thinking about glossolalia & pentecostal tongues

writing this because i’m catching a wave of sleepiness and it’s 1am, so hopefully i’ll tire myself out enough to go to bed by writing this. typing on my phone so the quality might be dogshit lol

had a sliver of a thought about the parallels between glossolalia and the phenomenon of “speaking in tongues” that sometimes appears in religious contexts; but in this case i’m specifically going to be talking about the pentecostal branch of (US american) evangelical christianity. it definitely appears in other religious contexts but i’m not educated enough to speak on that, nor is it really my place. 

if you don’t know this already, pentecostals have this religious trait sort of that sets them apart from other denominations of evangelical christianity. they practise something they call “speaking in tongues,” where ideally the individual overcome with this phenomenon starts to seemingly speak uncontrollably in, well, “tongues.” supposedly ancient languages and whatnot. the individual almost becomes something like a vessel possessed by their devotion to god and having that channelled through them verbally, i guess. 

see, this is especially interesting to me because i grew up in a pentecostal church. i was also a childhood onset case of schizophrenia. this will be relevant, bear with me. 

i grew up surrounded by people who, in the heightened moment of morning worship service during the whole music portion or whatever, would sometimes erupt in tears while shaking and speaking in what looked to me like utter gibberish. made no sense to me logically, but i was led to believe that this was some sort of transcendent spiritual experience of being ☝️ Possessed By The Holy Spirit! or some shit. 

eventually i did it too. except, it wasn’t authentic. it didn’t come from a place of holy moly the Big G is channelling through me!!!1!1!1!! … 

brother i was probably 8 or 9 years old. 

i was copying the adults around me. shaking, crying, professing Emotional linguistic bullocks, the whole enchilada.

well, that didn’t go over well. but not because it wasn’t believed, oh, no. quite the contrary. let’s just say that’s when i was given the Born Again label. that’s a whole other box of bullshit to cover another time, but the quick general synopsis of what that term means is essentially being seen by your congregation (usually evangelical) as having actually given yourself in your entirety to god or being “delivered.” eughhhhhh. [ insert soul eater excalibur reaction face here ]

of course with this reception i received from these grown adults around me, and with my budding psychotic illness … hoo boy, you best believe that shit was BLOOMING at this point. jesus christ (pun unintended). even though i knew deep down i had initially done it in order to fit in with the crowd around me, eventually i too was fully believing this whole “the holy spirit has possessed me!” rhetoric (which quickly became detrimental and almost resulted in my death later on). 

this whole section of self exposé was not without reason. in the context of my own personal experience with this whole sensation, it makes me wonder if, again, in the lens of SPECIFICALLY pentecostal evangelical christianity, that the whole speaking in tongues phenomenon was constructed at one point years ago as some deliberate publicity stunt to push evangelical christianity into the spotlight through using this show of religious glossolalia as some outward “proof” almost that their devotion to god was so superior that the holy spirit was manifesting through them in a visually undeniable way. or maybe on the contrary someone was in religious psychosis and started doing this shit, and as a herd does, it was picked up on as some gift from god or whatever the fuck.

either way, to me, it comes across very much as a tool of enforcing and embedding control within the church members. weaponised psychosis is what i would call it. a parasite wedged into your consciousness so that you find yourself mindlessly enmeshing with the rest of the congregation’s conglomerate under the guise of being possessed or taken over by the Holy Ghost <- (said with sarcasm). 

i mean, look at it this way. so many evangelical christian denominations push the whole live exorcism shit. and, so much of that said live exorcism shit has been proven to be staged, a publicity stunt, or something else in that same vein. think about the whole live broadcasting clip of the pastor blessing some person with a walker, to which that person starts running around parading the walker in the air whatever claiming to have been healed. that was proven to be staged too. again, most of the shit these churches broadcast live is, because the publicity becomes a method of control over people with vulnerable minds or who are searching for a semblance of hope for their lives who get lured in. 

there has also been analysis done (worldwide even) on the sorts of “words” spoken by people who practise “speaking in tongues,” and it has shown that these people will usually use sounds and syllables that come originally from their own native languages versus anything that could be even remotely tied to substantially sounding enough like a biblical/“holy” language. sometimes american pentecostals will throw in a few typically hebrew sounding bits as well, but again … self explanatory. i do not have a link to this study as of right now but if anyone actually chose to read this and wants it i can probably find it lmao.

everything i’ve said so far feels so surface level and like common sense but at the same time i don’t know if it is common sense when there are so many people who so readily defend this shit with their life. listen man i’m not saying your personal spirituality is bullshit but i AM saying the overarching religious ORGANISATION that you subscribe to, is, on an INSTITUTIONAL level, total bullshit. i could write an entire piece on this alone (and probably will another time) if anyone is interested but again i feel like even that should be common fucking sense. 

i think this did the complete opposite of what it was supposed to do because now i’m wide awake and ended up writing an entire fucking essay on my phone somehow but hopefully this could be an entertaining think piece for one of you scrolling through the blog tab to read while you’re on the toilet. or if you’re on a computer, make sure not to get dorito dust all over your keyboard and mouse while scrolling. probably too late for that anyways since this is at the bottom of the post. sorry lol

godspeed 👍