do we claim that agency while also recognizing, because I think it’s an important part, to recognize the parts where we don’t have as much agency as we think we do. How do we navigate that? 

Sarah  

So on the scientific side of things, the most remarkable body of research, I think, that’s been happening in the last couple of decades is this recognition that our brains don’t determine our reality in a static way. It’s not just that we got a certain brain, we have a certain background, and therefore our spiritual futures are set. What is instead the case, is that there are indirect ways to affect what we believe and affect our spiritual experiences and our understanding and like, kind of interpersonal knowledge of God. And that occurs because our brains are plastic, they are extremely malleable. So there are different dimensions of this, I’ll just name three, but all kind of pointing at this reality that what we do with our bodies in the world affects how we actually perceive the world, affects how our brains perceive reality. 

One aspect of this is repetition, things that we do over and over and over again. So for example, any religious ritual that’s paired with some content, like “God is a loving God,” for example. The more we engage in that ritual, the more likely we are to believe that that thing is true. Another thing is emotional salience. So how gripped are we by something? And this is actually while I have a ton of critiques for the evangelical scene, I also do not want to give up on the things that they’ve done well. It is extremely important to capture emotionally intense and emotionally rich experiences, especially religious and spiritual ones. So I actually think it’s fine to cultivate religious experiences in our own lives. 

And then the third thing is attention. Where are we directing our focus and attention? When we pay attention to something, when we focus on something, it becomes more real to us. And this is where it comes back around to Pete’s question about tradition and authority. Let’s say that you, for whatever reason, find yourself just not believing in God anymore. Or you don’t find yourself believing in the sort of God that you want to believe in. This is where you can start using your mind and your tradition and your community to sort of help you. So for example, religious belief has never come easy to me. Never. I’ve always struggled to experience God in a way that felt real. I’ve been very open about this, and it’s kind of driven all of my research. 

But what I noticed is that the people whose lives and characters were the most gripping for me, and the people I most wanted to be like, they just happened to be Christians. I was lucky. I know that’s not the case for everybody. And I found that the more I exposed myself to those sorts of people, and the more that I focused on the things that were working for them, the more that I engaged in the practices that they were engaged in, the more my own spiritual sensitivity and the spiritual possibilities for me grew. And so it can be a real pathway of hope to recognize that your brain does not determine everything for you, and that your agency in the world, even just by choosing the sorts of people you’re hanging out with, what you’re reading, what kind of music you’re listening to, these things actually really can affect your spiritual possibilities.

Jared  

I have an odd question here that fits within this larger realm. I’m not sure if it fits here. But when we talk about, you know, I just have had many friends over the last year or two talk about the enlightening experiences of going on trips, mushrooms, that kind of psychedelics, how does that fit within this neuroplasticity conversation, in terms of opening people up to new experiences? Because that’s the thing I hear the most in light of these experiences.

Sarah  

Yeah, so this is actually one of my main research focuses at the moment. So I’ve done a lot of work in the past on, what I call, spiritual technologies. And again, that’s just anything that we’re using outside of our bodies—or things like meditation—to directly impact our spiritual formation, our spiritual lives. And so I’ve been working on the psychedelics research team for quite some time, and the research results are really incredible. So your listeners may well know that there’s been a huge resurgence in psychedelic research, treating things like PTSD, and depression, anxiety, and smoking cessation, all these kinds of physical and mental struggles that people suffer with. 

And one of the interesting outcomes of these studies has been that people who have these psychedelic experiences, will, decades later, rate those experiences as the most meaningful and transformative moments of their entire lives, and it changes the entire way they view the world. And so more and more sort of non-scientist scholars have been getting into this area, and wanting to look at ways of like, harnessing that and treating it appropriately. Not just giving everybody acid, not just handing out mushrooms at concerts, but really taking it seriously. Taking the possibility seriously that people can trust themselves, trust God enough to have the sorts of experiences that they might have. And they can structure these trips in a way that is extremely responsible. You can use sacred music of some form as sort of like the background experience, you have a spiritual intention for the experience. It can be an excellent tool to help people get out of their stuckness, help people get access to an experience of the transcendent, an experience of God that can really change their lives. 

And then they take that experience, and once they’ve had that raw, intense experience of what they call love, or God, or ultimate reality, they then start building up the scaffolding around that in the rest of their lives, to make it a robust spiritual practice. So you’ll hear people describe how a psychedelic experience was their gateway drug to meditation. I think it’s a brilliant insight that sometimes people just really need to have a powerful encounter with God. And we don’t really emphasize that very much in progressive circles these days, and I think that’s unfortunate, but there’s nothing in it- sometimes nothing can be just putting people in touch with a loving ultimate reality. And psychedelics, they tend to do that.

Pete  

So—I hope I’m using the right language here—the manipulation of our brain chemistry through psychedelics does not in and of itself support the notion that religious experience is simply the manipulation of our brain chemistry, right? We’re back to that same issue of, the science can only go so far.

Sarah  

That’s right. And what I always like to point out to people is that, you don’t have a choice about manipulating yourself. Every day you are manipulating yourself. Every time you go to a movie that is moving, or you’re a sports game, or to listen to some powerful music, you are choosing to manipulate yourself by giving yourself an experience that is meaningful to you. And so it’s not a question of whether or not we’re manipulating ourselves, but the question of how we’re directing our ability to give ourselves certain sorts of experiences. And so I certainly encourage, like caution and responsibility and following the law, all of that—but yeah, so we’re just getting back to the cognitive science of religion stuff. 

So, we are human bodies who are predisposed, for whatever reason, to form beliefs about God and to have experiences of God. And in our current climate, it’s actually quite difficult to find those experiences of God, to access them because our brains are- We are in a very particular sort of 21st century modern environment, and our brains don’t really get out of the repetitive patterns that we get into very often. So psychedelics are one tool, they’re not like a surefire way to experience God, you have to do a lot of the legwork going in, you have to really…It really, we’re not blank slates. 

It really helps if you’re bringing something to the table. If you come to the table saying, “Hey, I want to experience the Christian God,” and you might pray beforehand, I’ve done that. I was in a study, a clinical psilocybin study, and I absolutely prayed beforehand that God would give me a fuller revelation of ultimate love. So you prepare yourself, you know, you do the hard work, and then after the experience, you do more hard work. It’s not like a magic bullet at all. But it can be a very powerful tool.

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Pete  

Can you lay out a bit more of what your experience was, if you don’t mind?

Sarah  

Yeah, so I signed up—when I first started doing this research, I signed up for a study on sort of, like the “meaning making power” of psychedelics, and I have to tell you, it was a very challenging experience. And it was one of the best experiences of my life. The hardest part of psychedelics is you have to let go. I mean, there’s sort of the mantra is “trust, let go, and be open.” And the first like, half of that trip, for me was just pushing through resistance to letting go. I’m a perfectionist, an achievement-oriented control freak, I love to have—

I love to not lose control of my mind. I like to direct my experiences in particular ways and that does not work in psychedelics. You really have to trust, and you have to let go, and you can’t be afraid of the darkness. And I experienced a lot of darkness. I had a lot of pain, I had a lot of alienation and isolation to work through, I had a lot of…I mean, the core of my experience was one of being held by love, held by the universe, held by God I would say. And being invited to be a part of humanity and a part of that divine love story. But it was a brutal experience of spiritual alienation at the beginning. So it’s not for the faint of heart. 

But I will say that those experiences, you know, experiences on psychedelics, they stick with you. I mean, it’s not like being drunk or something where you have like a high and then you, like, kind of hate yourself the next day. It’s more like, you have insights into who you are, and what’s possible for you and what you, kind of the direction you need to go. And they’re very lucid insights. And then you take those with you and you work on them and you develop them. So I’ve changed a lot of how I relate to other people, kind of, compassion, I think for my own faults, my own weaknesses, the things I don’t like about myself. Like, I’ve really kind of encountered new levels of grace and empathy for other people, I think since encountering psychedelics. 

And I think the other thing I would say that for, you know, going back to sort of my lack of experience of God in the past is that you do get this firsthand experience in these trips of what is possible for you. So for so long, I thought it was not possible for me to believe in a God worth calling God, in a God that was loving and personal in any meaningful way, and psychedelics helped me get a firsthand experience—not just head knowledge, not just sort of some rational understanding of what divine human interaction looks like, but a real personal sense of what it felt like to know God’s love.

Jared  

Could you take a couple of minutes just to expound on that maybe in the broader picture of how has your studies within the cognitive science of religion impacted your own religious belief? How has it shaped it, challenged it, changed it, enhanced it?

Sarah  

So again, all of my research started from a place of total lack of experience of God. My entire childhood, I was like, “What is wrong with me?” I have such an acute spiritual sensitivity, I want nothing more than to be like in love with God and to do God’s will in the world. I want to be plugged into a sort of divine loving narrative, and I could never access it as real. And so I was like this, like a secret closet agnostic/atheist for so long and it was so shaming and alienating. And that’s when I started studying the brain sciences of the mind sciences and philosophy and theology, trying to make sense of all of this. And in the last few years, I’ve really started focusing on the “spiritual but not religious” crowd in particular, because what I found is that amongst the spiritual but not religious—so people who have left traditional religion, or who have never been in a religion, but long for something truly deep and meaningful in the world—you have a lot of people for whom the sort of easy traditional answers and communities just don’t work and that was where I found myself too. 

And I started really examining what was working for them and not working for them. And that’s when I started bringing back in the cognitive science of religion, research on psychedelics, other research on other forms of spirituality, and spiritual technologies and trying to examine tried to really understand the people who couldn’t claim a home and traditional religion, but were not willing to give up on a normative, robust commitment to something spiritual about the world. It’s sort of this perfect marriage for me of cognitive science of religion, and sort of my own spiritual longings and desires. 

Not too long ago, I came across this fantastic article that I’m using a lot right now, written by Tim Shriver and Terra Isabella Burton. It’s called “Spiritual Realism in a Divided America,” and so this term, spiritual realism, I think, is the perfect term to describe not only like where I am, but also the sort of work I want to do in the world. So the way they use it and the way I use it is, the spiritual realism—spiritual realism is about recognizing that spiritual yearning, longing, desire, and commitment is a brute fact about what it means to be human. It’s one of the most human things about us, that we have a hunger for purpose, we have a desire for community, and it’s not enough to just do that in this sort of way that cuts out the possibility of transcendence, the possibility of an ultimate reality, a God that is, in some way, relational, in some way in connection with humanity and the rest of the natural world. 

So my work recently has been sort of taking the spiritual yearning itself, spiritual hunger itself, as one of the most real things about humanity. And it doesn’t—like, that kind of commitment to treating our spiritual longings as real doesn’t require any particular doctrinal commitment. It doesn’t require you to sign up to any metaphysical belief, or any religion. But it’s a great starting point. And it allows you to sort of like, build a robust spiritual life from the ground up. So if cognitive science of religion says anything, it’s that to be human is in some way to be spiritual or religious. And that is what I want to cultivate and work with going forward. 

And so it’s directly impacted my own life in the sorts of spiritual technologies I seek out, the sorts of friends I invest in. I can actually say that I am…I see more hope for real belief now, in a God worth calling God, than I have for almost my entire life. And certainly in my entire life in the Southern Baptist church that I came from [Laughs]. And it’s really through looking at these people for whom it doesn’t come easy, the spiritual but not religious. Those who have the spiritual yearning that cognitive science of religion talks about, but they are trying to build something with a lot of hard work and seeing where it goes.

Pete  

Well, Sarah, I think we could keep talking with you for days about this. This is absolutely fascinating. We’re just touching the surface, but I think you’ve given us—myself certainly—a lot to think about that’s positive and encouraging and, you know, just another step that we’re all looking for, I think, to make sense of our religious experience in light of the bigger world around us, and not just narrow, isolated, insulated kinds of contexts that we sometimes explore our religious faith in. So I want to thank you for coming and for spending some time with us. This has been absolutely fascinating.

Sarah  

Yeah, it’s my pleasure. And I really appreciate all the work that you guys do.

Pete  

Thank you so much.

Jared  

And now for Quiet Time.

Pete  

With Pete and Jared. 

Pete  

Right, well, Jared, Sarah said “of religious belief—” and I am quoting her, “It’s important that your emotions and your relational experiences with God and others are being activated. Those things make beliefs stronger.” So how does that resonate with you now?

Jared  

I think it’s part of a theme that we’ve talked about many times on here, and that is growing up in a religious tradition—Well, it’s interesting, because I had this bifurcated experience. On the one hand, I grew up charismatic.

Pete  

Mhmm.

Jared  

Where it was the pinnacle of spiritual experience was the emotional experience. And then on the other hand, later on, was Reformed and in these other camps where emotional expression was like—

Pete  

Right.

Jared  

A sign of immaturity.

Pete  

Verboten, yeah.

Jared  

Like, “We don’t do that.”

Pete  

Right. 

Jared  

And so I liked this idea of what Sarah said of belief, because again, in the more Reformed camp I grew up in, belief was the most important thing and emotion was shunned. And in my charismatic upbringing, emotion was what was highlighted, and belief was downplayed. 

Pete  

Mhmm.

Jared  

And what I hear Sarah saying is, we’re not robots that can be compartmentalized in that way. It is- We’ve learned through this research that our emotions play a part in our belief.

Pete  

Jared  

It is not a merely intellectual exercise. 

Pete  

Right.

Jared  

And I have found that to be very true. It’s similar to the idea of do we believe our way into new ways of acting? Or do we act our way into a new way of believing? And I think they are connected, and we have to see it more holistically. And I see that now with belief and emotion. They go together, because they are a part of us and we are one thing. We are not these divided things. And so I appreciate that because I find that in my life a lot, where my emotions deepen my convictions. They push me toward ways of acting out my beliefs, they deepen those beliefs. And so it is this cycle that is all connected. What about you?

Pete  

Well, I mean, it’s been said, right, that we are not rational beings with emotions, we’re emotional beings. We’re, I guess, the reason goes along for the ride at some point. So I think to draw on the importance of that, is I mean, we’ve like you said, we’ve talked about this. In fact, I remember people letting you in here on the behind the scenes stuff, before we even…way before the podcast itself, you and I were talking about how the emotional impact of our theology is rarely discussed. And that’s certainly true in our, let’s say, the Calvinist iteration of our faith journey, it’s [?] would be true of your charismatic background, right? Because it’s only the emotions, right, you’re not really combining them to much with, let’s say, rigorous and intellectual thinking.

Jared  

Right, they’re still, they’re still distinct.

Pete  

Right. They’re still distinct. And so, you know, I appreciate that very much what she said. And as far as me, it very much resonates with me, the emotional side of this, because I mean the older I get, the more I think about this stuff. It’s like, what leaves you connected with yourself more? And the mind is a part of that. But if I have thoughts that are pleasing and pleasant, well they’re pleasing, and they’re pleasant. And those are emotional words, right?

Jared  

Mhmm.

Pete  

And no one has thoughts that are just there. They, it’s just like, “Oh, wow!” You’re excited about it, right? So those two things, I think I’ve been much more conscious, personally, about the inevitability of those two things appearing at the same time and naming it for what it is and allowing it to happen.

Jared  

And—it’s gonna sound arrogant, but I think it’s…

Pete  

Not us. 

Jared  

It’s not—that’s not my intention here. And that is, I think, we live in a culture that overemphasizes the intellect, the belief, the “be smart.” And whenever you say things, like “the older I get,” it reminds me of my story, too. And I think it resonates, I think, for both of us that we went down that path.

Pete  

Jared  

We were in a hyper-intellectualized Christian tradition. 

Pete  

Jared  

And we were both pretty smart in that tradition.

Pete  

Jared  

And I almost want to say like, “Believe us when we tell you…”

Pete  

Yeah.

Jared  

“It’s not as great as it’s cracked up to be, it doesn’t lead to the thing that you think it’s going to.”

Pete  

No.

Jared  

And now we have to double back. We, in some ways, I think of like, we got to the end of that trail a little bit and found it wanting.

Pete  

We’re going to have to go all the way back up to the beginning, drag the emotion backwards. [Laughing]

Jared  

We’re doubling back now and saying, “Oh!” And I can’t help but think about this in a gendered way. It’s almost like that—this was the emphasis in some ways in the book I wrote, “Love Matters More,” of saying—I had to go back and realize these feminine voices in the church in the tradition.

Pete  

Mhmm.

Jared  

They were on to something. And I just think other people, how they express their faith differently, they’re sort of still trying to…The gold standard is still intellectualizing it.

Pete  

Right.

Jared  

It’s like, I want to say like, “No, no, no” like that’s the wrong gold standard.

Pete  

Mhmm.

Jared  

We have to go back and start integrating all these expressions.

Pete  

It’s a modernist standard, right? Wouldn’t you say?

Jared  

Right.

Pete  

Yeah. Your making of the “Modern of the Modern Mindset” stuff.

Jared  

For sure.

Pete  

—that you’ve done. So and I appreciate Sarah, who I think, it’s fair to say she had a similar kind of trajectory…

Jared  

Yep.

Pete  

—in that highly intellectualized and trying to feel God, right?

Jared  

Yeah.

Pete  

The emotional side? I mean, you know-

Jared  

And kind of wanting that.

Pete  

-Who doesn’t want that at the end of the day.

Jared  

Pete  

Right so, but having a lot of difficulty in finding her own way through that. 

Jared  

Yeah.

Pete  

But that’s that’s sort of a an occupational hazard, I think, of people who studied this stuff when God is more objectified, and you’re supposed to keep your emotions to the side. Now, of course, you know, and your other iteration of your life, the charismatic side, right? I’m not sure—I mean, this is really a blanket statement to say, or you have Oral Roberts University, of course—but is that intellectual path really valued as much where you would even see the problem? 

Jared  

Yeah. Right.

Pete  

And probably on the ground, probably not as much, as opposed to let’s say, your average Calvinist church, right.

Jared  

Yep.

Pete  

Where this is really the heart and soul of things, and losing either one is a bit of a problem.

Jared  

Well, tied to that, you know, Sarah talked about these spiritual technologies as being “stuff in the world that enhances our spiritual experiences.” I appreciate that she said, “We are almost always emotionally manipulated.” Because if we use the word manipulation as just saying a way to enhance, direct, or shift our motion, I feel like we’re doing that all the time with all kinds of stuff. 

Pete  

You’re saying we’re manipulating ourselves. 

Jared  

Yeah, right.

Pete  

And we’re being manipulated too.

Jared  

Yes, we’re putting ourselves in situations where that’s kind of the goal. 

Pete  

Right.

Jared  

So my question for you is: What have you found as spiritual technologies, things that enhance those spiritual experiences—because again, you know, in the context of Sarah, she was just talking about how she didn’t have a lot of that growing up. It didn’t come naturally to her, so she’s almost like, she’s homed in on this idea of spiritual technologies because it was useful for her.

Pete  

Right, right.

Jared  

Have you found things that are useful for you?

Pete  

Well, I think I will say one thing that, I guess about 12 years ago or so, I started actually seeking out liturgical contexts because I was tired of doing all the thinking. [Chuckles]

You know, and so but that is, you know, by Sarah’s definition, a spiritual technology, which is a different way of approaching being in God’s presence than, you know, a 45 minute sermon and a lot of Scripture, songs. It’s a different way of doing things, which has been meaningful to me and I like the result of that and that is a spiritual technology.

Jared  

Pete  

Jared  

And it’s easy to get caught up in the world of, I think, well-intentioned people who, things that are spiritual technologies for them, then try to universalize that and objectivize it. 

Pete  

Right. Right, right.

Jared  

And so one thing I had to get over—I think I’ve mentioned this before on the podcast—was my guilt and shame over like, nature is not a spiritual technology for me. 

Pete  

Right, right. 

Jared  

So there’s like, this whole like, “Oh—

Pete  

Well, that’s for me too by the way. Yeah.

Jared  

“—I have to get out in nature and you know, go camping and just being in the wild…”

Pete  

Mhmm.

Jared  

And I’m like, that is not… But I always pretended it because it seemed like that’s what you’re supposed to do. When you’re…

Pete  

Well, you are supposed to do it. 

Jared  

Yeah. 

Pete  

Get on with it. Come on. 

Jared  

Exactly.

Pete  

Figure it out. 

Jared  

Thanks. Thanks for helping me get over my shame and guilt. Appreciate that.

Pete  

Jared  

Pete  

Nature does nothing for me.

Jared  

I respect it. And I love it. But it’s not one of these things that enhances my spiritual experiences. 

Pete  

RIght.

Jared  

It is much more cultural for me. Music is a spiritual technology for me. 100%.

Pete  

Well I mean, not necessarily churchy music. 

Jared  

Right, right. Exactly. Yes, specifically, probably not. 

Pete  

Jared  

Because again, I grew up in a world where there’s some baggage associated with that. 

Pete  

Right, exactly right, yeah.

Jared  

Other kinds of music based on my mood, and based on what I am, like, looking for. And so, I just think it’s important too, that we acknowledge and we can be radically honest with ourselves, and not fall into the trap. Again, growing up charismatic, in my tradition, there were a set of things that enhanced your emotion and the spiritual experience that were legitimate. And there were those that were not.

Pete  

Mhmm.

Jared  

There was a sacred/secular divide, specifically within the tradition. And I think I have an allergic reaction to that idea.

Pete  

Right. And just to remind everyone, you know, this, this conversation came out of Sarah’s study of the cognitive science of religion.

Jared  

Right.

Pete 

So this isn’t just winging it, it’s actually thinking about how our brain works with respect to God and to embrace that whole-body faith, which she mentioned as well, which is very much connected to the spiritual technologies and the emotions and things like that.

Jared  

And I think that’s a great way to end this episode, is that reminder of the embodiment. I think that’s what ties all of what we’ve just been talking together.

Pete  

Mhmm, right.

Jared  

Is thinking about our faith more holistically. 

Outro  

Jared  

Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you want to support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just want to give a little money, go to www.TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/give.     

Pete  

And, if you want to support us and want a community, classes, and other great resources, go to www.TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/join.     

Jared  

And lastly, it always goes a long way if you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show. In addition, you can let us know what you thought about the episode by emailing us at info@thebiblefornormalpeople.com. 

Outro  

Thanks for listening to Faith for Normal People! Don’t forget, you can also catch the latest episode of our other show, The Bible for Normal People, wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People podcast team: Brittany Prescott, Savannah Locke, Natalie Weyand, Steven Henning, Tessa Stultz, Haley Warren, Nick Striegel, and Jessica Shao.