Speaking in Tongues: Gibberish, Glossolalia or Faith's language?*

Critics deride it as fake, but new research shows that something
aberrant happens in the brain when someone speaks in tongues.

In 2006, a University of Pennsylvania team headed by Andrew B. Newberg
found that the frontal lobe area of the brain usually associated with
language skills and willful control of the body slips into a hypnotic
low gear when someone engages in this form of ecstatic prayer.

"Our findings are very consistent with what people say they are
feeling," Newberg says. "That they are not in charge of what is
happening and are experiencing an intense hypnotic trance like state
supposed to intensify their relation to God."

Newberg, a neuroscientist and co-author of Why We Believe What We
Believe, a book on the biology behind belief, used neuroimaging to track
blood flow to the brain. The study's subjects were five women from the
same Pentecostal church. They were measured twice: as they sang a gospel
song and as they spoke in tongues.

The scans found that when the subjects spoke, the frontal lobe showed
less blood flow and lower activity than it did during the singing.

Newberg previously examined Buddhist monks in meditation and Catholic
nuns in prayer. Their brain scans showed that the frontal lobe lit up
with more activity the exact opposite of the tongue-speakers.

Still, Newberg cautions against using the study as proof that God speaks
to people through tongues.

"It talks about the biological reality of the experience. It does not
address whether there is a supernatural reality," he says. "That
question is still left open."

By Kimberly Winston,

PLEASANTON, Calif. — On a wave of mystical emotion, the man at the front
of the church broke into a language only he and his God could understand.

"Ah le ah ne al la ne," said Bill Siordia, a worshiper at The
Pentecostals of Pleasanton, a small congregation in the San Francisco
Bay Area. With closed eyes and palms raised skyward, he continued in a
whispered rush. "Ma ne ah ne ta la ah ka wa."

Siordia, 44, a warehouse worker, was supposedly speaking in tongues, a
form of verbal prayer scholars call glossolalia. For him — and a growing
numbers of charismatic Christians worldwide — the emotional, hypnotic
mystic experience is a supposed to be a direct means of communication
with God that is a transcendent meditation and crucial part of his faith.

"It is kind of a high," Siordia said later, describing the most common
form of speaking in tongues as an indecipherable expression of personal
prayer and praise. "It is like being with the Lord. I feel that sense
that everything is OK."

This Sunday, Christians will celebrate Pentecost, when the Bible says
God sent a "mighty wind" among Jesus' disciples and they prayed in
unknown languages. "And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit," the
Book of Acts says, "and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit
gave them utterance."

A gift — or a fake?

Though all Christians mark the day, only some speak in tongues. Those
who do describe an immediate, ecstatic and personal experience of God.
Those who do not have called it phony, weird and even dangerous.

"There is tension between people who emphasize gifts of the spirit and
the people who emphasize church authority," says David Roebuck, director
of the Dixon Pentecostal Research Center in Cleveland, Tenn.

"It's a range of issues, from whether you are interpreting the Bible
correctly to people having an experience that the institution cannot
control to a personal dynamic of one group claiming to be more authentic
than another."

At the conflict's heart are differing interpretations of the purpose of
tongues. Some believe tongues and other "gifts of the Spirit," such as
prophecy and divine healing, died with Jesus' disciples. The primacy of
the Bible, they say, cancels the need for such gifts. Other Christians —
known as Pentecostals, charismatics or, more generally, renewalists —
believe those gifts remain available.

"We see it as evidence of the spirit of God within us," says Terry
Baughman, pastor of The Pentecostals of Pleasanton. "We see it as
filling a God-shaped hole in the heart of man. "

According to a recent Pew Forum poll, renewalists are the
fastest-growing religious group, approximately one-fourth of the world's
2 billion Christians. In the USA, 23% of Christians say they are
renewalists.

The largest American renewalist denominations are the Assemblies of God,
the United Pentecostal Church and the Church of God, which together
account for more than 12 million members worldwide. Since the 1960s, the
renewalist movement has leapt from these traditionally Pentecostal
denominations to mainline Protestant and Catholic congregations. There
are tongue-speaking Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Catholics.

Unity or division?

"The gift of tongues unites us," says Walter Matthews, executive
director for the National Service Committee of the Catholic Charismatic
Renewal. Matthews estimates that half a million U.S. Catholics now speak
in tongues, and 10 million have been renewalists at some point. "It is
meant to bring unity in the body of Christ and, by extension, in humanity."

But it can also bring suspicion. In one form of tongues, one person
"translates" the tongues uttered by another, deciphering it as prophecy
— a practice that, in the past, has sometimes split congregations that
disagree on the prophecy's meaning or accuracy. Some can put too much
emphasis on the gift of tongues, critics say, holding it up as evidence
that they are more blessed than those who do not engage in the practice.

"If I say 'If you don't have this experience, your Christianity is
inferior,' that gets very personal," says Roebuck, who, as a member of
North Cleveland Church of God, a Pentecostal congregation near
Chattanooga, Tenn., speaks in tongues during prayer. "That is a very
judgmental statement."

A Baptist dispute

A major battle over tongues has roiled the Southern Baptist Convention,
the largest group of American Protestants. The SBC's International
Mission Board does not accept international missionaries who speak in
tongues in public worship because it is not recognized as a part of
Baptist identity, says spokesperson Wendy Norvelle. Next month, at the
SBC's annual convention, a group of pastors will ask the SBC to
officially determine whether tongue-speaking adheres to Baptist principles.

"Many in the SBC do not want to accept the inerrant word of God when it
comes to praying in tongues," says Dwight McKissic, pastor of
Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, and a leader of the
tongue-speaking Baptists. "They see it as irrational, but faith is
irrational. I think they have chosen to reject it rather than teach it
as God's word."

Will Hall, spokesman for the SBC, says the denomination has no official
policy on speaking in tongues for its churches or individual members.
But there are other signs the practice is gaining acceptance. Dallas
Theological Seminary and Campus Crusade for Christ, two strongholds of
independent Christianity, have done away with restrictions on
tongue-speaking for students and staff.

"I see much more acceptance of it today in America than ever," says J.
Lee Grady, editor of Charisma magazine, which covers the renewalist
movement. "I see groups that had a hard line against teaching it now do
not. There is a relaxing of old tensions."

End Notes:

[Glossolalia:] The unintelligible speech or sounds that are currently
claiming to be a gift of the Holy Spirit. These speech patterns are
commonly associated with a trance state or certain schizophrenic
syndromes. Many primitive tribes and world religions practice glossolalia.