I’ve been preparing for my Lecture for LecturesOnTap, and I recently changed my approach.

I realized that the divide we often perceive between religious practitioners and scholars comes, in part, from the ways we label and reduce experiences. We give things names, attach frameworks, and suddenly the richness of what’s happening can feel flattened.

I want to operate within the frameworks I know best, to demonstrate this point.

Take a snake handler who is described as being “moved by the Holy Spirit.” There are many ways to interpret that. You might see it as the authentic, true movement of the Spirit. Or you might argue, as a scholar might, that physiological or psychological factors (dehydration, emotional stimulation, an adrenaline spike) could account for the behavior.

What I’m realizing as I continue my research is that these interpretations aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. Whatever label we attach, whether it is spiritual, physiological, or emotional, the experience itself happened, and it matters.

I fear we overemphasize the establishment of “truth” in these matters. And by “we,” I mean both scholars and practitioners, and everyone in between. I tend to side with the scholars when it comes to establishing a form of unquestionable fact: something repeatable and verifiable.

Yet the waters I wade in feel murky, because the human experience rarely fits neatly into repeatable frameworks. The challenge, and the beauty, lies in acknowledging both the lived reality and the interpretations we layer onto it.

I’m learning that this is the true joy of my research: everyone involved is merely explaining things in the best way they know how.

Take my own experience. One Saturday night in March, deep in Appalachia, I was bouncing my knee and swaying to music in a snake-handling service. I recorded the conversation Otto (my friend who attended with me) and I had on the way home. Every time I listen, I laugh.

The academic is broken in that recording. For once in my life I was at a loss for words. I kept saying things like "something about tonight felt different." Oh dear Chase, this is poor scholarship!

Thankfully, I can return home and attempt a scholarly interpretation of the experience. The room was hot, and thermoregulatory stress likely contributed to my physical agitation. My collar was tight, increasing discomfort. The music was loud, layered with guitar solos and rhythmic chanting, probably engaging both auditory and motor cortices.

And yet…in the moment, I was just bouncing my knee, swaying, and thinking, “Something about tonight feels different.”

There it is: the same body, the same environment, interpreted two ways at once, first as raw sensation, then as a complex interplay of physiology, neurology, and environmental factors. Must these interpretations be exclusive? Can’t the feeling and the analysis coexist, each revealing a different facet of the same event?

The next morning, me and another member of the congregation both had bad feelings in our stomachs. He told me his was because his brother had been hospitalized, and he wasn’t sure his brother was “right with God.”

My bad feeling? That came from a bad batch of chicken alfredo that had kept me up all night with food poisoning. Poor Otto was just trying to sleep.

You could test my stomach and prove, in a repeatable experiment, that the chicken was undercooked. In that sense, my experience could be called more “true.”

But neither of our experiences was more “authentic.”

He felt pain in the same way I did. We can both cast our minds back and remember those bodily sensations. Both experiences were real—even if only one could be measured in a lab. Just as my bad chicken created real suffering, he experienced equally real suffering. What we call it, spiritual, physiological, emotional, is a layer we add afterward.

In the end, the joy of this research is realizing that everyone, scholar and practitioner alike, is doing their best to make sense of experiences that are, in themselves, indisputably real.

So who’s to say what’s real? Me, my stomach, the Holy Spirit, or all of the above? 

Maybe it doesn’t matter.