The Ontological Challenge of the Domestic Miracle

There is, to be blunt, something off-putting about the miraculous, or at least there is for anthropological imaginaries. We can intuit this fact that the sort of miracles discussed, and often (at least allegedly) performed in Protestant and Pentecostal churches in the United States, the United Kingdom, and swaths of northern Europe, are inopportune objects by the way that modern ethnographies go right up to the edge of the miracle, only to stop analysis and description when it comes to actually having to confront the object. We can see this in the proliferation of ethnographies of various Anglo-American Christianities, ethnographies occasioned in part by the advent of a self-conscious anthropology of Christianity, and in part by the increasing political activism of various politically conservative Christian movements (these two phenomena, I should mention, are not themselves unrelated). Multiple ethnographies have captured the political and semiotic aspects of these collectivities that are quite open about their endorsement of a supernaturally inflected understanding of the world (see, e.g., Bielo 2009; Coleman 2000; Elisha 2011; Engelke 2007; Harding 2000; Strhan 2015). But like someone whistling past the graveyard, the miraculous is often just skated by. The miracle is mentioned only in passing, usually in a neutral voice that studiously avoids either skepticism or surprise, and used only as evidence for some other puzzle regarding issues such as personhood, the private-public divide, or the structure and effects of evangelical rhetoric. These are important concerns, to be sure. But the miracle never appears as an object in its own right, and the question of how the miracle is constituted goes equally unanswered.

As we will see, there are good reasons for this: miracles pose even more of an ethnographic puzzle on their face than one might expect. This situation may especially be the case in a book that has taken up “explanation” as its central thematic, considering that one of the inevitable backdrops for such a conversation in contemporary anthropology and ethnography will be some form of what the editors of this book refer to as “ethnographic foundationalism.” This term was coined as a placeholder for the tendency in the discipline to refrain from using anthropological categories to explain ethnography; the fear is that the importation of these nonindigenous logics would be a form of intellectual violence. Rather, ethnographers should derive their models for whatever phenomenon they happen to be attending to from the narratives of their informants.

We see an example of this, for instance, in the monograph by Joel Robbins (2020), a very influential figure in the anthropology of Christianity. In that book, Robbins argues that anthropologists writing on Christian populations would be well served by deriving their theoretical models at least partially from theology because theology in considerable measure is a clarified and rationalized expression of the account that Christians would themselves give of how both religious practice and divine agents shape and order their lives. But while there has been a great deal of attention to theology in the anthropology of Christianity, I would argue that theological thought does not stand as the chief representative of ethnographic foundationalism in the subdiscipline. Rather, when the miracle as a category is discussed, I would suggest that a certain attitude toward an ontological framing is more prominent. Specifically, there is a general tendency to implicitly or explicitly assume the ontology of one’s Christian interlocutors when discussing the miracle, sometimes in the form of something called the ontological turn, which is the more common form when anthropologists discuss Christianity. The ontological turn is a species of ethnographic foundationalism on steroids. It argues that anthropologists must wholeheartedly accept the ontology of their field interlocutors when they write. Doing so, it is claimed, not only avoids the intellectual violence that troubles practitioners of ethnographic foundationalism but also is the only means of producing what is truly anthropological thought, in that treating field ontologies as if they are valid means creating novel concepts that “fit” these ontologies. (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017). Now, to be clear, I am not claiming that all anthropologists who write on Christianity in an ontological vein are Christians, though there are those believing anthropologists who do share their informants’ understanding of reality and see the ontological turn as salutatory (see, e.g., Meneses 2018; Merz and Merz 2017). But additionally, there are also anthropologists who adopt the ontological turn writing in what we might want to call a “secular” genre (Scherz 2017; Vilaça 2015, 2016; Willerslev and Suhr 2018). It is true that there have been voices that, with different levels of adamancy, have criticized foregrounding local ontology as a theoretical frame in the anthropology of Christianity (Bialecki 2018; Marshall 2014). But to the degree that the miracle is engaged with at all, it is through an ontologically inflected ethnographic foundationalism.

Either despite or because of the way that the miracle is more generally avoided, the oddness of the ontological miracle as a topic may not be initially apparent on the surface. This is surprising. The miracle seems to be exactly the sort of received-rationality-breaking ethnographic “wonder” (Scott 2013) that the ontological turn is seen as popularizing; a metaphysical event that purposefully runs counter to the type of naturalistic reason that is perceived as endemic to the West in general and to the academy in particular. This is so much the case that addressing the miracle may even seem like cheating, a lazy turn to low-hanging ontological fruit. To use the categories developed in an article by Matei Candea (2016), all one has to do to engage in what he calls “frontal” comparison—the contrasting of some other society or culture with our own, whether as a form of contextualization, critique, or estrangement—is to juxtapose the miracle with the conceptual logic of some secular Euro-American society. One then congratulates oneself on having dealt a blow to a constipated, hyperscientistic image of thought, for having struck an ethnographic coup that bravely opens the way to new postsecular imagination.

There is something probably (slightly) unfair about the picture that I’m painting here. I think that even though I’m talking down ontological discussion of the miracle, there is something seductive about such a theoretical maneuver, and I certainly have not always been above trying to pull it off in my own work. But a little reflection on the ease with which this theoretical move can be done suggests that there may be something facile, and perhaps even illicit, in the maneuver, at least when talking about miracles. Not all iterations of this maneuver suffer from this fault, I wish to be clear. To the degree that one accepts the premise of an ontological-methodological framing in the first place, or for that matter of any sort of “frontal” comparison, I think there are instances of “miracles” in social and cultural milieus that are informed by sensibilities so different from ours that such a contrast can be productive. The problem comes, however, not when one is working with the miracle in the form of an apparition of a ghostly horseman or some bleeding icon somewhere in the Middle East, just to choose examples from anthropological literature resplendent with the miraculous (see, e.g., Heo 2018). Rather it comes when one is thinking about the miracle a bit closer to home. The contemporary Anglo-American Protestant miracle breaks ontology as a method, and leaves other attempts to “explain” the miracle in a bad position. Which is to say that other attempts to explain away the miracle will find themselves taking up stances that are not necessarily intellectually invalid, nor unethical in the strict sense of the term, but that would leave many ethnographers with a bad taste in their mouth, considering the ethical debt that the anthropologist is supposed to hold toward his or her informants.

The problem with ontological attempts to assail the miracle is that when one is dealing with the “domestic” miracle (for lack of a better phrase), the frisson that comes with a moment of critique manufactured through a juxtaposition of our intellectual conceits to the alien thought of the other is unearned. That is because the miracle is already a form that is indigenous to the West, and as such it can’t be contrasted with Western metaphysics in an attempt to tax our understanding to some breaking point. To return to Candea’s language, the domestic miracle therefore cannot be juxtaposed to our own indigenous understanding because the miracle is already present in our world and is already a feature of the intellectual hinterland that makes the contrast with some other mode of thought possible in the first place. Thus, the seeming encounter with alterity contained in ethnographically addressing the miracle is a false one, because there is no alterity in the first instance.

I will dwell a bit longer on the indigeneity of the miracle, since I suspect this will be a contentious claim. To be blunt, the miracle is an outsize part of our intellectual inheritance. Of course, some would say that this is not a problem, and we can still take on objects like this. As just one example, contemporary programmatic statements regarding ontology have been open to turning to much more slight gradations of difference. We can think of the call to work “beyond the relation,” for instance, and expand the ontological methodology’s scope to take on ethnographic milieus that are not predicated on the dividual logic of parts and wholes. However, it is one thing to be open to using an ontologizing methodology to unpack social forms that are incrementally closer to our own framework, as Martin Holbraad and Morten Pedersen (2017) have advocated. The difference here, though, is that the domestic miracle is not just close to us. It is the very precondition of our form of thought.

Some may complain that the miracle is cognitively exterior to us because it is exactly what is rejected by contemporary social-scientific logic, but it is the very act of rejection that makes the miracle unalienable. The miracle serves as a self-defining other in intellectual constellations as diverse as apologies for the natural science and garden variety anti-Catholicisms. And after David Hume and Baruch Spinoza, one might even say that it is a striking-through of the miracle (though importantly a striking-through without erasure or foreclosure) that serves as the possibility condition of contemporary discussions of religion and reason. Furthermore, it arguably still exists in our society as a “positive” entity in the internal critique of various forms of secularism and scientific reason. Of course, we could always stipulate an artificial hinterland, some intellectual caricature of a rationality, rather than any actual mode of rationality as we use it in the wild. This positing of an artificial hinterland is not an unusual move, as Candea reads more recent trends. (He gives examples of such stipulated intellectual faux locales as “Western ‘liberal’ understandings of freedom” and “Eurocentric notions of modernity” [2016, 195].) This creation by fiat of a purely ideological hinterland makes the miracle seem external to ourselves by drawing an artificial border between us and it, no matter how close we are situated in regard to that concept. Alternately, we could always take another angle and argue that while we may have a conceptual alacrity with the domestic miracle, it is experientially distant enough from us moderns that we can count it as other (which is, of course, to put to the side the issue of the relationship between experience and the ontological methodology). We could plead that, to use Charles Taylor’s (2007) term, today we have buffered and not porous selves, and the miracle is just the kind of magic that we have been trained to lock out.

This leaves us suggesting that there may be two semilegitimate moves to allow us to at once rescue and alienate the phenomenon: that of creating a purely hypothetical and hence somewhat thin and intellectually brittle home ground to hold against the domestic miraculous other, or that of back-projecting an experience-near “hinterlands” requirement as an addendum to the ontological turn’s platform. To be honest, both arguments sound like special pleading to me, but even if they are convincing to others, we still need to go on to ask, who would “us” be in this exercise anyway? When we are discussing the position of anthropology vis-à-vis the domestic miracle, the answer to that question is not so clear. As the historian Timothy Larsen (2014) has observed, some of the most noted twentieth-century British social anthropologists were also noted religious believers, adherents to an often supernatural form of Catholicism (see similarly Engelke 2002). The fact that many of these anthropologists also had long and fruitful sojourns in the United States suggests that this religious “fifth column” may not be particular to the United Kingdom alone. We also would have to deal with an increasing theological interest in anthropological reasoning and ethnographic methods (see, e.g., Lemons 2018). Given all this, formulating even a straw-man secularism that we would simultaneously identify with and use as a foil may be at best inexact and at worse disingenuous or dangerous, presuming allies and identities that are not as we imagine; as the punchline to the old joke goes, “Who do you mean ‘we,’ kemosabe?” Finally, there is the possibility that we might always be dealing with an anthropological case of “Je est un Autre.” By this, I mean the fact that even academically trained nonbelieving anthropologists fall into miraculous and religious thought at times. This is something that is usually not spoken about. But every so often, you will have anthropologists owning up to particular life moments as bordering on or crossing into the miraculous, even if they don’t habitually think in terms of either miracles or divinity as actual causal agents or events. (One particularly well-written example that I can point to is Ellen Badone’s [2013] personal essay on religion, anthropology, and death in Janice Boddy and Michael Lambek’s Companion to the Anthropology of Religion.)

This problem of locating the miracle in our conceptual topography is not the only difficulty we face. Even if it doesn’t cross any bright lines, explanation of the miracle at least courts ethical risk and intellectual vapidity. Let’s take vapidity first. While explanation retains a certain tension when juxtaposed to ontology, we should not forget that ontologically oriented anthropology is itself not antithetical to an explanation of a kind. “Powder is power” (Holbraad 2007), for instance, may serve as an axiomatic, or an instigation to the production of novel analytic concepts. But it is also an explanation (at least within a particular framework) of the capacities and causal chains that power/powder exhibits. That, though, is not the case across the board. Consider again the domestic miracle. Even if the conceptual location of the domestic miracle didn’t short-circuit any attempts to ontologize it, the internal logic of the domestic miracle would still foreclose any explanation set in the ontological key, or that of any other frontal comparison. That is because the essence of the domestic miracle is that it defies explanation. The miracle is marked not by an internal organizing logic but rather by a break with logic, a suspension of natural law. Of course, there are limits to the autonomy of the miracle. There is usually an assumption of some kind of ethical charge to the miracle (the “satanic miracle,” for instance, seems like an oxymoronic formulation, unless you are Aleister Crowley or in a Finnish black metal band). Another limit to the miracle is in the degree of variety that it can tolerate. One of the striking things about the domestic miracle is that it appears that God may be sovereign, but he is not very imaginative. Particularly in its Pentecostal and charismatic forms, the miracle seems to have a somewhat limited range of variation, usually remaining stuck in a healing/tongues/prophecy/deliverance-from-demons rut. And we should notice that in many accounts of the miracle, the effective monotony of the miracle and its moral valence seem to not be unrelated (recall C. S. Lewis’s [1947] observation that even if the miracle and nature are different orders, they are different orders crafted by the same author, suggesting that these orders cannot be entirely dissimilar). But neither this relatively truncated miraculous possibility space nor the ethical value either carried or communicated by the miracle in any way explains the miracle.¹

Now, of course, it is possible to save the situation by not presenting an ontological study of the “domestic” miracle at all. One could argue that because of the miracle’s native-born resistance to ontologically oriented ethnographic methodology and other modes of “frontal” comparison, and due to its hostility to any explanation that occurs “on its own terms” (that is, using the internal logic of this ethnographic phenomenon), it is an inopportune object that must be approached through more conventional modes of explanation, ones addressing physiological, cognitive, and perceptual engines that strain to produce phenomena that then get coded as “miracles.”

The downside of this turn to a different explanatory mode, though, is that such a move does not differ from domestic explanations. But it does run wildly counter to the understandings of the people that truck in these sorts of miraculous. Such an explanatory tactic threatens to rely on mechanisms that would overwrite the (lack of) causal narratives that are brought to this issue, replacing a divine hand with an evolutionary or cognitive spandrel. One could object that this makes it seem as if the believers who participate in the domestic miracle are having their ontological cake and eating it too. They get to claim that their logical construct is internal to “our” logic (again, with some lack of clarity regarding who is included in “our logic”). And at the same time, they can claim special privilege to only have themselves define the miracle, rather than having to tussle around about its meaning with others. First, we should remember that this is an anthropological problem and not a problem across the board. Other disciplines can still take up attempts using these other explanatory frameworks if they care to do so. Second, as has been noted in discussions of why it took so long for a self-conscious, for-itself anthropology of Christianity to get off the ground, this simultaneous proximity to and distance from the analytic mechanisms of social science is one of the frustrating things about relations between “Christians” and “anthropologists” (Robbins 2003). This is certainly also the case when considering the interrogation of the domestic miracle as an ethnographic object. But we should remember that the miracle as a concept and the miracle as a social fact are two different things, and that by choosing a naturalist explanation, we are interfering with or even openly attacking the latter, while not changing the status of the former. In short, if we choose to overwrite the meaning of the miracle, we then endorse the assumption that our informants are at best mistaken and at worst either gullible or culpable. Even more, we insinuate that we have a privileged access to reality that they do not. Whatever we think of the ontological turn, we can at least agree that it tried to make a virtue of not engaging in the hierarchical ranking of expert accounts over indigenous knowledge. While the ontological claim of being the “first to take their informants seriously” is questionable, we can at least agree that they try to take their informants seriously in this regard.

In the end, the danger is that we will be read not as making statements about the constitution of particular events or sets of events that are read as “miraculous” in the modern day but rather as making statements about the existence of miracles tout court, or even worse, about the existence of God. The anthropological formulations of “experts” are knowledge of a different kind, and due to methodological and epistemological regimentation, they should not be seen as being the fungible equivalent of other forms of knowledge. That would be to play with the kind of blind relativism that corrodes the capacity to claim that any form of knowledge has its own ethical and analytic distinctives and capacities. But when we cross over into topics that strain any kind of empirical account, and that appear to be at best at the far border of the anthropological remit, we should remember that there will be those both inside and outside the discipline who will counsel us that “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Fractal Comparison and “Explanation-Like Effects”

This leaves us in an unenviable position when it comes to the domestic miracle. We cannot mine the miracle for novel concepts, as proponents of an ontological methodology and other frontal comparatives would have it, because the miracle, at least in its domestic form, is already part of our intellectual furniture. And attempts to have us claim otherwise would leave us at best in denial about the role of religion and of religious believers in contemporary social science. Further, the internal logic of the miracle disables our ability to “explain” it, since one of the chief determinants, if not the chief one, of what is and what is not a miracle is whether it can be explained. And trying to explain it using logics alien to those who endorse the reality of the domestic miracle is an attempt at demystification. And this suggests that believers in the miracle are either credulous or implicated in a semiconscious or conscious fraud.

I do not believe that this dilemma is inescapable. I believe that there are two ways (or rather, two books) out of this thicket that have already been explored, even if these two approaches do not look like each other, and if they go their separate ways after needling through this narrow pass. The two paths through this problem share the same ethnographic object: a single contemporary American charismatic or evangelical movement called the Vineyard, a rapidly grown set of over 2,400 congregations worldwide, known for its celebration of miraculous acts such as prophecy, deliverance from demons, speaking in tongues, and healing. One of these books has the virtue of being widely received and acclaimed; I am thinking here of When God Talks Back (WGTB), by Tanya Luhrmann (2012; also see this volume). The other book has the equally singular, but slightly less prestigious, distinction of being mine (Bialecki 2017). Despite this difference, I want to suggest that they share something beyond ethnographically engaging with the same religious group. My argument here is that both these books square the circle, producing something like an explanation. They present narratives that have “explanatory-like” effects but that are not ultimately structured as explanations. (This is despite the language both authors use in their books; each uses the word explain and many of that word’s synonyms quite freely.)

I will … explain? … what I mean by “explanatory effects without explanation” and “participating in the miracle” later in this chapter. But first I want to defend putting these books alongside each other in the first place. Placing these books side by side is a bit cheeky for numerous reasons. One reason why this alignment is a bit presumptuous is that these books have had disparate impacts. Luhrmann’s book is double-voiced in that it is at once a thorough ethnography and an exercise in public anthropology of the like that has become quite rare in our discipline as of late, and it was the center of a great many critical popular media discussions at the time of its release. By contrast, while my book has received a few kind reviews, I suspect that it got misplaced somewhere on its way to the New York Times mailroom and will not end up catalyzing much general public media disputation. This is not to be understood as griping—as we will see, I believe that Luhrmann’s capacity to write an ethnographic monograph that is capable of triggering this kind of reception is part of how the argument of her book operates.

Regardless, for our purposes, reception is not the most critical distinction between these books. A more pertinent difference is that these books are, in a sense, only proximately concerned with the domestic miracle. This is not to say that the miracle doesn’t dominate each one. Rather it is to say that what motivates the investigation of the miracle in the first place is not the same in each monograph, and that each conversation concerns a different set of problems that constitute their further horizons. WGTB takes up the issue of the ease of belief in the current secular dispensation, a time when most nonbelievers presume that belief is binary, and that believers effortlessly adhere to faith. Luhrmann’s explicit goal is to complicate this flat picture by seeing belief as something that is always vulnerable and difficult even in those moments when it is (temporarily) achieved. It is not that believers are blind to the reasons that feed the skepticism of agnostics, atheists, and other “nones.” Instead, it is that they train themselves to perceive the world in ways that allow what could easily be presented as an absence to be seen instead as divine plenitude, in part through reading their sensorium in different ways, and in part by modifying that sensorium. In this way, WGTB is also a reaction to various almost fundamentalist scientisms. The book is pushing back against evolutionary psychological explanations of religion as merely a side effect, false positives caused by an overly sensitive agency detector; such a theory makes belief in supernatural actors both quick and easy, as it is better to intuit an entity that isn’t there than it is to not identify one that is. But WGTB also undermines medicalized accounts of miraculous phenomena, accounts that presume this behavior could only be rooted in psychiatric pathology. This medical explanation is “contraindicated” by the fact that these believers do not show the psychic pain, disordered thoughts, and disrupted lives that are usually associated with the sort of mental illnesses that cause someone to hear “voices.”

Diagram’s stakes are different. The book is concerned mostly with a way to discuss difference within and between Christian movements, as a response to nominalistic provocations that would reject a comparative anthropology of Christianity by claiming that the pure amount of variation found in the category “Christian” suggests that there is no underlying commonality, or at least no commonality outside of historical accidents. It tries to counter the claim by finding one structure common to multiple different Vineyards—that is, the domestic miracle—and showing that seemingly quite different instances of the domestic miracle can be seen as expressions of a single malleable, but still determinable, set of relations (called a diagram, after the sense used by Gilles Deleuze). It then attempts to see other Vineyard practices, such as stewardship of funds, care for church presentation, and the reading of the Bible as an authoritative text, as also being mutations of this diagram, where agency, obligation, and temporality take different forms, and hence have different effects. It closes by reading other contemporary forms of Pentecostalism, charismatic Christianity, and even evangelicalism as also being expressions of the diagrammatic set of relations claimed to be found in the Vineyard. The argument is that both variations in intensities of forces and temporalities, alongside the effects of having these expressions occur in different environments and realized through different material, can account for the differences between these different modes of religiosity, while still seeing something not unlike a genetic continuity underlying them all.

What I may have just laid out in my précis of Diagram may sound a great deal like an “explanation,” which is something I will need to return to. But first I want to close off this discussion by saying that these different stakes result in the object that is interrogated being presented in different ways. There is the old cliché that most intellectual activity can be reduced to lumping or splitting. Like other academic clichés, there is something tired about it, but there is also something true. In this case, each book does both, though in a different sequence. WGTB lumps, so as to address a wider fact of splitting, and Diagram splits, but only so it can lump later on. For WGTB, the Vineyard is treated as “a” thing. This is not done blindly, or without an open acknowledgment of light amounts of intellectual violence: WGTB understands that there is difference between various Vineyard churches and between various Vineyard believers, but for the book (as it is for more Vineyard believers the book concerns itself with) the Vineyard is “one” thing. WGTB works similarly with the domestic miracle. The miracle is a single thing: the act of “hearing from God.” And this is regardless of whether the miracle occurs through coincidence, through a sense or a concept popping into one’s head, or even (for some) through an audible voice. This lumping of the miracle into a single object is done because WGTB wants to say something about a broader American evangelical Christianity, and it can only do so by making the Vineyard not a special case with features that are particular to it but rather an exemplar, an object that might stand out a bit, but only because it exhibits some commonality in clearer and more robust ways, allowing for a more colorful depiction of something that may be expressed in other Christian groups only in shades of gray.

This is not how Diagram operates, however. It proliferates miraculous forms, distinguishing between divine messages experienced through the act of reading the Bible, and suddenly recalling scriptural passages as a form of receiving prophecy. It sets aside hearing from God as a spontaneous phenomenon from hearing from God as a result of exposure to practiced pedagogues; it even suggests that the latter is linguistically expressed in three different styles. It sets apart sharing a message from God to someone privately from doing the same in a public space. Speaking in tongues is set apart as well, and healing is given its own subcategory (with variations depending on proximity or closeness to the individual being prayed over, and the different manner of divine healing that is being interceded for). This is not to say that this material is absent from WGTB, but rather to say that in the latter book, they are treated as different tokens of the same type, with each instance having its own character, but all being, in essence, a moment in a longer conversation with God.

These differences are motivated differences, as pluralizing the miracle or seeing it in the singular allows for different comparative operations to be mobilized, and for the creation of different “explanation-like effects.” What I mean by “explanation-like effects” is best illustrated by sketching out how they occur in each book. And this can only be done by returning to the issue of comparison that began our discussion of what is problematic about the domestic miracle for the ontological turn (and other frontal comparisons). Comparison, as Candea notes in his already referenced article, is not only between the hinterland and the foreground; anthropology also has a long tradition of what he refers to as “lateral” comparison, where the juxtaposition of different ethnographic cases is used to set stakes, fashion arguments, and test claims. Since the disciplinary epistemological crises of the 1980s, this axis of comparative methodology has not enjoyed the primacy that it once did. Despite this, Candea argues that lateral comparison is still a legitimate and necessary part of anthropological thought, and of the evaluation of ethnographic material.

At the risk of straining Candea’s metaphor, though, I would like to observe that there can be finer gradations of comparison. If we are not going to presume that the boundaries of the cases are necessarily isomorphic with the boundaries of already problematic entities like “cultures” or “societies,” then lateral comparisons—or, as I will argue shortly, both lateral comparisons and comparisons that are akin to lateral comparisons—can be made where the differences are much slighter. Indeed, there is no reason why they cannot be made from separate instances that are “within” the ethnographic author’s case. And the resonances between these cases give birth to “explanation-like” effects, by which I mean groups of patterns that open the way for readers to select a causal account from a somewhat determinate set of possibilities inherent in the author’s presentation of the pattern, but do not mandate the adoption of any specific particular account, and hence do not explain. To differentiate them from Candea’s more classical sense of comparison, we can call these fractal comparisons, inasmuch as they either reiterate or anticipate the more classical lateral comparative operations that occur at a greater conceptual scale, and between different authors.

I’ll start with Diagram, since the case there is relatively quick to make. What is being compared and the warrant for the comparisons is more obvious, and the absence of explanation more clearly laid out than what is found in WGTB (which, as we shall see, does not conversely mean that WGTB obfuscates what it is doing or otherwise acts in bad faith—the problem there is a function of a fundamental undecidability). As just noted, Diagram proliferated the miracle, but the reason that the miracle was proliferated was so that its various instantiations of it could be laid alongside each other. This laying alongside each other is an important part of the argument. This parallelism is how Diagram argues for the existence of a common pattern. Without this maneuver, it would be hard to allow the already referenced set of relations to come to the surface. What is more, it is only through setting various instantiations of it alongside other instances that important elements of the pattern can be presented. The juxtaposition of differences, as well as similarity, not only allows for arguments such as the relatively “strata-independent” aspect of the underlying pattern (which is to say, it can be exhibited through numerous linguistic and nonlinguistic modes, and at scales that range from the individual to the nation). This also allows for a discussion of how the various aspects set in relation to one another can vary in their intensity, with intensity here not just meaning strength but also referencing qualitative aspects. This allows not only the similarities between various instantiations of the miracle to become apparent but the range of variation as well. Finally, this multiplicity of micro-comparisons allows for the jump in scale, where we cannot speak of variations on types and expressions of the Vineyard miracle, and instead compare the Vineyard miracle as a swath of possibilities against other neocharismatic and neo-Pentecostal groups, which is the moment when this fractal comparison shifts into becoming more akin to the forms of lateral comparison that concern Candea.

Depending on how you think of this sort of operation, it either produces or unveils a set of patterns. What it does not produce or unveil is an explanation. There are two reasons why Diagrams cannot be said to explain anything, or rather, to be more exact—since the form of the miracle “explains” some otherwise odd behavior in charismatic evangelical political and economic concepts and actions—why the miracle itself cannot be explained even as it explains other things. The first reason is that this structure cannot be thought of as a cause. The diagram of Diagram does not compel forces to behave in any way. Instead, it is just one pattern that affects and precepts can fall into if they are pushed that direction by other forces that are prior in logical or actual causation. To the degree that the pattern has any causal features, it is at best as something along the lines of a quasi-cause, an effect that retrospectively appears to be responsible for the very forces that brought that effect into being.

Under Diagram’s logic, though, the true nature of those forces cannot be addressed at any depth, which is the second reason while the miracle cannot be explained even as it explains. Some of the forces, such as intermediary sense perceptions, can be described, but the production of any longer causal narratives involving them is cut off by the fact that these forces inevitably lead off into other domains outside the miracle, and it is not clear that there is a consistency as to the direction that various individual causal accounts of specific miracles would be heading. Given the importance of the modular nature of the miracle for Diagram, the source of these forces cannot be addressed in advance, or at least not in a manner that is not at best merely probabilistic. This modular construction speaks not only to the source of forces but also to their character. There is a ban, established in Diagram by theoretical fiat, on “looking behind” the miracle. The logic of this across-the-board ban is that reading this through a sociological, psychological, phenomenological, or for that matter theological lens introduces new actors into the equation and transforms the content of forces, thereby denaturing the miracle. This is not a rejection of any of those analytics across the board. Rather, it is merely a statement that taking up a theoretical claim involving “looking behind” changes the nature of what is being looked at, and the question of the capacities of the miracle as an object becomes a different conversation.

Which brings us to WGTB. That book, with its focus on the psychological capacities of absorption, and its deep-seated enmity to reductionist evolutionary psychological approaches, may seem to be working against Diagram’s sensibility (or perhaps, considering the sequence in which they came out, it would be better to say that Diagram tries to retroactively legislate WGTB as being invalid). If anything would be a case of looking behind the miracle, one might reason, it must be this act of tying the miracle to a specific human cognitive faculty. This, of course, would be to ignore the different ultimate horizons that these books are working toward; Diagram’s ban on looking behind the miracle only makes sense in light of its original project of focusing exclusively on charting the variability of the miracle. But even more to the point, seeing WGTB as looking behind the miracle would be to miss out on what I feel is probably one of the subtler, and yet one of the most audacious, aspects of that book.

The nature of WGTB’s achievement stems from how it engages in comparison. The book uses comparison in a way that is radically different from the way that comparison is deployed in Diagram. As stated, WGTB treats the miracle as a single object, so it may seem that the kind of fractal comparisons Diagram makes are impossible, and that only more standard forms of frontal and lateral comparison are possible. It is certainly true that despite WGTB’s interest in the domestic miracle, there are moments of frontal comparison. This frontal comparison, though, is done merely to set up the stakes of Luhrmann’s project, to underline the degree to which the sensorial world of Vineyard believers stands in stark relation to the consensus sensorium of most nonbelievers. And lateral comparison is important to the book as well. In WGTB, the Vineyard is discussed in relation to other forms of first-world ecstatic religiosity and early modern spiritual exercises. More central to the argument about the difficulty of first-world contemporary supernaturalized faith are the contrasts between the Vineyard’s mode of dealing with more-than-human agents and forces and the way that “never seculars” deal with the same actors. “Never seculars” are believers who do not have nonbelief laid out as a possible alternate position, and therefore whose reasoning regarding supernatural entities is not informed by a corrosive knowledge of consociates who, when it comes to God, “have no need of that particular hypothesis” (to quote Pierre-Simon Laplace’s most likely apocryphal statement). But I would argue that the pivotal form of comparison that informs this book is one that no spatial metaphor can shoehorn into Candea’s template. That is because it is my argument that WGTB engages in the work of comparing the miracle with the miracle itself.

This comparison of the miracle with itself is achieved through WGTB’s continual juxtaposition of a psychologized depiction of the miracle as a model of sensory attunement with the more experience-near accounts of her informants learning to identify God’s voice (with these accounts drawn from either particular informants or ideal-typical general statements about what “the Vineyard” does). These are not two different sets of miracles, but rather the same process, differently framed. It is the contrast between these frames that gives rise to what I might want to call a naive reading of WGTB as an exercise in psychological reductionism. Under this reading, WGTB is about middle-class Americans training their imaginations to such an extent that they can spontaneously, unconsciously, and convincingly confabulate an unreal God as a conversation partner. While I suspect that this “village atheist” version is the most common academic reading of the book, it is not without problems. The first problem with the naive reading is that WGTB states that neither ethnographic methods nor anthropological thought are capable of “disproving” (or for that matter, proving) the existence of God. Of course, hypothetically showing that Vineyard believers are caught up in hallucinatory practices would not prove that God does not exist, it would merely show that whether or not he exists, this set of his adherents are not in communication with him in the way that they imagine themselves to be. But the implicit logic of WGTB’s claim of anthropological agnosticism is that this particular study, while it may not endorse Vineyard beliefs about speaking with God, does not impeach them either.

This idea of an implicit agnostic logic in WGTB might seem less speculative when we add the claim that the juxtaposed accounts of the miracle themselves have no single causal structure. This is to say that when reading the book, it is literally undecidable whether the psychological techniques described in the text encourage either the capacity to imagine a God who isn’t there or the ability to listen to a God whose presence is obscured. We are told at times that speaking to God is like having an imaginary friend—that is, an entity that is not there and whose features are purely granted by the person conjuring him up. But at other times, we are told that this is like learning the vocabulary of wine tasting, something that, despite all its pretense, is a way of describing an object that is there and that does have definite features. But what is not going on here is some kind of ambivalence. These moments that seem to lean one way or the other on the existence of God are capable of being rehabilitated for the alternative position. Rather, the argument that I am making here is that WGTB can be understood either as endorsing a logically prior human imagination that creates a flawed, unreal God or alternately as endorsing a logically prior God who is only approachable through exercises of a flawed imagination that has a tendency to be “unreal” in the sense that it is also prone to creating false positives.

This feature of the book became clear to me when, as preparation for writing this chapter, I reread WGTB, but from the hypothetical position of someone who took the existence of God as already given. Reading the book through that prism did not produce moments of frustration or disagreement with the book’s narrative. Rather, it shifted discussions that previously read like psychological compensation for social isolation as being instead discussions on why a relationship with God is a healthier mode of being in the world than the self-imposed alienation of the nonbeliever. Moments that naïvely read as fantasy and playacting instead read as the use of human imagination to dilate the senses such that the ever-present but subtle cascade of divine signs could become both perceptively apprehensible and cognitively legible. It felt as if I had come across a second esoteric text hidden in plain sight on the exoteric surface of the first.

But understanding WGTB in this way would be to hypothesize some kind of duplicity or bad faith. The bad faith, however, was my own. That is, neither reading is the “message” of the book, and I had merely taken my presumptions (either my original nonbelieving understanding or a later “as-if” religious understanding) and introjected them into what I thought was the book’s argument. But recall, the book is not arguing that God is entirely a symptom of a hypertrophied capacity for absorption, or that psychological self-development is the royal road to God. Rather, the book is working against a claim that belief in the contemporary world is not a precarious achievement but merely an unthinking and untroubled endorsement of faith that is blind to evidence. The act of comparing the miracle to itself, or couching the same process in two different parallel framings, achieves that (incidentally, I should note that it is this labor that causes the presence of causal language in WGTB). But this achievement is a negative achievement—not the presentation of an explanatory framework but rather the undermining of another.

Is it possible to argue that WGTB not only “explains” the miracle but does so twice over by offering two frameworks for the miracle that can be set in relationship to each other in two different ways? I would imagine that the answer to that provocation depends on how one understands explanation. It seems that the presence of two different readings that threaten to vitiate each other, and that are presented by the text in a way that makes it impossible to use textual evidence to decide between them, cannot stand as an explanation. Indeed, a multiplicity of explanations that cannot, on their own terms, collapse into a single explanation seems to foreclose explanation to the same degree that Diagram does through its ban. The reasons behind this foreclosure of explanation of the miracle in each case, I would argue, are those discussed in the first half of this chapter: the foreclosure of frontal comparisons, the inability to resort to the logic of the miracle to explain itself, and the ethical risk of an overweening condescension that results from an anthropological demystifying reading (a risk that other extra-anthropological demystifying accounts of the miracle would not share, due to their having a different relationship with the believers whose practices they are interrogating).

NOTE

1. 1. It should be noted that this is not the case when discussing how miracles are conceived of in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (see Bialecki 2022).

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