I love that John Green and friends decided to begin this episode with a discussion about “Speaking in Tongues” or Glossolalia, a phenomena I am personally familiar with from my years as a Jesus Freak/Catholic Charismatic during the 1970s. It was all just a part of the movement or church I was at, but I did notice that many of my friends, including my girlfriend at the time, did not participate or “receive” this particular spiritual gift. Some of them felt bad about it and thought that maybe something was wrong with them or their faith, but I thought it was somewhat like the fact that not everyone has a good singing voice. 

When I was a religious studies student at Catholic Loyola Marymount University one professor, a Jesuit priest, decided to participate in a small group session and he was told to just do what everyone else was doing and so he also started “speaking in tongues,” to the joy of the student leaders who were there. But he later commented that he was just mimicking what he saw or heard and didn’t necessarily feel “closer to God.” I also later began to feel like my own participation was kind of a psychological thing that I felt free to let go of my “rational” use of language and allow myself to feel free to do this babbling sound of syllables that didn’t mean anything rationally but was mostly an emotional expression. 

Then later, as a biblical studies student at conservative evangelical Biola University, I wrote a paper about Glossolalia using the writings of Benjamin Warfield in his book, Counterfeit Miracles  as my jumping off point. Reading through my paper, forty-four years later, I summarized that, contrary to Warfield and others, the gifts didn’t just disappear at the end of the Apostolic era but were more likely “pushed out” as the church became more of a social institution. I failed to mention that the notion that the “miraculous” disappeared because the Church now had the perfect revelation in the New Testament, would have been problematic with the Apostolic era ending before or around the time of the Jerusalem Temple’s destruction (70 C.E.) but the cannon would not be decided for almost 300-years. Oops. I was just thinking that I’d personally experienced things described as “spiritual gifts” that non-Charismatic/non-pentecostal Christians said didn’t happen because we now have the Bible. 

At the time I had no idea that phenomena like Glossolalia existed outside of Christianity. I find it interesting that depending on the context, similar practices or beliefs, like prayer, for example, can be so utterly skewed. I mean, what is the difference between praying to an unseen God versus speaking the words of a “spell” or enchantment to unseen cosmic forces? Also, this business of seeing a hierarchy or progression from superstition to religion to science, really oversimplifies the interconnectedness between all of these forms of understanding. So much harm has been done because one group doesn’t understand or is prejudiced against these practices and beliefs that don’t follow their own set of norms. That is so sad. 

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Tags: Crash Course Religions, in bad faith, magic v faith, speaking in tongues, video Mondays 

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