Is religious experience just hypnosis?
I wondered if my experience in Wales was some sort of subliminal state I’d gone into through social contagion. I went to meet the hypnotist Derren Brown to ask him what he thought, and interviewed him in his extraordinary house filled with optical illusions, stuffed animals, and a fish-tank inhabited by conger eels. We chatted while a jealous parakeet buzzed around my head. Brown was a teenage Pentecostalist, but lost his faith when he was an undergraduate and became interested in hypnotism. He’s now famous for using hypnotism to brainwash audiences in his shows. I asked him if he thought charismatic churches used a form of hypnotism to induce ecstasy in their congregations: ‘Yes, I do. But it’s complicated. It’s difficult to pin down what hypnosis is.’
The two competing theories of hypnosis are the ‘altered state theory’, which suggests hypnosis transports us into some non-rational, subliminal altered state of consciousness, and the ‘role-theory’, where people just go along with the role-play to conform with social expectations. I’d suggest they’re both right. Context and cultural expectation matter. The anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann has shown the extent to which charismatic Christians learn to lose control.11 At Alpha, we were taught how to open ourselves to the Holy Spirit, even how to speak in tongues. We also learned by imitating the ecstatic behaviour of others. But cultural expectations and role-play can also trigger powerful neurophysical states, which feel involuntary and automatic. You become deeply absorbed in a script, you become highly suggestible to commands from a high-status figure, and you lose control. Initially you’re just going along with a game, but suddenly it feels really real. You’re not being ‘brainwashed’, exactly. Rather, you’re finding a context in which you have permission to let go. That surrender can happen in a range of contexts, not just religious ones – it may happen at the doctor’s, at an alternative healer’s, at a rock concert, at the theatre, at a stage-hypnotist’s show.
And it’s not always bad for you: it can be healing and connecting. Indeed, Derren Brown’s latest show, Miracle, tries to recreate the world of Pentecostal faith-healing, in a tongue-in-cheek sceptical way. He gets audience members with physical complaints to come on stage, then ‘heals’ them with the Holy Spirit, while acting like a flamboyant revivalist preacher. It’s pretty offensive to Christians, but the weird thing is, it works. Brown tells me: ‘Not only does the healing work, but I’ve also “slain” people, so they fall down.’ I witnessed this when I saw Brown’s show – it was very strange to see sceptical Londoners abruptly pass out, then queue up to testify to how much better they felt. After the show, Twitter was full of testimonies – ‘It was incredible! Thanks for healing my feet’; ‘Thank you for healing my back’; ‘My legs started to buckle and I wet myself.’ When the show was screened a few months later, the papers were full of similar miracle stories: ‘Girl who suffered knee problems for 10 years claims Brown miraculously healed her in 10 seconds,’ said The Sun. ‘Derren Brown has god-like powers,’ declared the girl in question. It shows that just because a person can produce ecstatic experiences in others, it doesn’t mean they’re blessed with spiritual gifts. Such experiences seem more triggered by a person’s expectations than by the spiritual powers of the guru.12 But the response to Miracle also shows how healing ecstatic experiences can be - they unlock subliminal healing and give people the faith to believe a new narrative.
A few weeks after the show, I met Nicky Gumbel and asked him if some religious experiences are really ‘just’ hypnosis. On the Alpha course, when he told us ‘You may be feeling dizzy, or have sweaty palms or a warmth in your chest’, wasn’t that just hypnotic suggestion?
He said: ‘Someone once said the same thing to me on the Alpha course. So the next Alpha weekend, I didn’t say anything about what people might feel, and there were very powerful manifestations of the Holy Spirit, and someone came up to me afterwards and said, “Why didn’t you warn us?” So what I try to say now is “These things don’t need to happen, but if they do, that’s okay, it’s not wrong or weird.” The point I try to emphasise is, that’s not what matters.’ He suggested there are three possibilities about religious experiences: either it’s demonic, or psychological, or God. Or it could be a combination, particularly of the last two. ‘What matters,’ Nicky insisted, ‘is the fruit. If it leads to a ministry for Alpha in the prisons, I think that was God. If it leads to people coming off heroin, that was probably God. And if it was just psychological, maybe we need more of the psychological. When John Wimber came here, and a lot of friends of mine said, “What he’s doing is a well-known form of hypnosis”, I repeated this to my predecessor, and he replied, “Not well-enough known.”’
This is remarkably close to William James’s view of the matter: it may be God, it may be hypnosis, what matters is the fruit. Even secular psychologists arrived at similar conclusions. The psychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot initially pathologised religious experience, but his last essay on ‘the faith cure’ looked at Lourdes as a ‘system of mass suggestion’, which he admitted was often very healing.13 Religious healing may just be the well-proven placebo effect – but what ‘the placebo effect’ means is people’s expectations, beliefs and faith can have an extraordinary impact on the body, which can be triggered by ritual and role-play. So do we need the mass placebo of religious ritual to bring us healing, love and transcendence?
Set and setting
I know many of my atheist and agnostic friends were worried I’d joined a cult when I got into HTB. But I’d suggest it’s our secular individualist culture that’s weird in not providing ‘controlled spaces to lose control’ – places and rituals where people can come together to love each other, support each other, pray for each other, and dissolve their egos safely. That lack is unique in the history of Homo sapiens. Of course, there are risks in such places – one can lose one’s mind, get exploited by a guru, or end up turning against outsiders. In the Introduction I suggested that Timothy Leary’s idea of ‘set and setting’ are a good way to assess the risks of different contexts for ecstasy.
If we think about the ‘mindset’ of Anglican churches, in many ways they look a lot safer and more pro-social than other forms of contemporary ecstasy. Charismatic Christians engage with the Holy Spirit not for the thrill of it, not just to get high, but out of a sense of love of God, love of each other, and desire to help humanity. They’re fairly humble in their mindset: they’re so focused on worshipping Jesus that they avoid the risk of trying to be gods themselves. And the ecstasy is outward-looking; it’s channelled towards trying to improve society. Although charismatic Christians sometimes think the best way to improve society is by converting other people to Christianity, they’ve helped in other ways: a group of young HTB lawyers campaigned to pass the Modern Slavery Act (which gives police more powers against human traffickers), just as Methodists and Quakers worked to abolish slavery in the nineteenth century.
The main risk with the mindset of charismatic Christianity is that it can be over-attached to ecstasy. This is a risk in the whole of Christian culture, all the way back to the early church (St Paul warns against getting over-attached to charismatic gifts in 1 Corinthians). Christian ecstasy is a visitation from the Holy Spirit, proof of God’s love for you, an influx of charismatic power. It could bring healing, or children, or career opportunities. It could be proof you’re saved and going to Heaven. It could even be a sign of the coming Rapture. How could one not get attached to ecstasy