The Language of God

Speaking in tongues as an atheist

I. Experience

Right now, at this very moment, thousands of Americans are speaking a made-up language. “Shadyanta cosobro amibosho, yadeeante co so. Colonomiyato cami basa.” Their sentences swing with emotion — swells and hushes, murmurs and shouts.

In our church, being able to speak like that was a status symbol, and I wanted it. Not just for the status, but also because it would bring me closer to God. If you sliced open charismatic theology, you would find “speaking in tongues” near the center. To know God, it’s not enough to believe in Jesus: the Holy Spirit has to decide to dwell within you. Speaking in tongues is a marker, or “proof” of that inhabitation. Without it, you were a second-class religious citizen.

So on Sunday, when our pastor asked if anyone would like to receive the gift of tongues … I chickened out. I know, lame. Although spraying out a string of random syllables may sound easy, on the charismatic Christian understanding, it’s much more than that. God himself becomes a kind of divine ventriloquist, taking possession of your vocal cords and causing you to speak in tongues. It isn’t a skill you can learn, like riding a bike or preparing the perfect steak; it’s just a thing that happens to you.

So if it doesn’t happen to you, as it didn’t for many, it meant God had rejected you. Somewhere along the line, you hadn’t made the appropriate ablutions: perhaps you hadn’t repented for watching pornography, perhaps you weren’t asking sincerely enough — or, and this was never said aloud —perhaps you just weren’t worthy of God’s gifts.

But our pastor had a way of getting you past your doubts. The next Sunday he asked the congregation to close their eyes. Then, he asked those who wanted the gift to raise their hands. No pressure, right? Except he immediately asked everyone to open their eyes, and there I was, with my hand raised. No turning back.

I started toward the front of the chapel. There was an aura about the front. The worship leader stood atop the stage, emanating a hypnotic rendition of “I surrender all” from the keyboard. As I approached, I felt I was getting closer to the presence of God himself. My youth pastor was waiting for me and the few other brave souls making our way down the aisles. She arranged us into a circle and explained we were about to receive the Holy Spirit. She asked us to pray quietly.

She started to pray and speak in tongues herself, as if to gather the energy of the Spirit she was about to disburse. After a few minutes, she walked to one of my friends, faced her, put her hands on her head, and asked God to impart the Holy Spirit to her. I didn’t want to seem like a snoop, but I cracked opened my eyelids just enough to watch — was it going to work? Would the syllables just spew out of her mouth? What would it sound like?

After a couple minutes, she began making sounds resembling speaking in tongues. It seemed to escalate, and my youth pastor declared she had received the gift. Whew — I had a chance, I thought.

Finally it was my turn. My youth pastor repeated the process she used on the others, but after several minutes of praying, nothing like praying in tongues seemed to be happening. I began to panic. I was intently focused and desperate to speak in tongues, but the sounds just weren’t coming. She suggested I “grease the wheels” by repeating syllables like “da” over and over again. I wasn’t quite sure what that implied theologically — was that forcing it, and would that deny me a “genuine” experience? — but I didn’t have much time to think. So I uttered a chain of “da da da”’s, sprinkling in other syllables for what felt like ten minutes straight.

Gradually, and to my amazement, I began to feel less as if I was actively choosing the syllables coming out of my mouth and more as if they were being chosen for me. “Sha’s” and “shun’s” and “shal’s” began to tumble out almost unexpectedly, like a stream of consciousness I was witnessing rather than directing.

Speaking in tongues, it turns out, is a lot like singing “American Pie” by Don McLean. The word-salad lyrics mean nothing on their own, but precisely because they mean nothing you can load a lot of emotional freight into them. That’s why no matter your mood, you can belt out with absolute conviction “Bye, bye, miss American pie / Drove my Chevy to the levy but the levy was dry.” Anger, joy, disgust — they all fit in there. Like painting or photography, speaking in tongues eschews words to tap a purer emotional stream. And like good art, its expression is cathartic.

It was not always a rarefied experience, though.

II. Connection

A few years later on a summer day in Phoenix, Arizona, my cousin took me to a local theme park known for its roller coasters. I was terrified. I have always thought there was something masochistic about riding roller coasters. Why, why, would you subject yourself to terror for no other “benefit” than terror itself?

Well, peer pressure, for one. Click. I buckled myself in and we began our ascent. Despite my earnest protest to the attendant on the way up, we arrived as planned at the coaster’s zenith. Whoosh. My eyes slammed shut, my stomach seized, and down we went. When we bottomed out, I lunged across the seat and buried myself in my cousin’s side. As if that wasn’t enough, I began loudly praying in tongues — much to my cousin’s amusement. On we went, twist after twist and fall after fall, and I prayed harder than ever. By the time it was over, I’m sure my cousin thought I’d had a spiritual breakthrough.

And maybe I had. As a young Christian teenager, I didn’t think much of my instinct to pray in tongues, but looking back I can see how bizarre it must have seemed. Why did I jump to pray in tongues? Why not simply scream, or pray in English? The answer, I think, is speaking in tongues had become more than a parlor trick or a status symbol for me: it was a path to experiencing the immediacy of God. In that moment of terror, however trivial and artificial, some mental part of me instinctively ran to the safety of the experience of God.

Safety isn’t exactly the right word. Something more like groundedness. The experience of coming into contact with God, eternal and immutable, is a cornerstone of charismatic Christianity. If you haven’t experienced it, it’s difficult to describe. Imagine finding yourself floating in rough waters far ashore. You can barely see the beach between the peaks and troughs, and you begin to swim for it. A couple miles in, exhausted, you begin to wonder if you’ll make the shore before you lose your stamina. Another mile and you hit a current you can’t push through. You begin flailing wildly, trying, trying to get to shore, but it’s just too far. Finally, exhausted and in total desperation, you begin to sink, but you suddenly realize that although you’re far from the shore, the water is shallow enough to stand in. That moment, when you would stop fighting, let your feet connect with the sand, and rise above the water, is what it’s like to come into the presence of God. It’s a sudden awareness that you are and have been grounded all along, even as your everyday emotions and thoughts swirl around you.

Speaking in tongues had become a well-worn mental path to that realization.

III. Doubt

Yet, after years of speaking in tongues I had nagging doubts. One day I noticed the phrases “yo to to” and “ko sobra” bubble into my prayer language. The night before I had heard a preacher use those exact phrases while speaking in tongues. While these additions to my vocabulary were trivial, their presence agitated against the idea I was speaking a personalized language of exclusively divine origin. If it was God speaking through me, how could I “pick up” phrases? Didn’t that imply it was “me” instead of God speaking?

Another doubt. I stumbled on the term glossolalia, which is the nomenclature anthropologists give to speaking in tongues. It turns out many religio-cultural groups outside Christianity speak in tongues. But on the Christian worldview, this is nearly incomprehensible. The gift of tongues is supposed to be reserved for those who have the Holy Spirit, so how could groups with no knowledge of either Jesus or the Holy Spirit have it? Was their version of speaking in tongues some kind of devilish simulacrum? Or — a more frightening possibility — had Christianity simply annexed a basic human capability and pretended to have a monopoly on it?

All my religious doubts began life like this. They started as belief in something which is supposed to have a supernatural explanation — the virgin birth, for example. Then, a fact came along which cracked open the way for a natural explanation: regarding the virgin birth, it might be the surprise that many religions share a virgin birth mythology. This would spur further investigation and soon the shape of a natural, rather than supernatural, narrative would emerge. Perhaps, the narrative might go, we could explain the Biblical stories of Jesus’ virgin birth as mere legend. This skeleton outline would then be fleshed out with supporting facts: the first recorded gospel doesn’t mention a virgin birth or divinity, but by the last gospel Jesus is not only born of a virgin but God incarnate. And so on. The gaps would be filled in until an end-to-end natural explanation became not only possible, but plausible.

Just such an explanation for speaking in tongues surfaced in 2006. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, led by neuroscientist Andrew Newberg, recorded brain images of five believers while they spoke in tongues. They found decreased activity in both the language center, involved in constructing meaningful statements, and the frontal lobes, which yield a sense of intent and control. This brain activity dovetailed with the subjective experience I had— the loss of control over what you’re vocalizing, and the intrinsic meaninglessness of the actual phonemes spoken.

On its own, of course, correlative brain activity doesn’t diminish the possibility there’s something supernatural going on. The brain could simply be a reflection of what God is doing to it. You can’t rule God out. But you can question the probability something supernatural is going on, since the whole thing could work without God. If all you need to explain speaking in tongues are human brains, why invoke the supernatural at all?

This natural explanation would also put to rest my two doubts: if glossolalia were merely a learned practice all along, like playing the guitar or reciting a song, we should expect to find it beyond the borders of Christianity. And it would be unsurprising if speakers could influence the selection of phrases they vocalized.

And so with a possible — even plausible — end-to-end naturalistic explanation, invoking the supernatural was purely optional. Doubt in maturity.

Usually, when a doubt reached maturity I filed it into an overstuffed mental file cabinet labeled “the Lord works in mysterious ways.” Other doubts were filed there too: Was the virgin birth real even though we have little evidence for it? Or was it just a legend? Is the Bible perfect, even though it contains outright contradictions? Or is it just the work of some wise and passionate men? Was that girl healed of deafness in one ear? Or was she so excited she didn’t realize she wasn’t hearing any better?

But as I mentioned, the filing cabinet was overstuffed. Years upon years of doubts eventually tipped my intellectual scales in favor of atheism.

IV. Synthesis

I’ll never forget telling my mother I’d become an atheist. She flatly dismissed the idea. “No, you’ve seen too much not to believe in God” she retorted. At the time, I was upset — “Mom,” I thought, “you’ve no right to tell me what I believe.” But looking back, I think I understand why she said that. She knew I had many “spiritual” experiences like speaking in tongues, and on her worldview the only explanation for these involved God. So to deny the supernatural was to deny I’d had those experiences, which she couldn’t imagine me doing.

And, of course, neither could I — I hadn’t suddenly forgotten the reality of my spiritual experiences. The reply I should have made to her was just that I’d placed my epistemic bets on natural, rather than supernatural explanations for them. In the language of philosophy, I was was affirming the ontology (reality) of spiritual experiences, but disputing their etiology (cause): there simply wasn’t a God involved.

But this trick — acknowledging the reality of spiritual phenomena while disputing their supernatural cause — was not immediately apparent to me. When I deconverted, as it’s sometimes called, I ran as far from Christianity as I could. I vowed never to step foot in a church again. I began to heap scorn on religious experiences by pointing out they weren’t supernatural. They were engineered, I declared: that sense of wonder during communal singing? It was the result of deliberately chosen chord progressions. Speaking in tongues? No different — a purely natural phenomenon, found far beyond the borders of Christianity.

Still, this position put me in a different camp from the many atheists who haven’t had spiritual experiences. These atheists often adopt a kind of spiritual non-cognitivism: the idea that talk of spiritual experiences, such as speaking in tongues or experiencing God, is about nothing. Since God doesn’t exist, the thought goes, statements about interacting with him are total nonsense, in the way of married bachelors or lying truth-tellers. Spiritual life, on this view, is a house of cards: flick out the God-belief, and it collapses into nothing.

But I couldn’t go that far. I had those experiences. And by zealously pointing out the natural causes of them, I was only affirming their existence: I was detailing just how they were rooted in reality, in the realm of flesh-and-blood and day-to-day. And not just an abstract reality, if I was honest: an immediate, mental reality.

V. Faith

The first Christmas after I became an atheist, my mother asked me to attend a Christmas Eve church service with the family. I refused. I couldn’t abide the thought of singing about stories I no longer believed, closing my eyes to pray to a God who didn’t exist, or celebrating the birth of an itinerant Jewish preacher.

But mothers have a way of worming their way into your heart. A few years later she asked again, and I acquiesced. What was the harm?

I arrived at the service and we soon stood to sing. First on the docket was “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” We began to sing, slowly:

O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant!

The first line — the first line! — transported me to a mental place I had forgotten. I used to be one of the faithful, one of the joyful.

Come and behold him / Born the king of angels:
O come let us adore him / O come let us adore him
O come let us adore him / Christ, the Lord!

By the time the first verse was up, I had tears in my eyes. To adore him. I had forgotten what that was like. And suddenly I was in the presence of God again: standing on the sand beneath the water, as everything else washed away.

The sound of everyone singing together, the lit candles, the sheer sincerity of the parishioners, it was too much. I sat down, overwhelmed and perplexed.

Was I having doubts about my atheism?

After a long time, I decided I wasn’t.

To build a spiritual sensibility is not to cobble together a house of cards. It is to construct a great mental cathedral, brick by brick, section by section, and year by year. I had spent a lifetime learning to speak in tongues, find the presence of God in quiet prayer and communal worship, and a thousand other things. As an atheist, I had torn away a buttress of the cathedral, but it remained intact.

The Christmas carol brought me back to its door, and I realized that like speaking in tongues itself, the words didn’t matter. I could call it God’s presence or a neurochemical reaction. The only important thing, standing at that door, was whether I would go in.

I’m Andy Walters, an aspiring memoirist. Sign up here to receive a notification when my next piece comes out. Please also consider recommending this article by clicking the heart icon below.