the familiar pulpit of his congregation in
Northampton, Massachusetts, but rather
the church at Enfield, a town that had
gained notoriety for stubbornly resisting
the exhortations of previous preachers of
spiritual awakening. From his scriptural
text—“their foot shall slide in due time”
(Deut. 32: 35)—Edwards drew the
doctrine that “there is nothing that keeps
wicked men, at any one moment, out of
hell, but the mere pleasure of God.”
Sinners living here and now, Edwards
declared, were “the objects of that very
same anger and wrath of God, that is
expressed in the torments of hell,” and
that wrath was an annihilating fire that
already “burns against them; their
damnation does not slumber; the pit is
prepared; the fire is made ready…to
receive them.” In a notorious image,
Edwards portrayed God dangling the
sinner’s soul over the fires of hell like a
spider on a single, slender filament of its
web. The sermon achieved stunning
results, as recorded in the diary of one of
those present, Stephen Williams:
“before the sermon was done, there was
a great moaning and crying out
throughout the whole house—what shall
I do to be saved; oh, I am going to hell;
oh, what shall I do for a Christ.” The
“shrieks and cries were piercing and
amazing,” Williams reported, and the
scene was so tumultuous that Edwards
had to stop before finishing his sermon. i
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As the classic American example
of fire-and-brimstone Protestant
preaching, “Sinners in the Hands of an
Angry God” depends, for its effect, on
anthropomorphism: ascribing human
form and attributes—hands, emotions,
and purposive agency—to nonhuman
phenomena. Anthropomorphism has
been a hotly debated feature of religion
since classical antiquity. But, in the
modern world, religious
anthropomorphism has become
especially controversial, while, at the
same time, also becoming a crucial
concept in modern theories about the
very nature of religion. ii Modern
objections to anthropomorphism have
taken two major forms. First, traditions
within Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
have long opposed the worship of
“idols,” and regarded anthropomorphism
as a dangerous assault against genuine
piety and properly theological
understanding of existence. In the
modern period these religious objections
against anthropomorphism have
eventuated not only in sophisticated
intellectual polemics against
anthropomorphic concepts of God but
also in popular movements of
iconoclasm, which protested against
anthropomorphic representations of the
divine and sometimes physically
destroyed anthropomorphic images.
Second, the rise and development of
modern science has emphasized the
regularity of the processes that structure
the natural world. And even when these
orderly processes were described as
natural “laws”—a term with obvious
anthropomorphic connotations—they
have generally been understood in ways
that are thoroughly impersonal and
lacking any intrinsic purpose or design.
Hence, modern science has generated
numerous questions about religious
interpretations of influence on the course
of nature by divine ideas and purposes.
Since the late nineteenth century, many
instances of the so-called “warfare”
between science and theology have
turned on the issue of whether any
scientific plausibility could be attached
to concepts of a divine mind, purpose, or
intention that guided or ordered the
structure of the universe. iii According to
the philosopher Charles Taylor, the
transition from perceptions of a divinely
ordered, purposive universe to an
“impersonal order” of nature marked a
pivotal change that, especially since the
eighteenth century, has shaped “a secular
age” among the societies of the modern
West. iv In short, anthropomorphism has
not only become a source of tension
within religions but also something of an
impasse between religious and scientific
interpretations of the universe.
Nonetheless, anthropomorphic
assumptions remain vigorously present
in many of the modern forms of
theology, spiritual practice, and religious
art, a persistence that suggests the
strength of the psychological and social
functions performed by
anthropomorphic representation.
In light of these longstanding
controversies about religious
anthropomorphism, the graphically
anthropomorphic, spider-dangling deity
of Edwards’s sermon would seem to
offer a good test case for understanding
how anthropomorphic religious language
works in the modern era. Such an
understanding begins with one of the
central themes of this book, namely, the
powerful human motivation to establish
and maintain social connections.
Anthropomorphism extends this drive
for social connection beyond the
boundaries of human societies by
attributing human characteristics to
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nonhuman phenomena. In this way,
anthropomorphic language incorporates
human society in a web of ethical
obligations that connect to the natural
environment and, by imaginative
extension, to the universe as a whole.
Although the drive toward social
connection is a general human trait,
however, persons neither seek nor find
satisfaction in a generalized sense of
connection. Instead, satisfying social
connections are sought and experienced
in terms of the social norms and values
of particular historical and cultural
settings. Likewise, anthropomorphism,
as an inferred social connection to the
nonhuman, takes shape and becomes
persuasive in terms of historically and
culturally specific assumptions about
society and social relations. This
chapter will, therefore, step back from
“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,”
in order to describe how contemporary
scholarship in social neuroscience and in
the history of religions provides a fresh
point of view on the workings of
anthropomorphic perception and then
test that interpretive model by
reappraising Edwards’s famous sermon
in its historical context.
The Boundary of the Human
The line between the human and
the nonhuman is, perhaps, the most
consequential presupposition that any
society, group, or individual adopts
about life in the world. The way various
cultures draw this line, between “us” and
“the other,” has shaped civilizations and
their goals as well as the norms of
personal conduct and identity. Although
concepts of the human have a long and
contentious philosophical history, people
in their everyday lives show remarkable
consensus in the features they use to
define “human.” Central to this process
of perceiving the human is a perception
of mind in other agents, including the
presence of goal-directed agency,
emotions such as anger, guilt, or pride, a
capacity for self-awareness, and free
will. As Nick Epley demonstrated in the
preceding chapter, the perception of
these distinctively human traits—“seeing
invisible minds”—is a psychological
mechanism with tremendous influence
on the way humans order and understand
their social environment.
Mind perception is such a
powerful tool of inductive inference,
however, that it regularly crosses the line
it has itself drawn between the human
and the nonhuman. Scholars from a
wide array of disciplines have long
observed humans’ anthropomorphic
tendency to see nonhuman things or
events as humanlike, imbuing the real or
imagined behavior of nonhuman
phenomena with human motivations,
agency, and emotions. By perceiving
the world in terms of human capacities
and social relationships,
anthropomorphism builds a complex
system of analogies that uses knowledge
of what it is like to be a person, in order
to interpret the behavior of animals, the
function of technological devices, the
operation of complex social systems
such as “the market,” or natural
occurrences such as violent weather
patterns or catastrophic events. v Hence,
anthropomorphism, as a process of
inference that not only draws but also
crosses the line between the human and
the nonhuman, has very substantial
consequences for the human sense of
connection to nonhuman animals, to
larger ecological systems, and to the
structure of the universe taken as a
whole.
Contemporary psychological
research has created an intellectual space
that opens the phenomenon of
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anthropomorphism to fresh possibilities
for interpretation that are especially
important for understanding its role in
the human spiritual traditions in
modernity, as well as the controversies
surrounding that role. This research
proposes that a single set of
psychological mechanisms is likely to
explain when people perceive a mind at
work in an encountered phenomenon,
regardless of whether the thing in
question is a god, a machine, an animal,
another person, or an uncanny sequence
of events. From this perspective, the
psychological process of
anthropomorphic inference works in
concert with two other motivational
mechanisms: the need to interact
effectively with nonhuman phenomena
in our environment and the desire to
establish social connections with other
humans. vi The phrase anthropomorphic
inference fails to capture, however, the
interactive dynamism that infuses a
person’s perception that a mind is at
work in another agent. Put more
strongly, our sense that mind is present
in the other is, in no small measure, the
sense that we are communicating. The
absence of this communicative
dimension of mind perception is
precisely the tragedy in the family of an
Alzheimer’s patient—the loss of
reciprocal recognition. As Tanya
Luhrmann vividly illustrates in the next
chapter, religious anthropomorphism
builds on the notion that this
communicative reciprocity extends
beyond the boundary of human society
into the wider environment and includes
social connection and communication
with the divine.
Anthropomorphism adds an
obvious but important twist to these
psychological mechanisms: whenever a
person ascribes human attributes to a
nonhuman phenomenon, the person
nonetheless continues to perceive it as
nonhuman. When, for instance, a pet
owner observes a dog’s reliability and
infers that this behavior arises from the
dog’s faithfulness, the owner does not go
on to say that the dog is human. Indeed,
an indispensable aspect of an
anthropomorphic way of seeing Fido’s
faithfulness is that the person also
continues to see Fido as a dog. This dual
perception is even more pronounced in a
parallel illustration: a person observes
the everyday reliability of gravity and
infers that this arises from faithfulness at
the heart of the natural order. Both
illustrations indicate a close connection
of anthropomorphism to metaphor, in
which persons understand one kind of
thing in terms of another by identifying a
feature that bridges their difference
without eliminating it. The specific
feature, in this case faithfulness, posits a
point of comparison that enables a
familiar human capacity for loyalty to
enable interpretation of another,
unfamiliar or alien phenomenon. The
illustrations further suggest that Fido’s
faithfulness is what could be called weak
anthropomorphism, because one could
plausibly argue that dogs and humans
actually do share a capacity for
faithfulness. We perceive that, as
mammals, they exhibit many behavioral
similarities. By contrast, the perception
of faithfulness as an attribute of the
natural order is strong
anthropomorphism, because it makes a
far more daring inference in its effort to
draw an analogy that produces insight or
knowledge about the communicative
reciprocity of the human and the
nonhuman. Religions, as Edwards’s
sermon illustrates, build primarily on
strong anthropomorphism in order to
propound communicative social
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connection with the nonhuman world.
The metaphorical and analogical
reasoning so characteristic of religious
interpretations of the world is not merely
a rhetorical flourish but is, instead,
closely tied to general psychological
processes in which self-knowledge and
knowledge of other humans function as
the most readily accessible starting
points for inferences we make about
human connections to the most
comprehensive and consequential forces
at work in the nonhuman world. vii
Anthropomorphism’s dual
perception of nonhuman phenomena—as
simultaneously both like and unlike
human persons—has shaped modern
religious and spiritual perceptions in two
especially intriguing directions. In one
case, it has fastened on the difference
between the human and the divine and
cultivated iconoclastic perceptions of the
spiritual in which anthropomorphic
representation is regarded as a
dangerously misleading, albeit
necessary, accommodation to the
limitations of human reason. viii In the
other case, it has emphasized the point of
metaphorical identity between the human
and the nonhuman. Thus, an ancient
idea held that the physical universe was
a macrocosm mirroring the human
microcosm, and this included what
literary critics have named “the pathetic
fallacy,” that is, a sympathetic response
in nature to the affective states of
humans. The early modern political
philosopher Hugo Grotius (1583-1645),
for example, described how human
disobedience to divine law prompted an
anthropomorphic emotional response
from nature: “with sad motion
wheeling, let the sky lament and
mourn.” ix In the modern history of
religions, these two modes of
anthropomorphism, one accentuating
difference and the other accentuating
identity, have varied according to social
circumstance, rhetorical purpose, and
political ramifications. “Sinners in the
Hands of an Angry God” illustrates, in
one historical context, how
anthropomorphic language crosses the
boundary of the human in order to
interpret human ethical responsibility to
both the human and the nonhuman
environment.
The Rhetoric of Divine Wrath
Clearly, Edwards’s
anthropomorphic rhetoric destabilized in
a terrifying way the Enfield
congregation’s complacent perceptions
of the world. It did so by starting from
an assumption that Edwards and the
congregation shared: that humanity’s
ultimate environment should be
construed, anthropomorphically, as a
cosmic society held together by a
covenant that God had made with the
whole of creation. The sermon induced
terror among the congregants by
graphically portraying their own
responsibility for disrupting the
harmonious order of this allencompassing
society and provoking
divine wrath for their rebellion against
the covenant.
The primary evidence for this
divine wrath came not, however, from
the external orders of nature and divine
providence, which Edwards imagined
working together to maintain the
harmonious order of the world. Instead,
wrath had arisen from a clash between
the benign will of the world and the
rebellious human will: “there is laid in
the very nature of carnal men a
foundation for the torments of hell:
there are those corrupt principles, in
reigning power in them, and in full
possession of them, that are seeds of hell
Page | 107
fire.” For the present God restrained
human wickedness “by his mighty
power, as he does the raging waves of
the troubled sea,” but, if God should
withdraw that restraining power,
humanity’s willful self-regard would
overturn nature. The most dangerous
fire in creation was not, therefore, the
fire of hell but rather the hellfire bursting
forth from an unrestrained human will:
“The corruption of the heart of man is a
thing that is immoderate and boundless
in its fury; and while wicked men live
here, it is like fire pent up by God’s
restraints,” but, should God ever relax
his governance, humanity’s boundless
fury “would set on fire the course of
nature.”
The turmoil stirred by human
willfulness, like a violent storm at sea,
threatened to capsize the ark of the
universe, and the earth responded to this
threat in a terrifying version of the
pathetic fallacy, in which not empathy
but enmity arose between humans and
their natural environment.
Consequently, except for “the sovereign
pleasure of God, the earth would not
bear you one moment,” and Edwards
warned the Enfield congregation that
“the creation groans with you” and
resented its subservience to human
usurpation: “the sun don’t willingly
shine upon you to give you light to serve
sin and Satan; the earth don’t willingly
yield her increase to satisfy your lusts;
nor is it willingly a stage for your
wickedness to be acted upon; the air
don’t willingly serve you for breath to
maintain the flame of life in your vitals,
while you spend your life in the service
of God’s enemies. God’s creatures are
good, and were made for men to serve
God with, and do not willingly subserve
to any other purpose, and groan when
they are abused to purposes so directly
contrary to their nature and end.” A
rebellious humanity antagonized the rest
of creation, “and the world would spew
you out, were it not for the sovereign
hand of him who hath subjected it in
hope.”
The just order of the cosmos
would rightly destroy humanity for its
willful rebellion against the order of the
whole, and the fact that this had not
already happened was the expression of
something like the self-restraining mercy
of a monarch who does not order the
execution of a traitor who has offended
the royal honor: “The bow of God’s
wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready
on the string, and Justice bends the
arrow at your heart, and strains the bow,
and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of
God, and that of an angry God, without
any promise or obligation at all, that
keeps the arrow one moment from being
made drunk with your blood.”
The Great Awakening was
coterminous and interactive with the
eighteenth century development of the
modern physical sciences, especially
building on the work of Isaac Newton
(1642-1727). Edwards’s assumptions
about the harmonious order of creation
combined the science of his day with the
aristocratic social order of eighteenthcentury
society. In warning the town of
Enfield that it had transgressed the
cosmic order, Williams was also
asserting that it had violated the societal
aspect of that order; as minister, he
called the town to task for both
violations.
Conclusion
Edwards imagined the
Newtonian universe as an aristocratic
social hierarchy held in harmony by
sovereign law, at once moral and natural.
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In this hierarchy one member—the
human—had stepped beyond its
assigned place in the cosmic society and
now lived in an unwitting complacency,
ignoring the precarious finitude of a life
being pursued by a radical judgment:
“’tis nothing but [God’s] hand that holds
you from falling into the fire every
moment: ’tis to be ascribed to nothing
else, that you did not go to hell the last
night; that you was suffered to awake
again in this world, after you closed your
eyes to sleep: And there is no other
reason to be given, why you have not
dropped into hell since you arose in the
morning, but that God’s hand has held
you up.”
Like his contemporaries, the
deists and religiously inclined scientists
such as Newton himself, Jonathan
Edwards assumed the “Newtonian world
machine,” operating with the
metronomic regularity of natural law.
Presupposing both the science and the
aristocratic social hierarchy of his day,
Edward introduced anthropomorphic
language to create a clash between this
harmonious order and the willful selfinterest
of humans who dared to ignore
their proper rung on the ladder of
existence. As a preacher of penitence,
he carried his anthropomorphic imagery
to extravagant heights in order to induce
a reversal of behavior in a recalcitrant
town. The sermon effectively threatened
the people of Enfield with what
amounted to “metaphysical ostracism,”
an expulsion no less thoroughgoing than
the primordial ejection of Adam and Eve
from the garden. The palpable effect of
this imagery depended on the evocation
of the natural and social orders rising up
like, and yet unlike, an angry monarch to
crush rebels against the cosmic
commonwealth.
References
1 In the interests of clarity, I have
slightly rearranged and modernized this
quotation. It and all quotations from
Edwards’s sermon are taken from Jonathan
Edwards, Sermons and Discourses, 1739-
1742, ed. Harry S. Stout and Nathan O.
Hatch, with Kyle P. Farley, The Works of
Jonathan Edwards 22 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2003), 404-18.
1 Social scientific analysis of the relation
between anthropomorphism and religion is
summarized by Steward Elliot Guthrie, who
argues “religion is anthropomorphism” in
his book Faces in the Clouds: A New
Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993), 178. The most
lucid and succinct historical treatment
remains Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth
Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1959).
1 I have in mind such authors as John
William Draper, History of the Conflict
between Religion and Science (1874), and
Andrew Dickson White, A History of the
Warfare of Science with Theology in
Christendom (1896). For a more recent
example, see Richard Dawkins, The God
Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
2008).
1 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2007), 270-95.
1 For a sampling of relevant recent
work, see Philip Husbands, Owen Holland,
and Michael Wheeler, eds., The Mechanical
Mind in History (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2008); and Lorraine Daston and Gregg
Mitman, eds., Thinking with Animals: New
Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
Ralph Waldo Emerson made the classic
American argument for the positive
reciprocity between the human and the
natural. This idea of mutuality takes a
different turn in our contemporary situation,
in which industrial and technological
Page | 109
advances have begun to alter the climate and
thereby blurred the boundary between the
human and the natural in another way. See
for examples of this phenomenon, Bill
McKibben, The End of Nature (New York:
Random House, 1989).
1 Nicholas Epley, Adam Waytz, and
John Cacioppo, “On Seeing Human: A
Three-Factor Theory of
Anthropomorphism,” Psychological Review
114 (2007): 864-86.
1 Sheldon Sacks, ed., On Metaphor
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1978); David Tracy, The Analogical
Imagination: Christian Theology and the
Culture of Pluralism (New York:
Crossroad, 1981).
1 Alain Besançon, The Forbidden
Image: An Intellectual History of
Iconoclasm, trans. Jane Marie Todd
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2000); Joseph Leo Korner, The Reformation
of the Image (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004).
1 Merritt Y. Hughes, “Earth Felt the
Wound,” English Literary History 36
(1969): 193-214.
Page | 110
Personifications of God
Jonathan Edwards wrote during a
time in which monarchs reigned
supreme. Writing from this perspective,
he argued that the universe is a cosmic
society organized under the leadership of
a King of kings, a society against which
humans have rebelled and, as a
consequence, humans are at risk of
annihilation except for the mercy of the
King. Judgment day will come,
according to Edwards, and those who
have failed to meet their moral
responsibility to the directive of the
universe face eternal isolation. Clark
Gilpin notes that by conjuring up a
personified God – a God with emotions,
intentions, and the capacity to act –
Edwards instilled great fear and
trembling in his listeners that
presumably motivated them to change
their behaviors in the desired direction.
It is hard to imagine that Edwards would
have had comparable success had he
resorted to simple instructions or
exhortations to engage in certain
behaviors and avoid others. The innate
tendency of people to understand divine
entities in terms of what people do
understand, namely their own thoughts,
feelings, and beliefs, provided the
leverage on which Edwards relied to
drive his message home.
Tanya Luhrmann also discusses a
personalized construction of God – a
God with whom one can consult and
who intervenes in one’s daily life.
People are intrinsically motivated to
form social connections, and very little
in life is more rewarding to people than
their social relationships. Luhrmann,
who adopts the perspective of a
participant observer, finds that a new
evangelical Protestant movement, the
Vineyard Church, appeals to this
motivation to depict God as one’s
personal guide and friend, well within
one’s sensory reach. By conjuring up an
anthropomorphic God with loving
emotions, intentions, and actions, the
Vineyard Church creates a desire for a
personal relationship with God. But
developing a relationship with an
invisible God defies rationality. People
must learn how to transform an abstract
concept of an invisible God into a
concrete sensory presence in their lives.
Just as the social brain can perceive
nonhuman objects as human, the social
brain is also capable of selectively
attending to sensory experiences and
interpreting these sensations as God’s
presence.
Page | 111
Chapter 12 12
How Does God Become Real
How does God become real to
people when God is understood to be
12 The lead author is Tanya Luhrmann, Ph.D., a
professor in the Stanford Anthropology
Department. Her interests include the social
shaping of psychological experience, and the
way that social practice may affect even the most
concrete ways in which people experience their
world, particularly in the domain of what some
would call the “irrational”. Her first project was
a detailed study of the way apparently reasonable
people come to believe apparently unreasonable
beliefs (“Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft”,
Harvard, 1989). Her second project explored the
apparently irrational self-criticism of a
postcolonial India elite, the result of colonial
identification with the colonizers (“The Good
Parsi”, Harvard 1996). Her third book identified
two cultures within the American profession of
psychiatry and examined the way these different
cultures encouraged two different forms of
empathy and two different understandings of
mental illness (“Of Two Minds”, Knopf, 2000).
She trained at the University of Cambridge (PhD
1986), and taught for many years at the
University of California San Diego. Prior to
moving to Stanford she was the Max Palevsky
Professor and a director of the Clinical
Ethnography project in the Department of
Comparative Human Development at the
University of Chicago.
Religion is often understood as a matter
of belief: a yes/no proposition. This essay
suggests that it may be more helpful, and more
accurate, to understand religious commitment as
a response to sensory experience that can be
learned, and that the capacity to learn depends
upon one’s knowledge and belief, one’s
proclivity for experiencing the world in
particular ways, and the impact of devotional
practice.
invisible and immaterial, as God is
within the Christian tradition? This is not
the question of whether God is real, but
rather how people learn to make the
judgment that God is present. Such a
God is not accessible to the senses.
When you talk to that God, you can
neither see his face nor hear his voice.
You cannot touch him. How can you be
confident that he is there?
Anthropology cannot answer the
question of whether God is real. But the
traditional method of the discipline,
participant observation, can use the
slow, careful method of fieldwork to
explore the way that people learn to
experience God as present in their lives.
And what the method can teach us is that
this often intensely private and personal
relationship between a creature and its
creator is built through a profoundly
social process.
In fact, one of anthropology’s
most useful contributions to
understanding the experience of God is
to draw attention to just how much work
faith takes, and to the fact that different
kinds of faith—and different
understandings of God—demand
different kinds of work. Many who do
not believe in God approach the question
of religious belief as the problem of why
people should believe in the existence of
an invisible, intentional agent in their
world. One of the more persuasive
recent answers emerges from the
observation that many of our cognitive
traits evolved to help us survive.
Evolutionary anthropologists and
psychologists argue that belief in
invisible beings is an accidental
byproduct of the way our minds have
evolved over the millennia. Our quick,
effortless, automatic intuitions lead us to
“anthropomorphize,” or to see faces in
the clouds, as one scholar puts it. From
Page | 112
this perspective, people believe in God
because it is so easy to believe in
invisible supernatural presence, and the
great religions are elaborations around
this basic core. 1
Belief in the Invisible
Yet it is also true that in many
ways it is hard for people to believe in
the invisible, intentional being of God, at
least in some ways and at some times. It
is one thing to believe in the abstract that
there is a good and loving God; it is
another thing to believe that this God
loves you in particular this very
afternoon when your car has broken
down in the rain. Many Christians
struggle at some point with whether God
exists or with whether they understand
God’s nature. A young man may come
to university as a devout Christian, take
a course on religion, and begin to
wonder whether Christ as well as
Krishna are cultural constructions. A
depressed woman may understand
herself as devout, but find that when she
sits down to pray she feels that no one is
listening to her prayers. And always
there are times when terrible things
happen to good and faithful people who
often continued to believe in God in the
abstract, but who find that they can not
longer pray at all. The struggle between
espoused religion (the religion one
asserts; the Nicene creed) and lived
religion (the way in which one
experiences God from moment to
moment) is central to the life of the
Christian, and perhaps to the lives of
most believers.
The problem for believers is that
to experience the Christian God as
present, one must override three basic
features of human psychology, features
that are also part of our evolutionary
inheritance. A person must override the
expectation that our minds are private,
an expectation so substantial that
researchers have shown that it develops
around the world at a more or less
similar age and can be found even in
non-human primates. A person must
override the expectation that persons are
visible. And finally, a person must
override the expectation that love is
conditional, as it is for all social beings
beyond a certain age, when right
behavior is expected as a condition of
human interaction. At least, some
versions of Christianity expect
unconditional love.
The deep puzzle of faith is not
why but how. How is it possible that
people are able to violate such
fundamental expectations of presence?
The answer, in part, is that they do not.
For most Christians, it will be a lifelong
process to believe in all times and in all
ways that their God is real for them in
the way that their church tells them that
God is real. As the psalmist laments:
“how long wilt thou forget me, Oh Lord?
For ever? How long wilt thou hide thy
face from me?” (Psalm 13: 1). What they
do to make God plausible for them
depends upon their understanding of
God and on what the social world of a
faith teaches about how to experience
their minds and bodies to find evidence
for God’s presence.
Learning to Sense the Presence of God
In 2004 I set out to study
ethnographically the way God becomes
real for people in a church that would
exacerbate the cognitive burden of
belief. I chose an example of the new
Protestant church that grew up after the
1960s. 2 Those churches set out as an
invitation to experience God as
concretely and as vividly as God had
been experienced by the earliest
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Christian disciples. This God is both
intensely human and intensely
supernatural. In these churches, God is
understood as so person-like that he
becomes someone to joke and argue
with, someone one chats to when
walking down the street, about the little
trivial things that matter only to the
congregant. Coming to know God in
such a church is described as to hear
God “speak.” Dallas Willard, a beloved
evangelical’s intellectual, puts it baldly:
that God’s face-to-face conversations
with Moses are the “normal human life
God intended for us.” I conducted
ethnographic fieldwork at a church that
exemplifies this approach to God, a
Vineyard Christian Fellowship in
Chicago and then on the San Francisco
peninsula (there were eight such
churches in Chicago and four on the
peninsula). For three years I went to
Sunday morning gatherings. I joined
three small groups, or housegroups, each
for a year; I went to conferences and
retreats; and I interviewed many
congregants casually and also more
formally about the way they experienced
God.
Overall, what I observed was that
the process of coming to know God in
such a church could best be described as
a mapping process in which the
congregants learn to use the familiar
experience of their own minds and
bodies to give content to the abstract
experience of God. This is the way that
humans learn most commonplace
abstract words, in effect cognitively
mapping from what we know to what we
can only imagine. God speaks: so
congregants learn to infer from their own
experience of inner speech the way in
which God talks to them. God relates: so
congregants learn to imagine a
relationship with God based on their
own experience of relationship. And
God loves: and congregants use their
own experience of being loved by a
human as an example of the way they
are loved by God. But unlike learning
about time, congregants also map back.
They build up a model of God by
interpreting out of their own familiar
experience into a representation shaped
by the social world of the church and the
narrative of the sacred text, and then
they seek to re-map their own interior
emotional experience by matching it to
this representation. This demands
constant effort, continual work on the
way one pays attention and interprets
one’s experience. As an ethnographer, I
could see three kinds of work.
First, God must be recognized as
present. What congregants learn to do is
to cherry-pick mental events out of the
everyday flow of their awareness, and to
identify that moment as other than
themselves, as being of God. God was
said to speak in several different ways.
He spoke through the Bible, so that a
verse “jumped out” at a congregant, or in
some way drew their attention. For
example:
“I was reading in [some book] and I
don’t even know why I was reading it.
There’s a part where God talks about
raising up elders in the church to pray
for the church. And I remember, it just
stuck in my head and I knew that the
verse was really important and that it
was applicable to me. I didn’t know
why. It was one of those, let me put it in
my pocket and figure it out later.” How
did she know that it was important?
“Because I just felt it. I just felt like it
really spoke to me. I don’t really know
why. And a couple of days later a friend
asked me to be on the prayer team and it
was like, wow, that’s what it was.”
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God spoke also through circumstances.
What a skeptic might interpret as
coincidence is understood as God’s
intentional decision to direct the
congregant’s attention. For example:
“Everything in my life right now is
focused on trying to get to England, and
I needed to get some ID pictures. So I
was really anxious—the money hasn’t
really come together—and one afternoon
I just felt like God said, you need to get
up and go get those. Go get those ID
pictures that you need. I was like, that’s
totally inefficient. I don’t have a car, so
it’s like walking half an hour to
Walgreens and another half an hour
back. Like, I could do this later and
combine it with several things I need to
get done. But I felt it was a step of faith
to do this thing. So I did it—grumbling.
Then on the way there and back I ran
into three people I knew, and I felt that
there was a kind of pattern, and that I
was in the right place at the right time.”
These ways of recognizing God are
widely shared in many forms of
Christianity. More specific to
experiential evangelical Christianity is
the expectation that God will speak
directly into the mind, by placing a
mental image or thought or sensation
there. For example:
“I’m praying for someone and, you
know, they say their situation, what they
want me to pray for. I start praying and
start trying to, you know, really
experience God, and, you know, I see
these vivid images, and I’m explaining
these vivid images and what I think they
mean and, you know, sort of checking in
with the person, you know, does this
resonate with you? They’re like “oh, my
gosh, yes! How did you know that?”
Most congregants find this process of
pulling out specific thoughts and
ascribing them to God baffling at first:
again, the process violates the basic
human experience that the mind is
private. A congregant commented: “now
I know that the ‘something’ is God,
God’s voice. But I didn’t at all have
words to describe it at that time I didn’t
understand. It was very confusing.”
The social world of the church
taught specific ways to differentiate
between mental events that are God and
that are not. This technique has been
taught in the church since the earliest
time as “discernment,” although the
content of the word and its rules has
varied with the era. In the modern
experiential evangelical church, the rules
of discernment are more often taught by
example and gossip than explicitly.
Nevertheless, there appeared to be four
principles. A thought might be said to
come from God if: the thought was
unexpected; the thought was consonant
with God’s nature; the congregant had
additional confirmation (one “tested” the
thought); and one felt peace during the
experience. The process was understood
to be ambiguous, and left room not only
for the congregant to be wrong, but for
different congregants to disagree about
whether God had, in fact, spoken in a
particular manner. One afternoon, a
woman spoke in front of the church
explaining that God had spoken to her
and told her that she should carry out
some mission work in a lovely part of
Mexico. The man sitting next to me said
drily, “God sure wants a lot of
evangelizing in Puerto Vallarta.”
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Second, God must be
experienced in relationship. Such
churches invite congregants to
experience God in their imaginations as
a person. Again, this violates a basic
psychological expectation: persons have
faces to observe and hands to shake.
Human relational interactions are based
on sensorial response. Churches like the
Vineyard explicitly suggest that one
should imagine a sensorial response
from God and encouraged congregants
to participate in a kind of let’s pretend
play in which God was present. The
pastor suggested one Sunday morning
that congregants should put out a second
cup of coffee for God, and sit down with
him to chat. People went on “date night”
with God. They would get a sandwich,
and sit down on park bench to talk with
God as they imagined his arm around
their shoulders. They would ask God
truly trivial questions like what shirt they
should wear in the morning and what
movie he thought they would like. These
behaviors were clearly play-like. One
congregant remarked: “I definitely do
that. When I can’t decide what to wear.
Like, God, what should I wear?” Then
she laughed. “And you know, then I kind
of forget about the fact that I asked God.
I think God cares about really, really
little things in my life. I mean I know
God cares, but I don’t expect him to tell
me what to wear. I’m like, Oh, I think
I’ll wear that and forget I even asked
God!” This invitation to play was C.S.
Lewis’ explicit contribution to twentieth
century Christianity: “let us pretend to
turn the pretense into a reality.” In
churches which encourage such play,
heresy fades in importance. The pastors
and the committed congregants worry
about “deadness,” not flawed imagining.
Third, congregants must learn to
respond emotionally to God as if God is
real. If God is real, a Christian (at least,
the modern evangelical Christian) should
experience the emotions that one would
feel if one were loved unconditionally.
Most do not. It is, in fact, difficult for
humans to experience themselves as
unconditionally loved because no matter
how warm and loving a parent may be,
at some point the child is expected to
control his or her behavior and parental
love will becomes contingent. The task
of feeling unconditionally loved imposes
upon the congregant not only the burden
of identifying and relating to an invisible
being, but experiencing emotions in
response to that being’s love which the
congregant rarely, if ever, truly
experiences. Congregants talk about the
experience of unconditional love as rare:
they speak of “those moments” when
one really feels God’s love.
I was driving home from grocery
shopping in the car and I stopped at a
light and suddenly for no reason that I
could come up with, I was weeping and I
felt a massive and awesome sense of the
presence of God in the car with me. It
just came and I had absolutely no control
over it. I pulled over to the side of the
road—I remember thinking that I was so
in love with Jesus at that moment that no
one else on the planet could come close.
After about twenty minutes of real
intensity the feeling subsided somewhat,
but the presence of Jesus stayed with me.
I drove home not really ever able to fully
express what happened without sounding
like I’d taken something illegal.
The more immediate aim seemed to be
to experience what Galatians 5:22-23
calls the “fruits of the spirit”: love, joy,
peace, patience and so forth. The social
life of the church was rich in emotional
practices which sought to reshape the
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congregants’ interior emotional world by
modeling the self on God, or on the self
as seen from God’s loving perspective.
One of the most important was prayer
ministry, where the person for whom the
prayer is given is often crying and in
visible pain; those around the person are
offering prayers which describe the ways
in which the sobbing person is loved by
God. Another was treating prayer like a
psychotherapy session. One congregant
explained: “It’s just like talking to a
therapist, especially in the beginning
when you’re revealing things that are
deep in your heart and deep in your soul,
the things that have been pushed down
and denied.” In these churches which
emphasize God’s love and intimacy, hell
and fear largely disappear.
The central demand of these
learning practices is to use one’s own
mental experience as evidence and
content for the responsive presence of
this God, who is believed to be other
than oneself, and to use pretend play to
integrate those mental events into a
representation that is persuasively
external to the self. The emotional
practices provide both direct evidence of
God’s love and, more generally,
evidence that participation in church is
satisfying and worthwhile. In effect the
process asks the congregants to carve
God out of their own experience and to
experience those phenomena as other;
and it uses the emotional practices taught
by the church and the social world of the
congregation to help them hold that God
separate and apart and lovingly
responsive.
This is hard work to do, and not
everyone was able to do it, or to do it
easily. Here two congregants describe
their difficulty in experiencing God
directly despite their efforts.
Jake: “I remember desperately wanting
to draw closer to God, and [to have] one
of these inspired Holy Spirit moments …
I wanted those [experiences] and I
sought them out, but I never found
myself encountering them”
Irene: “I don’t understand the gift of
prophecy completely. I’ll probably
never will and I don’t have it and I don’t
want it because it would scare me.”
Here is another congregant who has been
able to do so:
Nora: “It was pretty early on in my
relationship with him. I was just all full
of myself one morning. I just had
wonderful devotions and worships and
just felt so close. I went out, and it was
the most god-awful day. It was icy rain
and gray and cold and it was sleeting.
I’m just full of the joy of the Lord, and I
say, “God, I praise you that it isn’t
snowing, and that nothing’s
accumulating, and that the streets aren’t
icy”—and then I went around the corner,
and I hit a patch of ice, and just about
went down. It was so funny to me. I just
burst out laughing out loud. It was just
so funny that he would put me in my
place in such a slapstick personal kind of
way. But then he just graced me the rest
of the morning. The bus showed up right
away, which it never does. I was
reading, and I missed my stop to get off,
and I heard God say, “Get off the bus.” I
looked up and hollered, and the bus
actually stopped, half a block on, to let
me get off. I just felt that intimacy all
morning. Like when you go from
holding a new boyfriend’s hand to
kissing him goodnight ….”
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Some people experience God speaking
directly to them in an easy relationship.
Others do not.
As a result of my involvement
with the Templeton group, I decided to
carry out some quantitative and
experimental work to see whether we
could figure out the differences between
those who found it easy to do this work,
and those for whom it was difficult. That
work suggests that there is a
psychological capacity that makes the
process of knowing this kind of God
easier, though its absence does not
prevent religious experience, and its
presence does not predict it. It is the
capacity for absorption, which is at the
heart of imagination. Absorption is the
capacity to focus one’s attention on a
non-instrumental (and often internal)
object while disattending to everyday
exterior surrounds. Absorption is related
to hypnosis and dissociation, but not
identical to either. All of us go into light
absorption states when we settle into a
book and let the story carry us away.
There are no known physiological
markers of an absorption state, but as the
absorption grows deeper, the person
becomes more difficult to distract, and
his sense of time and agency begins to
shift. He lives within his imagination
more, whether that be simple
mindfulness or elaborate fantasy, and he
feels that the experience happens to him,
that he is a bystander to his own
awareness, more himself than ever
before, or perhaps absent, but in any
case different. And as the absorption
grows deeper, people often experience
more imagery and more sensory
phenomena, sometimes with
hallucinatory vividness. Scholars do not
discuss training in absorption, although
researchers of hypnosis and dissociation
are clear that some kind of practice
effects can be seen. 3
Conclusion
Prayer is basically training in
absorption, at least the kind of prayer in
which the person praying focuses
inwardly and disattends to the everyday
world in order to engage with God. It
would be hard to over-estimate the
importance placed on prayer and prayer
experience in a church like this and
indeed, in Christian America today.
Many of the best-selling Christian books
are books on prayer technique, and they
sell in the millions. Such books often
begin by presenting the concrete sensory
experience of God described in the
Hebrew Bible as the everyday
relationship for which the ordinary
believer should strive. In these manuals,
the act of praying is understood as a skill
that has to be deliberately learned. I
discovered that these evangelical
congregants assumed that prayer was a
skill which had to be taught, that it was
hard, that not everyone was good at it,
and that those who were naturally good
and well trained would experience
changes associated with a more richly
developed inner world. Their mental
images would seem sharper; they would
be more likely to report unusual sensory
experiences. They would be more able,
in short, to experience God. The more
quantitative work—done in
collaboration with Howard Nusbaum
and Ron Thisted--suggests that those
who have a proclivity for absorption and
who trained that proclivity through
prayer are indeed more able to
accomplish the demanding learning that
this concept of God sets out. 4 They are
more able to identify God’s presence in
their mind. They are more likely to
experience God as an invisible
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companion. They may be more capable
of responding to God emotionally.
All theologies have trade-offs.
This one offers an intensely personal and
person-like God. He can comfort, like a
friend, and respond directly, like a
friend. He can be like a real social
relationship for those who make the
effort to experience him in this way. But
because that social relationship lacks so
many features of actual human
sociality—no visible body, no
responsive face, no spoken voice—such
a theology demands a great deal of effort
from those who follow it. They must
constantly work with their attention,
reinterpreting the ordinary and natural
into the presence of the extra-ordinary
and super-natural. Faiths which manage
God differently—less personal, more
present in the everyday natural world—
make fewer demands on their followers’
attentional habits. But it may be,
perhaps, that such a God may be easier
to take for granted. Paradoxically, it may
be that this high-maintenance, effortful
God appeals to so many modern people
(as many as a quarter of all Americans,
according to a recent Pew study)
precisely because the work demanded
makes the God feel more real in a world
in which disbelief is such a real social
option.
References
1
Scholars who contribute to this
perspective include Scott Atran, Justin
Barrett, Pascal Boyer, Stewart Guthrie,
and Harvey Whitehouse.
2
These churches have been described by
Miller, D. 1997. Reinventing American
Protestantism. Berkeley: University of
California; see also Wuthnow, R. 1998.
After heaven: spirituality in America
since the 1950s. Berkeley: University of
California Press. A survey by the Pew
Foundation 2006 (Pew, 2006, Spirit and
Power: Ten nation survey. Pew Forum
on Religion and Public Life) found that
23% of all Americans belong to a
loosely similar style of “renewalist
Christianity.”
3
Good summaries of work on hypnosis
and dissociation, with some reference to
absorption, can be found in Spiegel, H.
and D. Spiegel. 2004[1978], Trance and
treatment. New York: Basic Books;
Seligman, R. and L. Kirmayer. 2008,
“Dissociative experience and cultural
neuroscience.” Culture, Medicine and
Psychiatry 32(1): 31-64; and Butler, L.
2006, “Normative dissociation.”
Psychiatric Clinics of North America.
29: 45-62.
4 The empirical work is presented in
Luhrmann, T., H. Nusbaum and R.
Thisted. 2010. “The absorption
hypothesis.” American Anthropologist.
March; cf. Tellegen, A. and G. Atkinson.
1974, “Openness to absorption and self
altering experiences (“absorption”), a
trait related to hypnotic susceptibility.”
Journal of Abnormal Psychology 83:
268-277
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Belief and Connection
We tend to think of beliefs as
wisps of the mind that have no power in
the material world. However, as Gary
Berntson and Louise Hawkley have
discussed, beliefs can affect our health
even to the extent of determining life
and death. As Tanya Luhrmann
discusses, in some forms of Christianity,
there is a real belief in the presence of
God. This is not simply a belief of God
in the world, but a belief of a God who is
by one’s side. The idea of God as a
friend and companion clearly motivates
the desire to make such a presence
manifest in tangible ways. For some, it is
the sense of God with which they
commune, for others it is what they
believe to be a sensory experience of
God that they seek. Luhrmann outlines
how this belief, coupled with a
supportive social structure, can lead to
powerful personal experiences, such as
hearing the voice of God, reflecting the
operation of our social brains.
Our sense of social connection is
not dependent on a single set of religious
beliefs, however. In human social
connections, we can form individual
relationships with a spouse or friends
but, as John Cacioppo outlined, there are
other kinds of connections that our social
brain seeks, as well. We seek
connections with emergent structures
such as groups, clubs, teams,
congregations, and beyond. Kathryn
Tanner argues that the belief that God
created the world and bears causal
responsibility for it serves to connect
believers to life in a broader way than is
provided through individual
relationships. This broader connection to
life does not depend on the manifestation
of a presence to whom we can talk
because the evidence of social
connection is apparent in the very fabric
of daily existence. Thus, whereas
Luhrmann discusses God as a palpable
friend that one can learn to attend to and
experience as an active presence in one’s
life, Tanner discusses God as the
initiator of life and the very fabric of
existence, a presence so ubiquitous that
there is no specific point on which one
can focus to attend to or experience God.
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Chapter 13 13
Theological Perspectives on God as an
Invisible Force
An individual’s beliefs about
God are one factor to be included in a
multi-dimensional investigation of the
social consequences and possible health
benefits of religion, an aid in particular
13 The lead author is Kathryn Tanner, Ph.D., the
Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor of Theology at
the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her
research relates the history of Christian thought
to areas of contemporary theological concern
using critical, social, and feminist theory, with a
special focus on the possible practical
implications of Christian beliefs and symbols.
She has lectured widely throughout the United
States and Europe, and is the author of six books:
God and Creation in Christian Theology:
Tyranny or Empowerment? (1988, Blackwell);
The Politics of God (1992, Fortress); Theories of
Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (1997,
Fortress); Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity (2001,
Continuum and Fortress Press); Economy of
Grace (2005, Fortress); and Christ the Key
(2010, Cambridge).
Christian beliefs are not just theoretical
matters, involving putative truth claims about the
nature of ultimate reality, but practical ones:
Christian beliefs are often promulgated with the
hope of impacting the way human beings live, by
establishing, for example, the meaningfulness of
and motivations for certain forms of social
behavior. Prior research has concerned the
possible economic, social and political
consequences of Christian beliefs about God's
relation to the world. This essay extends such
questioning to the topic of perceived social
isolation. How might belief in God as an
invisible force in everyday life affect an
individual's sense of social connection?
to scientific hypothesis generation. x
Scientists can better test for the social
and health consequences of religious
commitment when they know more
about the character and range of beliefs
about God that such commitment brings.
This chapter hopes to show, in
particular, that exactly what Christians
believe about the nature of God’s
influence on their lives is likely to have
an important bearing on one of the
questions of this volume: How can
religion encourage a sense of connection
to others, especially in situations of
perceived social isolation, and thereby
assuage the adverse health consequences
of loneliness?
Depending on what they think
God is like, Christians vary in the way
they expect God to be a present
influence on their daily lives. God’s
nature is supernatural or transcendent,
which means God is not very much like
any of the ordinary persons or things
with which they come into regular
contact. Christians use the same terms
for God that they use for talking about
ordinary persons and things but they
therefore know that neither set of terms
is really adequate to capture who or what
God is. On the one hand, God is
something like a human being in that
God loves them and wants to do them
good, and in that God is unhappy with
their failings and trying, through the use
of carrots and sticks, to get them to
change. But, on the other hand, God is
really not very much like an ordinary
human being in that God is present at all
times and everywhere, working
inexorably to bring about what God
intends throughout the entirety of
peoples’ lives by way of influences of
both personal and impersonal sorts--for
example, through personal words of
advice and warning found in the Bible as
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well as apparent accidents of fortune like
car crashes and the weather. Though
retaining personal characteristics such as
love or anger, God operates less like an
individual human person with limited
reach and partial interests, and more like
light, air or gravity do—quite
pervasively and constantly.
Usually one side or the other
comes to the fore in the way Christians
feel connected to God: for some
Christians the personal side of God is
central; for others, the more impersonal.
Thus, some Christians expect God to be
very much like a human friend, offering
companionship and good advice. xi As
Tanya Luhrmann explores in her essay,
their religious lives often revolve around
the internal sensory or imaginative
experiences that make a God of that sort
seem real to them--the sense that God is
in the room with them, that God speaks
to them, and so on. They work to
cultivate a prayer life that heightens the
vividness of those experiences and
thereby allays doubts about the actual
existence of this invisible, otherwise
seemingly unreal, divine friend. In short,
good practitioners of prayer gain a
stronger and more reliable sense that
God is present as a friend directing the
course of their lives.
Other Christians have
expectations of a more overarching and
impersonal sort about the way God is a
force in their lives; these expectations, I
suggest below, are the consequence of
their holding certain beliefs about God
as the creator, sustainer, and savior of
the world. In this case a strong sense of
God’s presence in one’s life does not
depend on having experiences of a
literally personal sort or on developing
the spiritual practices that help cultivate
such experiences. The sense that God is
present as an influence on one’s life is
rather something one feels all the time
simply in virtue of the beliefs one holds
about God and the world. Given a
particular construal of those beliefs—a
relatively impersonal one, I argue—
simply having those beliefs in mind,
with some awareness of their quite
obvious presuppositions and
implications, makes clear one is never
alone, never a self-sufficient operator. In
contrast to the understanding of God as
friend, here God’s invisibility does not
threaten to interrupt a sense of God’s
presence and influence. God’s
invisibility to the contrary enables the
sense of God’s presence and influence to
be the routine backdrop of all one’s
experience, to constitute a general
outlook on the world, no matter what the
circumstances.
Belief in Creation as a Backdrop to
the Whole of Life
For example, a common
Christian construal of the belief that God
is the creator of the world makes it
possible for the sense that God is with
one—one’s supporter and sustainer—to
be a constant feature of one’s life as a
whole. Contrary to first impressions,
God’s creation of the world need not
refer to the origin of the universe, or to
the beginning of its more specific
features or components. Were either to
be its meaning, belief in God as the
creator of the world could not be a very
central component of a generally
applicable Christian outlook, of much
relevance, that is, for more than the
occasional speculation about origins:
e.g., why am I here at all? The belief
concerns instead a causal dependence
upon God of a more continuous sort,
spanning, in short, the whole time of the
universe’s existence and therefore the
whole time of one’s individual life. To
be created by God is to exist in a relation
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of dependence upon God for what one is,
However, long one exists. xii A human
being therefore depends upon God for
more than the fact of his or her birth: he
or she remains dependent upon God in
the same way ever after. God’s creation
of the world in general is simply not
temporally indexed; it is no more closely
associated with the beginning of things
than with what comes later. A
preoccupation with temporal origins
therefore commonly drops out of
Christian accounts of creation: the world
is just as dependent upon God for its
existence whether it has a beginning or
always exists. xiii Belief in God’s creation
of the world for these reasons blurs into
belief in God’s supportive maintenance
of it at every point in time.
Also enabling belief in God as
creator to form a general backdrop to all
one’s experience—to be relevant on
every occasion as a universally
applicable worldview--is the fact that
God is thought to be responsible as
creator for the whole of what happens in
the world at any one time. To believe
that God is the creator of the world is at
the very least to believe that God holds
into existence the entirety of the world in
any and all respects in which it is good.
In the case of one’s own life, therefore,
every aspect of value at every moment—
one’s existence, fine qualities and
capacities, enjoyments and
achievements, beneficial connections
with natural and social environments,
and so on—is to be attributed to God’s
agency as creator. While there is a good
deal of disagreement within Christianity
on this matter, Christians, moreover, not
uncommonly affirm that God is equally
behind the bad things that happen, at
least insofar as those bad things can be
turned to good account--for example,
harm suffered turned into a salutary
pedagogical correction, just punishment
for sin, the necessary testing of one’s
faith, or simply a beneficial form of
sympathy with God’s own suffering on
the cross. For both the general reasons
just mentioned—because of its holism
and temporal inclusiveness--belief in
God as the creator of the world
encourages love, gratitude, and trust
toward God, and toward the world that
God brings about, as constant Christian
dispositions, basic Christian attitudes of
wide-ranging applicability, whatever
might be going on in one’s life.
Social Connectedness and Invisibility
The same all-inclusive causal
dependence upon God at all times is
what ensures individuals are never left
on their own, never abandoned to their
own devices. Christian theologians
(especially in the Protestant tradition)
usually develop the psychological
implications of this in terms of avoiding
either anxious or arrogant selfconcern.
xiv According to this theology,
one does not believe he or she ever
operates independently of God.
Therefore, one should never attribute
successes and achievements in a prideful
way to oneself, but rather one should
always give the glory to God as their
ultimate source. For the same reason,
one should never despair of failings, as if
one’s own inadequacies were the last
word; one believes a supremely
powerful and loving influence, God,
remains an operative force in one’s life,
However, desperate the situation
otherwise appears to be from the
standpoint of one’s own powers and
capacities to improve one’s lot in life.
By discouraging isolated selfregard
or self-understanding generally,
the same nexus of Christian ideas about
God as creator has clear consequences
Page | 123
for loneliness or perceived social
isolation. Because they believe
themselves to be creatures of God,
Christians feel related to God whatever
happens. Whatever their social
circumstances--no matter, at the
extreme, how isolated or strong their
feelings of abandonment by human
others--individuals are to remember that
they remain in a relationship with God,
who is concerned about them. Even
when they feel themselves utterly
forsaken by others, Christians have
reason to believe God cannot be
forsaking them. They can believe they
are never alone even when they appear
to be absolutely so. In such
circumstances, Christians can always
avail themselves of a completely
counterfactual sense of social connection
with the best-connected “superfriend” of
all—the God who remains, they believe,
in a relationship of ultimately beneficial
causal efficacy with not just themselves
but everyone and everything.
It is the very unapparent,
counterfactual character of God’s
influence on human lives—the
invisibility of God’s influence, in short--
that permits Christians to perceive their
relationship with God as an unbreakable
constant. Because God’s influence is
unapparent or invisible Christians can
continue to believe God is operative for
creation’s benefit in the absence of any
of the obvious confirming evidence
required in ordinary cases of beneficent
human influence. Christians who believe
that God is a universal influence for
good as the world’s creator do not
expect God to be present in the way one
expects a human person to be; and
therefore God’s apparent absence, in
human terms, need not break down their
sense of being in relation to God.
Having God as one’s creator (in
the best case scenario) is like having a
perfectly loving human benefactor; but it
is the unusual invisibility of this
benefactor that allows Christians to think
God present even when not apparently
so. Being in a relationship with God for
Christians who believe God is a good
creator is something like being in a
relationship with a human person who
never lets one out of her sight and who
intends one’s good comprehensively. It
is, for example, very like being in a
relationship with a loving parent who is
fully responsible, not just for the fact of
one’s existence, but in a comprehensive
way for one’s nurturance throughout an
extended minority. Unlike a relationship
with an ordinary human person of that
sort, however, God is believed to be
invisible and this is what allows
individuals to assume God’s constant
presence, all appearances to the contrary.
The invisibility that underlies the
Christian affirmation of God’s constancy
here is a function of the very diffuseness
of God’s influence, a diffuseness of
influence no human person, invisible or
otherwise, could possibly match. Belief
in God as the creator of the world does
not encourage one to single out God as
the cause of any specific happening in a
way that suggests God is one cause
among many, the cause of this particular
happening rather than some other with a
different cause. Belief in God as the
creator of the world does not allow one
to identify God’s influence in overly
close fashion with any particular causal
influence of a beneficent sort. Instead, as
I have suggested, whatever is of benefit
to the individual, over the long or short
term, taken as a whole, is to be attributed
to God’s influence.
The Christian cannot, then, locate
or pick out God as one could a loving
Page | 124
parent from within the field of variously
operative forces or influences on one’s
life, and for that reason the Christian
need neither fear God’s loss nor rue
God’s absence as one would such a
parent’s. Unlike relations with human
others, which are situation-sensitive and
thereby susceptible to change of
character, rupture, and decline, God,
Christians believe, is with one, whatever
happens, in exactly the same capacity--
as the creator and sustainer of whatever
it is that remains good about one’s life,
be that only at a minimum the bare fact
that one continues to live. The Christian
who believes God is his or her creator is
therefore confident that God continues to
work for his or her ultimate good, that
God is engaged in the effort to increase
it, whatever the impediments in human
life suggesting the contrary, absent, that
is, almost any confirming evidence.
The Problem of Inattention
Although invisibility and
apparent absence do not pose the same
problem here as they do when God is
one’s friend, this rather more impersonal
understanding of God’s influence as
creator and sustainer has its own
problem maintaining a strong sense of
connection to God. The diffuseness of
influence that lies behind God’s constant
invisible presence can prompt simple
Christian inattention to God. The very
monotony of the always pertinent
Christian affirmation that everything is
to be attributed to God can make that
affirmation recede from focal awareness,
make it fail to come focally to mind.
Belief in God’s uniform presence would
thereby become functionally
indistinguishable from the sense of
God’s absence. The invisibility of God
that follows from a belief in the
comprehensiveness of God’s influence
simply means in that case that God drops
out of sight and mind, drops out of
Christian consideration for most intents
and purposes, most of the time. Such a
God has little to offer as a “para-social”
entity, as a factor fomenting or
supplementing a sense of social
connection.
In the back of their minds
Christians may believe that God is the
source of everything, but they may not
feel compelled to consider that fact
actively in the course of their everyday
lives. God hides behind, so to speak, all
the creaturely influences that God is
working through, which become matters
of primary Christian preoccupation. At
the center of attention are all the
ordinary influences and connections with
one’s natural and human environments;
preoccupation with them pushes out of
focal awareness the fact of God as the
ultimate source of them all. Apart from
specifically religious obligations—say,
the demand to give God thanks and
praise at times of worship—Christians
who believe God is their creator would
have no particular reason to dwell on
that fact.
Christian theologians commonly
tie this sort of practical worry--about
what from a Christian point of view
amounts to sinful neglect of one’s
connection to God--to the understanding
of double agency in the account of
creation I sketched above. xv According
to that account, it is true, God’s
influence on human life does not have to
go by way of the human and natural
causal powers and influences on human
life that God creates; God can influence
human life without producing sufficient
created causes for what God wants to
happen in human life. (The Christian
claim that Jesus was resurrected from the
dead—an event without natural causes--
is a case in point, one that Christians are
Page | 125
usually very reluctant to give up.) But
part and parcel of the account of creation
is the suggestion that God ordinarily
influences human life by bringing about
the very natural and human influences
that shape it. In general, because God
influences the world as its creator, God’s
working does not begin where created
causes break off; God works, instead, in
and through the created causes that God
brings about. Christians are therefore
able to give a double account of most
happenings in the world: one that
discusses what has happened in terms of
the coordinated created powers and
activities sufficient to explain it within
the created order; and one that talks
about God’s creative activity in bringing
about those same coordinated created
powers, activities, and their
consequences in their totality. It is the
sufficiency of the explanation in terms of
created causes—the self-containment of
that explanation within its own order—
that allows human beings to attend to the
created order without taking into account
the relationship of dependence upon God
that is its presupposition.
The temptation to lapse into
habitual obliviousness of one’s
relationship with God is easily
countered, however, by other beliefs
about God that Christians hold.
Christians do not just believe that God is
the creator and sustainer of the universe,
but believe a lot of other things about
God. For example, the common
Christian belief that God acts as more
than a creator in individual lives helps to
counter obliviousness to God. God does
not merely act as creator by giving
individuals the created gifts that make
them what they are—for example, their
own capacities and operations, the
ability to influence and be influenced by
their human and natural environments,
and so on. God also acts to give them
God’s very presence—by way, for
example, of their relationship with Christ
who Christians believe is God in human
flesh. The very presence of God in
human life means one’s relationship
with God cannot be ignored. The created
causes and influences, through which
God also influences human life,
consequently no longer have the same
capacity to distract human attention from
God.
Christians often believe,
moreover, that God’s direction of human
life by way of God’s own presence to or
within it is no optional matter: God’s
presence forms an essential component
of human life. In addition to created
capacities and influences brought about
by God, God’s presence is necessary for
ordinary human capacities to operate as
they should. xvi To be morally good, for
example, requires not just virtuous
capacities of one’s own, given to one by
God, but the presence of the Holy Spirit
within one. Knowing well requires not
just the formation of good ideas through
the usual human processes of
investigating one’s environment—the
entirety of which has its source in a good
creator God--but also a mind informed
by the very Word of God. And so on.
Such beliefs imply that attention
to God’s presence, some sort of Goddirectedness,
should be a constant
feature of an individual’s everyday,
ordinary life, in order for that life to be
lived well. The individual Christian is
accordingly given a reason to bring to
mind his or her relationship with God,
motivated to attend to that relationship
as much as possible, indeed, in the effort
to lead a better life. An active Godreference
becomes part of a prospective,
goal-oriented process of self-reformation
Page | 126
in accord with what is believed to be
God’s intentions for one.
Beliefs like this about God’s
presence as a constituent feature of
human operations are at times
incorporated by Christians within an
account of creation: God’s presence to
or within them is then believed to be an
element of what God as the creator of
the world gives to every human being;
and is in that sense part of the natural or
ordinary constitution of human life that
God intends in creating the world. xvii But
more often than not the gift of God’s
presence as an effective influence on
human life is specifically associated by
Christians with salvation. Human beings,
Christians typically believe, have either
lost altogether, or at a minimum,
habitually fail to attend properly to a
presence of God always theirs, in ways
that corrupt human well-being. The
Christian claim is that God saves human
beings by giving them the presence of
God as an effective force for human
transformation in virtue of something
that Jesus suffers or accomplishes.
God acts as an invisible force in
human lives here because God
influences humans through God’s very
presence. Christians, if they follow the
common teaching of theologians in this
regard, believe God is invisible or
unapparent because God is not capable
of being delimited or circumscribed by
the usual boundary drawing and sorting
mechanisms used to cordon off and pin
down other things. xviii God is not, in
short, a kind of thing, set off by clear
boundaries that distinguish God from
what God is not. But there is also here
the kind of invisibility discussed earlier:
the invisibility of apparent absence in
human terms.
Christian claims about salvation
often have an eschatological edge. They
frequently point, that is, to an end time,
indefinitely deferred from the
perspective of anything achievable in
this life. What God gives to remedy the
sin of human life through Christ is,
accordingly, not commonly thought to
be fully effective in any visible way in
this life. Christians typically think that
their connection to Jesus brings with it a
new availability of the presence of God
as a force for change in their lives, but
what they expect to achieve by way of
that constantly available relationship
remains invisible in the form of an
always deferred hope. Once again it is
invisibility—here the invisibility of the
revolutionary changes in one’s life for
which one continues to hope--that
permits Christians to believe the
presence of God, made available to them
in a new way in Christ for the very
purpose of bringing about those changes,
is nevertheless always with them.
Conclusion
The main intention of this
chapter was to make the case that basic
Christian beliefs are likely to have a
bearing on perceived social isolation.
After suggesting that Christianity is not
all of a piece on that score, I developed a
particular construal of basic Christian
beliefs that would seem to have great
potential to alleviate perceived social
isolation through attention to connection
with God. While that argument was
merely a logical or prima facie one, it
forms a testable—though as yet
untested—hypothesis: Does the
particular construal of the beliefs
commended here for their
encouragement of a focal sense of
constant connection with God really
have those consequences? Do people
actually feel less lonely, in other words,
Page | 127
when they hold such beliefs? Can they
be made to feel less lonely by calling
them to mind? More specifically, how
does the influence of this construal on
feelings of social isolation compare with
that of other construals—for example, a
construal that directly associates God’s
creative influence with the irredeemable
bad? How might the stronger sense of
God’s presence in the hardships one
suffers balance out in the latter case
against the unhappy quality of the
connection? Might one feel oneself to be
better off alone, in other words, if God is
as much one’s tormentor as one’s
benefactor? Finally, comparable
problems to the ones for belief surface in
the more experience-driven God-asfriend
outlook in Christianity, and make
experimental testing pertinent. xix If the
problem in both cases is that a strong
sense of connection with God is hard to
sustain—because God is invisible in the
one case or crowded out by more
obviously pressing matters in the
other—how is the imaginative force of
the idea of relationship with God better
shored up? By imagining that one is on a
date with God, or by imagining that God
is always all around one like the air one
breathes or the sun that shines? And
what works for the greater number of
people? What if the former imaginative
capacities are hard to cultivate, and
require in any case exceptional abilities
of concentration or inward focus that
many people lack? Might beliefs be
easier for most people to hold in mind
without sustained or disciplined
practice? A simple visit to church or
occasional perusal of a prayer book
would do?
References
1 
For
the
general
importance
of
belief
for
such

investigation,
see
the
essays
by
W.
Clark
Gilpin

and
Tanya
Luhrmann
in
this
volume.

1 
See
Luhrmann
in
this
volume.

1 
Thomas
Aquinas
is
one
prominent
theologian

in
the
Christian
tradition
who
highlights
this

idea:
“creation
.
.
.
is
the
very
dependency
of
the

created
act
of
being
upon
the
principle
[God]

from
which
it
is
produced.”
Summa
Contra

Gentiles,
Book
Two:
Creation,
trans.
James
F.

Anderson
(Notre
Dame
and
London:
University

of
Notre
Dame
Press,
1975),
chapter
18,
section

2,
p.
55.

1 
See
again,
for
example,
Thomas
Aquinas,

Summa
Contra
Gentiles,
Book
Two:
Creation,

chapters
31‐38,
pp.
91‐115.

1 
See,
for
example,
Martin
Luther,
Lectures
on

Galatians
(1535),
in
Luther’s
Works,
ed.
Jaroslav

Pelikan
(St
Louis,
Missouri:
Concordia
Publishing

House,
1964),
vols.
26‐27.

1 
Thomas
Aquinas
again
provides
a
clear

theological
exposition
of
this
view.
See,
for

example,
his
Summa
Contra
Gentiles,
Book

Three:
Providence,
Part
1,
trans.
Vernon
J.

Bourke
(Notre
Dame
and
London:
University
of

Notre
Dame
Press,
1975),
chapter
70,
section
8,

p.
237:
“It
is
also
apparent
that
the
same
effect

is
not
attributed
to
a
natural
cause
and
to
divine

power
in
such
a
way
that
it
is
partly
done
by

God,
and
partly
by
the
natural
agent;
rather,
it
is

wholly
done
by
both.”

1 
For
prominent
examples
of
such
a
view
in
the

history
of
Christian
thought,
see
Augustine,
The

Literal
Meaning
of
Genesis,
trans.
John

Hammond
Taylor
(New
York:
Newman
Press,

1982),
chapters
10‐12,
pp.
49‐51;
and
Cyril
of

Alexandria,
Commentary
on
the
Gospel

According
to
John,
trans.
P.
E.
Pusey
(Oxford:

James
Parker,
1874),
Book
1,
chapters
7‐9,
pp.

66‐87.

1 
See,
for
example,
Athanasius,
“On
the

Incarnation
of
the
Word,”
trans.
Archibald

Robertson,
in
Philip
Schaff
and
Henry
Wace

(eds.),
Nicene
and
Post‐Nicene
Fathers,
vol.
IV,

Second
Series
(Grand
Rapids,
Michigan:

Eerdmans,
1957),
sections
3‐5,
pp.
37‐39.

1 
See,
for
example,
Gregory
of
Nyssa,
“Answer
to

Eunomius’
Second
Book,”
trans.
M.
Day,
in
Philip

Schaff
and
Henry
Wace
(eds.),
Nicene
and
Post‐
Page | 128
Nicene
Fathers,
vol.
V,
Second
Series
(Peabody,

Massachusetts:
Hendrickson,
1994),
p.
257.

1 
See
Luhrmann
in
this
volume.

Page | 129
The Elusiveness of Meaningful
Connection
Kathryn Tanner’s chapter has
developed the classical Christian idea
that God is the creator and sustainer of
the world, in order to suggest the ways
in which this notion of the creator might
be one factor providing persons with a
sense of social connection and a hopeful,
generous, and caring disposition toward
the world that assuages the adverse
health consequences of loneliness. In
this classic interpretation of God as
creator, the idea refers not to the origins
of the universe but rather to the allinclusive
dependence of life upon God at
all times. This sense of a sustaining
divine presence spanning the whole time
of one’s life thus contributes a deep
sense of one’s connection to the whole
order of creation. However, as Tanner
notes, people may become inattentive to
a presence so pervasive, just as people
can become inattentive to the forces of
gravity holding them to the surface of
the Earth as they go about their everyday
life. In more extreme versions of this
inattention, the person understands
humanity as “alone” in the universe, a
sort of metaphysical loneliness that
might exacerbate more concrete feelings
of loneliness.
Perhaps surprisingly, Chris Masi,
from the perspective of a physician and
medical researcher, casts a fascinating
and fresh perspective on the theological
notion that we live in a sustaining
connection to creation as a whole. After
describing the negative health
consequences of loneliness, Masi
proceeds to describe a cycle of
loneliness in which a person’s sense of
isolation frustrates well-intended efforts
to make social connections. Masi finds
that efforts to intervene and break this
cycle are not notably successful, in large
part because the preconscious
disposition of lonely people toward the
world is difficult to change. Like Tanner,
although using different terminology,
Masi’s review of the scientific literature
suggests both that the character of one’s
general disposition toward the world is
profoundly important for one’s
connections to others, and that the
processes by which these general
dispositions change are complex and
warrant further scientific attention.
Page | 130
Chapter 14 14
Visible Efforts to Change Invisible
Connections
14 The lead author is Christopher M. Masi, M.D.,
Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department
of Medicine at the University of Chicago. He is
co-founder of Every Block A Village Online, an
Internet-based community development
program, and is past president of the Illinois
chapter of Physicians for a National Health
Program. He is the current president of the
Midwest Society of General Internal Medicine
and has received numerous awards, including a
Models That Work Award from the United
States Bureau of Primary Health Care and the
New Investigator Health Sciences Research
Award from the Gerontological Society of
America. With a medical degree, as well as a
PhD in social service administration, Dr. Masi’s
research focuses on the socioeconomic factors
underlying health disparities. He currently has
two projects, one aimed at developing an
intervention to reduce loneliness and one focused
on the role of sex hormones in gender, age, and
racial differences in cardiovascular disease. He
is a reviewer for several scientific journals and
grant-making organizations and has published
research and reviews on diverse topics, including
health insurance reform and racial disparities in
breast cancer and hypertension.
Human capacity for creativity,
compassion, and learning is unparalleled in the
animal kingdom. However, humans reach their
full potential only when they are socially
engaged. Lack of social engagement impairs
creativity and learning, and limits opportunities
for caregiving and emotional growth. Numerous
studies have shown that loneliness is also a risk
factor for illness and premature mortality.
Because loneliness is increasing in modern
society, it is critically important to understand
this condition, as well as strategies to reduce it.
This essay describes our review of the literature
regarding loneliness reduction interventions.
The 17 th century English
philosopher Thomas Hobbes proposed
that without the organizing structure of
government, humans would experience
bellum omnimum contra omnes (war of
all against all) and life would be
“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short”(1). While this colorful description
is often quoted, less attention is paid to
Hobbes’ premise that such misery can be
avoided if humans codify and enforce
the rules of a civil society. Not everyone
agrees with Hobbes’ views, but history
is replete with examples of human
misery when anarchy reigns and of
relative peace when a social contract is
observed. A question that philosophers
continue to debate is whether
collaboration for mutual benefit is part
of human nature or whether promotion
of the self above all others is man’s
primary motivation. In this volume,
Cacioppo argues that sociality is an
integral part of human nature. He notes
that given each child’s prolonged period
of total dependence, survival into childbearing
age depends entirely upon the
support and protection of adults, most
often parents or kin. As a result, those
who survive long enough to procreate
pass along genes for nurturing and
protection, thereby hardwiring a form of
sociality into our genetic code.
This protective behavior helps
ensure that genes within a family are
passed on to future generations.
Cooperation among unrelated adults or
the support and protection of children by
adults exists beyond kin, as well,
because these activities also provide
survival benefit. Examples from early
human existence include hunting and
gathering, which are more likely to
succeed when pursued as a group than
individually. To these structural benefits
Page | 131
of non-familial sociality, we may now
add physiological benefits. A 1979
population-based study showed that
adults lacking social ties were 1.9 to 3.1
times more likely to die during a 9-year
follow-up than those who had more
social contacts, all else being equal (2).
Since then, at least five population-based
prospective studies (3) and numerous
smaller studies have found positive
associations between social integration
and either survival or improved health
outcomes. The mechanisms by which
social integration enhances survival are
several and include improved health
behaviors, increased access to resources
and material goods, and strengthened
immunity against infection (4).
Whereas sociality is a normal
state, loneliness is an unusual state, akin
to hunger, thirst, or pain (5). As with
those states, loneliness is unpleasant and
serves to remind us that we should
change the status quo. Therefore,
loneliness can be an adaptive motivator
for increased social surveillance and
interaction. Unfortunately, not all
individuals succeed at achieving the
level of social connectedness they desire
and suffer instead from chronic feelings
of loneliness. Cacioppo and others have
shown that lonely individuals interpret
events and social interactions more
negatively than non-lonely individuals.
As a result, they unconsciously develop
defense mechanisms, including social
barriers, which shield them from insults
and rejection. While this approach may
achieve its goals of self-protection, it
also reduces opportunities for positive
social interactions and perpetuates
feelings of social isolation (5). John
Bunyan, a 17 th century Christian writer
and preacher, described the barriers
associated with loneliness when he
wrote of a vision in which he
“saw the people set on the sunny
side of some high mountain,
there refreshing themselves with
the pleasant beams of the sun,
while I was shivering and
shrinking in the cold, afflicted
with frost, snow, and dark
clouds. Methought, also, betwixt
me and them, I saw a wall that
did compass about this mountain
(6).”
For chronically lonely people,
the wall between themselves and others
is partly of their own making and
reflects continuous surveillance for
negative signals from others (5). The
challenge is to help lonely individuals
break down the barriers between
themselves and others and ultimately
return to the normal state of sociality. In
his vision, Bunyan achieved this, but
only through great effort:
“About this wall I thought
myself, to go again and again,
still prying as I went, to see if I
could find some way or passage,
by which I might enter therein,
but none could I find for some
time. At the last, I saw, as it
were, a narrow gap, like a little
doorway in the wall, through
which I attempted to pass; but the
passage being very strait and
narrow, I made many efforts to
get in, but all in vain, even until I
was well-nigh quite beat out, by
striving to get in; at last, with
great striving, methought I at first
did get in my head, and after that,
by a sidling striving, my
shoulders, and my whole body;
then I was exceeding glad, and
went and sat down in the midst
of them, and so was comforted
with the light and heat of their
sun (6).”
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Genetic studies indicate that
heritability accounts for approximately
50% of loneliness while social
circumstances account for the other 50%
(7). Research also suggests that
loneliness is common - reported by as
many as 20 percent of the population at
any given time (8). In addition, some
evidence suggests that the prevalence of
loneliness may be increasing, at least in
the U.S. A recent national survey found
a threefold increase in the number of
Americans who indicated they had no
confidant or person with whom to
discuss important matters (9). Although
differences between this survey and its
1985 predecessor may be sufficient to
account for this increase, this suggestive
report raises the possibility that
contemporary societal factors may be
interfering with the natural tendency for
humans to form meaningful, long-term
social connections. One factor is social
mobility, which increased dramatically
during the 20 th century. A second is the
aging of the U.S. population. In 1900,
4.1% of Americans were 65 years or
older. By 2006, that percentage had
increased to 12.4%, representing 37.3
million Americans (10). With less value
placed on older individuals in the U.S.,
we have witnessed an increase in
marginalization of this segment of
society. Third, as life expectancy
increases, more elders are living longer
as widows or widowers and are therefore
at increased risk for loneliness. Other
factors which may place Americans at
increased risk for loneliness include less
intergenerational living, delayed
marriage, increased dual- career
families, increased single-residence
households, and increased age-related
disabilities and health conditions. Given
the mental and health risks associated
with loneliness described in Hawkley’s
chapter, interventions are needed to help
lonely individuals regain normal social
connections. As Bunyan’s account
suggests, breaking through the wall of
loneliness may require considerable
effort. When individual effort is not
sufficient, assistance from others may be
needed. Unfortunately, contemporary
interventions to reduce loneliness have
fared more poorly than has been
recognized.
Repairing Broken Connections
Almost a century ago, scholars
began to propose strategies for reducing
loneliness. Karen Rook (11), for
instance, amassed over 40 interventions
dating back to the 1930’s in her attempt
to identify effective loneliness reduction
strategies. Since Rook’s review, five
scientific publications have provided
qualitative reviews of strategies to
reduce loneliness, social isolation, or
both (12-16). The most recent
publication identified 30 interventions
published between 1970 and 2002 (16),
and evaluated the effectiveness of those
intervention studies that were not flawed
by poor design. Among the thirteen trials
deemed to be of high quality, six were
considered effective, one was considered
partially effective, five were considered
ineffective, and one was inconclusive.
The authors’ conclusions were similar to
those of prior reviewers who found that
interventions which emphasized social
skills training and/or group activities
were the most successful.
However, qualitative reviews are
subject to invisible biases that can color
our judgments of the scientific evidence
we see. Thomas Kuhn, a 20 th century
physicist and epistemologist, noted that
scientists too easily accept results which
conform to previous intuitions and too
readily reject results which do not (17).
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In the case of loneliness interventions,
all of the reviews essentially confirmed
the findings of previous reviews that
social skills training and group-based
interventions can succeed in reducing
loneliness. Is this conclusion justified, or
is this a case in which prior conclusions
have been perpetuated in the manner
Kuhn describes?
To combat bias favoring results
that confirm dominant theories, some
scientists have argued that specific study
criteria should be met to warrant an
evaluation of the effectiveness of the
intervention (18). These criteria include
random assignment of study participants
to receive the intervention, evidence that
the intervention is more effective than no
intervention, findings that are replicated
by at least one independent research
group, and results that are published in
peer-reviewed journals. Previous
reviewers of loneliness interventions
have, in fact, placed a premium on
randomized trials that contrast a group
randomly selected to receive the
intervention with a group randomly
selected to receive no intervention.
However, none has employed metaanalysis,
a quantitative technique for
calculating the average effect of diverse
interventions designed to accomplish the
same goal. Whereas qualitative reviews
are subjective and vulnerable to
confirmatory biases, quantitative reviews
are objective and relatively impervious
to bias as long as all relevant studies are
included in the analysis.
To minimize bias in our metaanalysis,
we first combed the literature
to identify all the intervention studies
that specifically targeted loneliness. To
further meet our criteria for inclusion in
the meta-analysis, studies had to be
published in a peer-reviewed journal or
as a doctoral dissertation (to ensure the
scientific integrity of the findings),
between 1970 and 2009 (to include and
extend the time interval reviewed
qualitatively in prior research), and had
to measure loneliness quantitatively.
Fifty-two intervention studies for
loneliness met our inclusion criteria.
These studies were divided into three
categories based on the experimental
design used to assess the effects of the
intervention. Twelve studies used a
single group pre-post design in which
loneliness among participants was
assessed at baseline and again after
exposure to the intervention. The single
pre-post design is weak in terms of
measuring the effectiveness of an
intervention, however, because
individuals who have high scores on a
loneliness measure on one occasion are
likely to score less extremely on a
second occasion even if no intervention
had occurred. Said differently, people
whose measurements suggest they are
very lonely at one point in time, on
average, appear to be less lonely when
measured at a later point in time. Our
meta-analysis of these studies indicated
there was indeed a lowering of
loneliness as measured before and after
the interventions, but we cannot
conclude from this evidence that the
reductions in loneliness were due to the
interventions.
Eighteen studies utilized a nonrandomized
group comparison design in
which some of the participants sought
out the intervention (the experimental
group) while others (the control group)
did not. In this design, assignment of
individuals to the experimental or
control groups was based upon
convenience, participant preference, or
some other factor, which means the
groups that did and did not receive the
intervention may differ in ways that
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explain different outcomes in the two
groups. For example, people who
volunteer to be in the experimental arm
of a study may be more gregarious by
nature and may be more likely to
become less lonely over time regardless
of exposure to the intervention. Results
of the meta-analysis suggested the
interventions might be effective, but to
know it’s the intervention and not an
artifact of subject selection, we need to
look at the effect of these interventions
when assessed using randomized group
comparison designs in which
participants are randomly assigned to the
experimental or control group.
Twenty-two studies utilized such
a design. Quantitative analysis revealed
that, on average, the interventions had a
small but significant effect in reducing
loneliness. Moreover, efficacy in
reducing loneliness did not differ
significantly as a function of
intervention strategy nor as a function of
individual- versus group-based
implementation. Whereas once a
consensus existed that social skills
training and/or group activities could
reduce loneliness, we found insufficient
evidence to support that conclusion.
Why have successful
interventions to reduce loneliness been
so elusive? There are several possible
reasons. Some of the interventions have
been designed with the notion that if
only lonely individuals had better social
skills they would be able to form
satisfying connections with others.
However, recent research suggests that
at least for most adults, the social skills
they know are not related to the
loneliness they feel. Other interventions
have been developed with the notion that
lonely individuals simply need to
interact more with others, so the
interventions are designed to increase
contact with others. However, people
not only tend to like lonely individuals
less than nonlonely individuals, lonely
individuals are especially negative
toward other lonely individuals.
Therefore, bringing lonely individuals
together is unlikely to result in warm,
satisfying social connections. Finally,
some interventions were designed with
the notion that what lonely individuals
need is social support, such as someone
who is available to provide help when
needed. However, loneliness affects not
only how people think, but how people
think about others: loneliness
diminishes people’s executive
functioning and biases them to see others
as threatening and rejecting even when
they are not (5).
Cacioppo and Patrick (5)
proposed a framework for reducing
loneliness which includes four elements.
First, unconscious barriers that
chronically lonely people develop to
shield against being hurt by others tend
to reduce their likelihood of having
positive social interactions, and they
may benefit, therefore, from
encouragement and practice in forming
social connections gradually in “safe”
environments where threat of rejection is
minimal. For instance, because
chronically lonely people are selffocused
in their hypervigilance for social
threat, they may benefit from learning to
shift their attention from themselves to
others through other-oriented activities
such as volunteerism. The notion is to
intervene to diminish or eliminate the
negative effects loneliness can have on
social perception and cognition. Second,
we tend to think of loneliness as the
same thing as a personal weakness, as