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By Root 578 0

a gauntlet at the foot of my faith. If disparate religions drive the same neural routes to transcendence, can one religion claim that it is true and all others false (or at least deficient)? I had noticed in my reporting that the people who experienced mystical states tended to drop religious labels: if they had been Christian before, they often became “spiritual but not religious” afterward, or they might incorporate other traditions into their practice of Christianity. One thing they often rejected, however, was an exclusive claim to Truth. This forced me to reconsider Jesus’ statement, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me.” Perhaps, I reflected, Jesus’ words were more nuanced than a literal reading of the text suggests.

Of course, I was not ready to throw my faith overboard just because of a few brain scans. Even if two things appear identical physiologically, they can play out in distinct ways. Identical twins share the same DNA, but they are not identical people. Can one routinely score 100 on math tests and the other flunk? Can one become a car salesman and the other an English teacher? Of course. Biology does not determine everything—and it certainly cannot determine the nature of “Truth.” In the same way, it is too facile to say that brain states can determine the veracity of spiritual claims. And yet, I wondered, if there is a God who maps out the neural routes to communicate with Him, He could be making an explicit point: maybe the distinctions between religions are more artificial than believers want to admit.

Prayer Without Thinking

Andrew Newberg is an equal opportunity scientist. He is intrigued by brains in meditative states and in excited ones, which brings us to Pentecostal Christians. Anyone who has stood in a charismatic church and listened to the trilling of tongues could have told Newberg that these brains are nothing like those of contemplative nuns or Buddhist monks. The question is, how are they different?

What differentiates one type of spirituality from another is not doctrine—witness the scans of monks and nuns. What distinguishes one type of spirituality from another is style. And here we come to a very strange style indeed.

Since people started speaking unfamiliar languages at Los Angeles’ Azusa Street Mission in 1905, Pentecostal Christianity has swept the world like a tornado, carving its way across the United States, turning south to Latin America, and most recently, carving a broad swath through Africa. It is the fastest-growing religious movement in the world. It knocks people down,“slaying them in the Spirit.” It sparks laughter and apparent healing, and most of all, it confers upon people their own “prayer language.” For the hallmark of a charismatic or Pentecostal Christian (the words are often used interchangeably) is glossolalia, or “speaking in tongues.”

In his “terrifying” study, as Newberg put it, the scientist recruited five women who had spoken in tongues for several years. The protocol mirrored the one for Scott McDermott and the nuns and monks—with one major difference. Since Newberg wanted to detect changes specific to speaking in tongues, he asked each Pentecostal subject to sing gospel songs as the “baseline” state, and then to speak in her unknown prayer language as the “target” spiritual state. As in the other studies, a radioactive tracer was injected into the subject’s bloodstream at the (presumed) height of her singing and glossolalia, capturing her brain in musical and then spiritual ecstasy.

Donna Morgan, one of the hospital’s nuclear medicine technologists, told Newberg she had a deep interest in observing someone speak in tongues, and volunteered to help.6 As they prepared the first subject, Newberg confessed to Morgan he was nervous, as he had never seen this phenomenon before.What if nothing happened? he asked her.

“Don’t worry, it will,” she reassured him.

Two minutes into the second session, the subject began uttering incomprehensible words, like a foreign language. She returned to English, then back to tongues.