High on God: How Megachurches Won the Heart of America by James K. Wellman, Katie E. Corcoran, and Kate J. Stockly

Abstract

Reviewed by: High on God: How Megachurches Won the Heart of America by James K. Wellman, Katie E. Corcoran, and Kate J. Stockly Mark Mattes High on God: How Megachurches Won the Heart of America. By James K. Wellman, Jr., Katie E. Corcoran, and Kate J. Stockly. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. xviii + 327 pp. No doubt some readers of Lutheran Quarterly are put off by megachurches as sellouts to showy, manipulative revivalism. In a [End Page 204] word, megachurches are havens for Schwaermerei. For the record, as secular academics, the authors started their multi-year, statistically-based research program investigating megachurches with skepticism. While acknowledging a dark side to megachurches, the fact that some megachurch leaders have committed sexual improprieties while others advocate a "prosperity gospel" or cozy up with unchastised capitalist economics, the authors—quite against their instincts—came to view these congregations as "wellsprings" of life (188). This book is ambitious, offering not only a detailed theory as to why megachurches are successful but also a new take on the sociology of religion. Indifferent to Lutheran worries about Schwaermerei, the authors contend that religious ecstasy is no mere epiphenomenon of religion but instead foundational, and, surprisingly, stimulated not primarily in social dynamics but instead rooted in physiological or biochemical responses in the human body. In contrast to "rational choice" theory, in which religion is seen as the acquisition of a support system better than any cost attached to it, the authors advocate for an "embodied choice theory," which grounds the human disposition for religion in what human bodies either want or reject (xiii). Religion actually affects the body; it offers an "affective pull" on the body prior to any "rational" choice to participate in it (80). Wellman, following René Girard, notes that humans are essentially creatures of desire. Megachurches are quite effective in helping people get "high on God" (x) specifically by assisting the production of oxytocin in the body (273) which produces good moods, energizing people to navigate life. Following Emile Durkheim, the authors see humans as homo duplex craving both individuality and sociality. People desire to participate in something far bigger than themselves (xv), and the fulfillment of this desire creates energy in people. People thereby are fundamentally energy seekers. Religions offer rituals that provide emotional energy and create solidarity by bonding people together in community (2). Indeed, emotional energy comes vis-à-vis communal rituals (6). Megachurches are effective in doing this and so, for the authors, offer a "drug that works." In worship, human bodies are offered "somatic markers" by which bodies remember feelings [End Page 205] attached to prior experiences, such as the ecstasy offered in megachurch worship (10). For the authors, secularism should not be seen as the disappearance of religion, but instead the loss of any one group as having a "religious monopoly" over life-giving rituals. Hence the recent tendency to see culture as overriding biology, that is, that people are defined through arbitrary cultural standards such as gender, sex, or race, is too reductionistic. Instead, for humans, culture is a product of biological evolution and so it is not to be seen as different in kind from nature (15). There is no clear distinction between the biological and the cultural origins of self or society (19). Religion is not to be reduced to merely a cultural phenomenon, some kind of add-on to human nature which could be erased. Instead, evolutionarily speaking, it has been the most effective method to establish cooperation and not merely competition amongst humans. Megachurches are particularly powerful agents in establishing emotional energy since they enhance six important affective desires which the authors elaborate: 1. belonging, 2. awe or sensory stimulation, 3. reliable leaders, 4. deliverance or salvation, 5. purpose, and 6. remembrance of worship via small groups. It is helpful that the authors link megachurches to a long heritage of revivalism beginning in early modernity. They are not a new phenomenon. Lutherans historically have an anti-revivalist legacy that offered education for all levels as an alternative path to discipleship. That said, in consonance with the authors' description of religious experience, Lutherans honor religious experience without elevating it to a status of authority...