Tongues Is Learned Behaviour

Another possibility which could explain the phenomenon is that tongues is a learned behaviour. Most contemporary glossolalia, I am convinced, falls into this category. As we have seen, charismatic leaders like Charles and Frances Hunter hold seminars to instruct people about how to receive the gift of tongues. How can that be viewed as anything other than learned behaviour? The Hunters jump start people emotionally by getting them to shout prayers and praise; they suggest sample syllables to prime the pump; and they encourage people to repeat "funny little sounds." That's clearly not how a spontaneous gift operates. Nor is that kind of tongue-speaking by any stretch of the term a "supernatural" experience. It is not a miracle. It is something almost anyone can learn to do. It is striking that many of the different tongues-speakers use the same terms and sounds. They all speak essentially the same way. Anyone who hears it enough can do it.

In his book The Psychology of Speaking in Tongues, John Kildahl concluded after much study of the evidence that glossolalia is a learned skill. Kildahl, a clinical psychologist, and his partner Paul Qualben, a psychiatrist, were commissioned by the American Lutheran Church and the National Institute of Mental Health to do a long-range study on tongues. After all their work, they came to the firm conviction that it was nothing more than a "learned phenomenon".

A more recent study conducted at Carleton University, Ottawa, demonstrated that virtually anyone can learn to speak in tongues with minimum instruction and modeling. Sixty subjects who had never spoken in tongues or heard anyone else do it were used in an experiment. After two brief training sessions including audio and video taped samples of tongues speaking, all the subjects were asked to attempt to speak glossolalia for thirty seconds. Every subject in the test was able to speak passable glossolalia throughout the thirty-second test, and seventy percent were able to speak fluently.

A man in our church who used to speak in tongues admitted to me, "I learned to do it. I'll show you." Then he started speaking in tongues. The sounds I heard coming from him were exactly like other tongues I had heard from others. Yet the claim is constantly made that each charismatic is supposed to receive his own "private" prayer language.

I overheard a zealous charismatic trying to teach a new believer to speak in tongues. It struck me as odd that this man felt he needed to labour industriously to help this baby Christian receive the gift of tongues. Why a person would have to learn how to receive a gift from the Holy Spirit is baffling. None the less the charismatic movement is full of people who will gladly "teach" you how to speak in tongues.

While researching for this book, I was watching a charismatic talk show on television. One person confessed to having spiritual problems. Another charismatic said to him, "Have you used your tongue every day? Have you spoken in your language every day?"

"Well, no, I haven't," the person admitted.

To which the other one replied, "Well, that's your problem. You have to get into it every day, and it doesn't matter how it starts. Just get it started and once you get it started, the Holy Spirit will keep it going."

That conversation is revealing on several counts. For one, if the Holy Spirit has given someone the gift of tongues, why does that person have to make an effort to get it started?

Within the charismatic movement, there is great peer pressure to belong, to perform, to have the same gifts and power that everyone else has. The "answer" to spiritual problems is tongues. It is easy to see why tongues has become the great common denominator, the universal test of spirituality, orthodoxy, and maturity for charismatics. But it is a faulty test.

Kildahl and Qualben wrote,

Our study produced conclusive evidence that the benefits reported by tongues-speakers which are subjectively real and continuous are dependent upon acceptance by the leader and other members of the group rather than upon the actual experience of saying the sounds. Whenever a tongue-speaker broke off the relationship with the leader of the group, or felt rejected by the group, the experience of glossolalia was no longer so subjectively meaningful.

They also reported a wide-spread disillusionment among the subjects of their studies. People who spoke in tongues realized instinctively that what they were doing was learned behaviour. There was nothing supernatural about it. Soon they found themselves facing the same problems and hang-ups they had always had. According to Kildahl and Qualben, the more sincere a person was when starting to speak in tongues, the more disillusioned he could be when he stopped.

(from Charismatic Chaos by John F. MacArthur, Jr.)

The Grand Poo-Bah says:

The dangerous part of speaking in tongues is that it is addictive and very difficult to give up.