The hypnotic power of charismatic religion
The other day I watched Louis Theroux on TV and he was participating in a “positive thinking will make you rich” seminar in the US, and I was astonished at the similarity of this seminar with some Pentecostal Charismatic services I have witnessed.
Similarities included; the use of suggestion, repetitive physical movements, chanting, eliciting a heightened state of emotion, physical contact (especially palm to forehead), peer reinforcement and pressure, ‘name it and claim it’, etc.
In view of this, some fascinating stuff from Tom Ress of Epiphenom.
Whatever else you think about charismatic preachers, they have a dramatic power over their audience. While their followers believe them to have special powers, a new brain imaging study by Uffe Schjødt at Aarhus University in Denmark suggests that it’s all just a product of their imagination.
In fact, the brain imaging study is only part of the story. What’s even more remarkable is what it says about how some people come to fall under the spell of these charismatics.
What they did was to take a small group of pentecostal Christians and a matched group of non-believers. Both were chosen so as to represent the extreme ends of the belief scale.
They were asked to listen to prayers being read by three different people who, they were told, were a non-Christian, an ordinary Christian, and a Christian ‘known for his healing powers’. In fact, they were all ordinary Christians…
So there was no real difference between the prayers (the speakers were mixed up to make sure differences in speaking style could not affect the experiment). The only difference was what the listener was told, but what a dramatic effect it had!
When asked, the pentecostalists rated the one they were told was a healer as the most charismatic, and the person they thought was non-religious as much less charismatic (see the graph). For the non-believers, there was a slight trend in the same direction, but it was small and insignificant. Basically, they weren’t taken in by the deception.
But the pentecostalists were. Just telling a pentecostalists that someone has healing powers makes them think that they are highly charismatic. What’s more, they didn’t feel God’s presence in the prayers read by the person they were told was a non-Christian.
So where does the hypnotism come in? Well, specific regions of the pentecostalist’s brains became somewhat activated when listening to the prayer from the ‘non-believer’, but highly deactivated when listening to the prayer from the ‘charismatic healer’. The prayer from the ordinary Christian resulted in deactivation too, but on a small scale.
And the regions that were deactivated by the ‘charismatic healer’ were all associated with ‘executive function’ – the part of the mind that evaluates, monitors, and makes decisions. A similar response has been seen in the brains of people undergoing hypnosis – as well as meditation.
In other words, they went into a bit of a trance.
What Schjødt thinks is happening here is that, when we listen someone we trust implicitly, we switch off our critical faculties, and just let what they are saying wash over us. In the words of the researchers, “subjects suspend or ‘hand over’ their critical faculty to the trusted person.”
Now, in this scenario the atheists were immune to the powers of the charismatic preacher. But we shouldn’t run away with the idea that this is a particular characteristic of religious people. Stage hypnosis shows that you that you can see similar effects in secular situations – and Milgram’s scary experiments in authority also spring to mind.
What strikes me most about this study is that the charisma of the preacher was all in the minds of the subjects. They were willing dupes.
And what this study also shows is just how closely linked the razmatazz of charismatic preachers is to the showmanship of stage hypnotists. They seem to be exploiting a common human weakness – and one that has enormous power!
Hat tip: Paliban Daily and New Scientist.
Tags: Christianity, Science & Medical
April 25th, 2010 at 5:12 pm
Diana Mitford, wife of the British fascist, Sir Oswald Mosley, was a friend and supporter of Hitler. She found Hitler’s charisma at mass rallies completely overwhelming.
However when (hoping to convert her sister, Nancy) Diana tried to write down exactly what the Fuhrer had said during his impassioned performance she found it was gibberish.
April 26th, 2010 at 12:52 pm
I agree completely with you – some thoughts from me:
I’ve worked in hotels a lot and have witnessed numerous “personal development” events, as they typically take place in hotel ballrooms. (I wouldn’t go to them as a delegate, I’m only there because I’m working and being paid for it). There are striking parallels between them and the word-of-faith movement. They operate on identical principles to the prosperity gospel – a speaker says I’m rich and successful and if you give me money (pay to be at my seminar) then you can be rich and successful as well. I never saw the TV programme you mentioned, but I’ve witnessed very similar things to what you describe.
It has been well-documented in recent years that pentecostal faith-healers use hypnotism to manipulate vulnerable people in their audiences into believing that they have been healed. See Mark Haville’s testimony – http://www.e-n.org.uk/385-From-faith-in-faith-to-faith-in-Christ.htm – as an example. Benny Hinn is the leading exponent of this deception – his “miracle crusades” are actually hypnosis shows. What we saw at Lakeland with Todd Bentley was no different, and there are dozens more. There’s an excellent film called Marjoe about a pentecostal healer who didn’t actually believe in God yet still was able to perform miracles – look it up on Wikipedia or buy the DVD (eg on Amazon) – it’s not very well-known but I think it should be essential viewing for all Christians.
Another good resource is “The Battle For Your Mind” by Dick Sutphen – available in numerous places online such as http://www.hiddenmysteries.com/freebook/neuro/sutphen.html – note that I think he loses the plot a bit towards the end, but there is much truth in this piece.
One thing I said in a comment on another blog is that we as Christians are generally not familiar with crowd psychology, emotional manipulation, hypnosis, etc. So we don’t tend to consider such things when we think about what happens in Christian meetings – instead we localise it to our personal framework of beliefs – if it’s happening in a church or Christian conference then it must be God at work.
There is a huge disconnect between the claims of the charismatic and pentecostal movements and the experience on the ground (and I write as a charismatic). We say that the gifts of the Holy Spirit, including miracles, are available today, yet in reality few, if any, are supernaturally healed in our midst. The validation of our worldview is the baptism/filling of the Holy Spirit, accompanied often or always (according to your theology) with the gift of speaking in tongues. But as I get on in life I’m becoming increasingly convinced that this is psychological in origin in the vast majority of cases – people normally experience it in a highly emotional setting where they are probably in a semi-hypnotic state and there is huge peer pressure.
My point is simply this – people need to believe that God heals today (because their theology requires it), so they will accept the claims of anyone who describes themselves as a having a healing gift. And that is a recipe for being conned.
April 26th, 2010 at 3:35 pm
@George.
Unbelievable! Thanks for that input.