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T. M. Luhrmann: What We Believe About Prophecies

The new evangelical Christianity that emerged out of the cultural tumult of the 1960s and 1970s was vividly supernatural. It was born out of the fear that Americans were turning away from Christianity, and it promised a God who was intensely present, always loving and almost magically invincible.

Preachers promised that ordinary people could heal and prophesy in Jesus’ name. (Here they might quote John 14:12: “Whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing.”) Churches like Bethel Redding, in California, founded schools of Supernatural Ministry. Throughout the country, Christians went on prayer walks to cleanse their cities. They began to sniff out demons and exorcise people.

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In 2006, the Pew Research Center found that about a quarter of the country belonged to “renewalist” churches like these. For reasons still poorly understood, most of these churches were politically conservative. As the 2020 election approached, many within them prophesied that President Donald J. Trump would be re-elected. When President Biden was sworn in on Jan. 20, 2021, it was a massive disconfirmation of their beliefs.

Many are waiting for those who believed in the fantasies to come back to their senses. There are two reasons to think that this might take some time.

First, the intensity of belief commitment can actually increase in the face of refutation before declining. Decades ago, the psychologist Leon Festinger found that when people recognize that their beliefs conflict with facts in the world (he called this “cognitive dissonance”), they will work to reduce the tension — but not always by changing their original commitments. The more strongly they have invested in the original belief, the more they will work to change the world instead.

Dr. Festinger explored a famous example of this phenomenon in “When Prophecy Fails,” a book he wrote with Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter about a Midwestern doomsday cult that predicted the world would end on Dec. 21, 1954. When that date passed and nothing happened, group leaders picked up the phone, called the press and began to proselytize. They now interpreted their beliefs differently. The global calamity, from which this group would be saved by flying saucers and in which everyone else would die, had been postponed by God. They found proof of a partial calamity (an earthquake here and there) and insisted that the spaceships were here to stay (the aliens were examining the faults in the Earth’s surface). “A man with a conviction,” the book opens, “is a hard man to change.”

Second, the arcane knowledge found in this new evangelical Christianity (often called charismatic) can be intensely satisfying. Effective religions create a kind of paracosm for the faithful. By that I mean that gripping faith offers a shared imagined world that is accessible only to insiders, who follow the clues, read the texts and spin theories. This kind of Christianity — and even more QAnon, its political kin — built a paracosm with obscure symbols, rare words with uncommon meanings and elaborate historical genealogies, a set of particulars to interpret as brain-bending as the hardest puzzle. Knowing these texts and solving these puzzles turns ordinary desk clerks into esoteric grandmasters. It’s hard to give that up.

After the election, many of those who prophesied that Mr. Trump would be victorious and who listened to those prophecies remained committed to the cause. To be sure, some of the believers have peeled off. Kris Vallotton, a pastor at Bethel Redding and a towering figure in charismatic evangelical Christianity, in November gave a heartfelt and moving apology for having misheard the “word” God gave him about who would win the election. Some of the Proud Boys (a political organization, although many members are evangelical) declared Mr. Trump a failure.

Others grew more fervent. J. Derrick Lemons, an associate professor of religion at the University of Georgia, found himself startled as he participated (for 50 hours) as an anthropological observer in the Zoom prayer sessions held after the election by some of the evangelical leaders Mr. Trump frequently consulted with during his presidency. They were clear that Mr. Trump had won and that his victory would be recognized. As the weeks went by and Mr. Trump’s lawsuits attempting to overturn the election’s results continued to fail, the prayers became more heated and more public, expanding to Facebook Live and You- Tube. The stakes went up. The leaders prayed not against malevolent Democrats, but against a deep-state Republican and Democratic cabal that controlled all government, and from which they needed Mr. Trump to free them. Mr. Lemons said they spoke of Mr. Trump as a modern-day Cyrus to lead them out of captivity and into the apocalyptic battle that would end with Christ’s return.

There is a deep lesson here about religious commitment. Faith is always about living with the contradictions between the world as it should be (as understood by the person of faith) and the world as it is. God is good, but injustice abounds. You pray to an omnipotent king that your mother will recover, but she does not. Faith is always, to some extent, about cognitive dissonance.

Most people live with a cognitive flexibility around the relationship of their faith to the everyday. They believe that God can do anything, but they never rely on God to feed the dog. They do not expect God to write their term paper. They do not allow their faith commitment to the world as it should be to violate the reality constraints of the world as it is. One can find this sentiment in many faiths. A famous Islamic hadith asks whether one should tie up one’s camel, or leave the camel untied and trust in Allah. Trust in Allah, the hadith says, but do not forget to tie up your camel.

Yet some people of faith deliberately disregard the real world. They march on with an outsize commitment to the world as their faith wants it, and not to the world as it is. The more someone becomes emotionally invested in such a group, the more it takes to wrest that person free.

Many years ago in San Diego I spoke with a woman who had joined the movement of the spiritual leader known as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh back in the 1970s when it was fun and free, when he was known as the “sex guru” and when her days were full of dancing meditations. She followed him when he left his ashram in Pune, India, in 1981 to build an enormous new commune in Oregon. She remained as activities shifted from dynamic yoga to hard labor, with devotees constructing buildings on the property. She stayed with him through the period in 1984 when group leaders hatched assassination plots and deliberately poisoned hundreds of Oregonians with salmonella.

She left him, she said, only in 1985, when F.B.I. helicopters landed in the commune and the Bhagwan was charged with immigration fraud and deported. She had come to talk to me, the new anthropologist of religion in town, to ask why she had stayed for so long.

People stay longer in reality-challenging faiths when their news is tightly controlled. They stay longer when it is hard to find people outside the group. And they stay yet longer when they feel that they will be ridiculed by those in the society to which they will return.

For those who cannot accept the results of an election, this will take some time.

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