Ross Douthat on the Varieties of Religious Experience
My mother had a friend who invited her to go to a healing service. [Her friend] would go around and pray for people who were sick, pick people out of the audience, and they would be slain and they would lie down in high school auditoriums having encounters with the Holy Spirit.
My mother went to one of these services and was very uncomfortable throughout and almost left but in the end ended up being prayed for and having one of these experiences…
For me this was the beginning of spending a big chunk of my childhood following my parents as they went on this very interesting, very strange religious pilgrimage first through healing services, then through various other Pentecostalist and Evangelical worlds.
…
I wasn’t a skeptic about my parents’ experiences. There was some skepticism around the edges of some of these churches and religious entrepreneurs, but watching the faith healing and the revivalism and so on, it wasn’t like watching the scene in the first Borat movie where they’re praying for him and they’re pushing him down to get him to look like this is really happening.
I think that a lot of especially very secular or liberal people assume that it’s all sort of like that, it’s all sort of performative and people are just sort of thrashing and flailing around because it’s just sort of the mood of the crowd. Even though it was a long time ago, the places we went in my childhood weren’t like that at all, and it has instilled in me that at least certain kinds of religious experiences have a fundamental reality that defies, not all explanation, but the easiest material explanations.
That is Ross Douthat in conversation with Andrew Sullivan. And here is Ross’s mother’s account of her experience.