To Judge or Not to Judge?: Ritual, Culture, and Humanity at Asbury

I didn’t think I’d want to write about it, but it has came up in my social media again and again. Was it authentic? Was it theologically sound? Was it good for the church? These questions were quickly followed by those saying, “Leave it alone!” “What’s the harm?” and “Who are you to judge?” I’ve seen articles and substacks from such folks as Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber, New Testament professor Craig Keener, commentary and reporting from everyone from theatlantic.com to CNN to The Tucker Carlson Show.¹ Combined with all the folks in my own circles who wanted to talk about it, it was inescapable.

Even as the President of Asbury University, Kevin Brown, announced that the “Asbury Outpouring” (aka the Asbury Revival) would be moved off-site, this particular moment leaves us with the questions that emerged at the start. Was this a “real revival?” Was it “authentic?” And “who are you/we to judge?”

As an anthropologist, words like “real” and “authentic” always perk me up. These are terms loaded with meaning that beg to be unpacked. Indeed, I would say the whole Asbury event was loaded with meaning to be unpacked. We who viewed it from afar are limited in much of what we can say (at least, we should be saying), but there is a bigger question than just this Asbury event.  What does it mean to judge a spiritual event as “real?”

I recall once leading worship at my small, predominantly white congregation where we had made an explicit commitment to be multiracial and multicultural. It was clear (to me, anyway) that our worship still reflected a largely Euro-American, Reformed-evangelical aesthetic, so one morning I tried to bring in elements from the Black church as best I could. I invited people to speak out during worship. I urged people to clap and shout. At one high point in the music, I called out, “Everybody raise your hands!”

I learned, after the service, this was not appreciated by several of my white brothers and sisters. These folks complained I was causing them to be “inauthentic.”  If the Holy Spirit commanded them to raise their hands, that was one thing. But for the worship leader to be so pushy? Just no.

It was clear to me then, and many times since, that many Christians believe that for something to be “authentic” it must feel supernatural, almost inexplicable, and perhaps look extraordinary. The urge to engage in any particular practice must come from something internal (ideally surprising), preferably not influenced by anything in the external environment, ideally inexplicable from any human standpoint.

This desire to distinguish the so-called real/divine impulse from the human or cultural one has come up for many who commented on the Asbury event. For example, in response to a tweet from Christian writer David French calling the Asbury revival “inspiring and moving,” the first commenter wondered, “I’ve seen collective joy and dancing celebration in many settings, often not religious at all. Is there something theologically unique here?” The second asked, “how can you tell the difference between people overcome with a sensation they falsely attribute to a divine being, and people overcome with a sensation they correctly attribute to a divine being?” I can’t say if these are Christians asking these questions, but the approach seems familiar to what I have encountered in my fellow Christians everywhere: for a spiritual experience to be authentic it must be extraordinary, unfamiliar, and—as far as possible—disconnected from my own emotions or free will. I would argue that this way of thinking stems from a false dichotomy of body and soul, insisting on acts of the Spirit to be wholly foreign to our lives as humans. Instead, we should not be surprised when spiritual phenomena look ordinary, nor should we expect a bright line between our humanity and the work of God. These things are often closely bound up together.

As a Christian anthropologist, I start my thinking not with an anthropological approach, but an explicitly Christian one. That is, I start with the question of how the Bible speaks of those things we call spiritual. The Bible certainly counterposes “the Spirit” to “the flesh” in many instances; there’s no question that when God is called a Spirit (Jn 4:24) we are to understand that God does not (apart from Jesus) have a bodily form. But we know that we’re also not meant to always equate the spiritual with “non-corporeal” or “intangible.” In I Cor. 15:44, Paul writes of the “spiritual body,” but makes the comparison with Jesus’ resurrected body. While Jesus’ post-resurrection body was certainly different than the earthly body, it was critically not immaterial and non-corporeal.

This division of the spiritual/earthly into transcendent/immanent or immaterial/material is a legacy of Platonic dualism and the Enlightenment. In the evangelical tradition, this split has often led to a strong emphasis on the rational mind over all those things considered “of the body,” such as emotion, sensation, and response. Indeed, things of the physical body, and the physical world, have become equated with “the flesh,” or those parts of us that are not to be trusted (i.e., our sinful nature.) This evangelical Gnosticism, as Abigail Favale has called it, may lead us to categorize virtually all of what makes us human—our feelings, sensations, even our words—as unspiritual.²

I see this dichotomy among my students who often classify anything particular, specific, and visible to be unspiritual. Culture, and the products of culture, are clearly human. We know they’re made up. Moreover, culture is specific, dynamic, and often limiting. Therefore, their thinking goes, culture is that which gets in the way of true spirituality and the real Christian life. We should, they often aver, read the Bible seeking to distinguish that which is “merely cultural” from that which is universal.

This thinking is, however, an unbiblical way to consider how culture matters in human life. Culture is spiritual, in the sense that language, categories, relationships, and creativity—all things we would call “cultural”—existed in a perfect way before the fall, and, according to the visions of St. John, will exist in a New Heaven and New Earth. God created humans with the capacity for cultural creation in our pre-fallen state, and we’re meant to have these in a redeemed world (Rev. 7:9). Jesus, in his spiritual body, continued to participate in, reflect, and engage the culture in which he lived. To imagine that “the spiritual” can only refer to things that are not cultural, not embodied, not human, is to mis-categorize the cultural, particular, and material as wholly sinful.

This point brings us back to the question of the revival/outpouring at Asbury. What I saw in that moment was both something of the spirit—of God, reflecting his goodness and peace—and a cultural expression of religious life, a ritual phenomenon that drew on the historical meanings of these actions as we (or more specifically, the students at Asbury) have come to understand them. I see no tension between saying that it was both a cultural phenomenon, driven by desire, longing, and emotion—a “mass hysteria” as it could be classified by Freud, or “collective effervescence” as Durkheim would call it—and a work of the Holy Spirit, a real spiritual event in which God was richly at work. Though the Spirit often does move in ways that are radically surprising and new, just as often God draws on us as encultured beings and works within a familiar historical and cultural context to make himself known.

If the standard of an authentic spiritual event is always a talking ass or a burning bush, or a strong personal compulsion as to be irresistible or inexplicable from a human standpoint, we are drawing our circle too tightly. God has often used familiar settings—a stable, a public sermon given in a familiar style, a traditional religious meal—and familiar, explicable, understandable human desires and actions to reveal truth and grace to the world.

There is no doubt that religious rituals and emotional responses can be manipulated and abused, and there are good reasons to question and discern how events dubbed “works of the Spirit” are affecting those participating, particularly the vulnerable. Asking questions about the good of such events is important because we know God is Good. But separating those things that are “real” from those that are “fake” by imposing criteria of extraordinary spectacle or supernatural phenomena is to impose on God a manner of action that is only a part of how He has worked in human history.

We are called to enjoy God in our humanity, history, culture, and context, not to step outside of it. The rituals and patterns of religious life that we know—that seem familiar and even somewhat expected—are not evidence that something is not spiritual. We should not be surprised when He meets us where we are in the ways that look ordinary, normal, and human. After all, in God’s grandest manifestation of all, the undeniably spiritual event of the incarnation, God could not have come in a more ordinary, normal, and human way.

1. Nadia Bolz-Weber, “On longing and the Asbury revival,” The Corners by Nadia Bolz-Weber (blog), February 19, 2023, https://thecorners.substack.com/p/on-longing-and-the-asbury-revival; Craig Keener, “Opinion: What is Revival—and is it Happening at Asbury?” The Roys Report, February, 16, 2023, https://julieroys.com/opinion-what-revival-happening-asbury/; Thomas Lyons, “When a Christian Revival Goes Viral,” The Atlantic, February 23, 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/asbury-kentucky-university-christian-revival/673176/; AJ Willingham, “A nonstop worship gathering at a Kentucky school echoes an old Christian tradition,” CNN, February 18, 2023, https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/18/us/asbury-revival-christian-what-is-cec/index.html, Tucker Carlson, “What I saw at Asbury, Biden’s $1 trillion handout, and more from Fox News Opinion,” Fox News, February 17, 2023, https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/what-saw-asbury-biden-1-trillion-handout-more-fox-news-opinion
2. Favale, Abigail Rine. “Evangelical Gnosticism.” First Things 283 (May 2018): 13–15.