This is not a fringe practice. Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, in which tongues is central or at least familiar, is among the largest and fastest-growing religious movements on earth—on the order of half a billion people, most of them in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Whatever one concludes about glossolalia, it is not an oddity at the margins.
So what do we actually know about it? It usually is not the dramatic thing some imagine—suddenly speaking a real foreign language one never learned. (That claim, properly called xenoglossy, is a different matter, and does not survive scrutiny.) What tongues-speakers produce is speech-like vocalizing: it has rhythm, emotion, and a kind of word-like flow, but it does not reliably carry stable meaning or grammar the way an ordinary language does. The foundational linguistic study, by William Samarin, concluded that it is a "meaningless but phonologically structured human utterance"—patterned sound. It draws heavily on the sounds and speech habits the speaker already has in their native tongue, favouring simple syllables and a narrow range of sounds. It feels like language without functioning as one. Nor is it a supernatural gift. Nicholas Spanos and his colleagues showed this experimentally: naive volunteers, given a little exposure and encouragement, could produce passable glossolalia on demand. Where it is expected, taught, and socially supported, it behaves like a learned skill.
Here is one point I want to make in my own professional voice, because a clinical description can so easily be mistaken for a diagnosis. Glossolalia is not a symptom of mental illness. As a psychiatrist I would not want anyone who practises it to close this chapter fearing otherwise. The research is consistent: its practitioners are psychologically unremarkable, and Samarin stressed that the behaviour is normal, not pathological. It is an ordinary human capacity, like singing or weeping.
From a psychological point of view, glossolalia is best understood as a learned vocal practice that can, under the right conditions, shade into an altered state of attention. Assemble the ingredients—music, group emotion, high expectation, authority cues, a shared vocabulary of the sacred—and a person can generate vocalizations that feel profoundly meaningful, and may experience the act as a surrender of control. The sense of surrender does have a measurable correlate: in a small neuroimaging study, Andrew Newberg and colleagues found that, compared with devotional singing, speaking in tongues was accompanied by decreased activity in the frontal lobes—the seat of deliberate, intentional control. Many practise it quietly, in private prayer, and describe it as calm or soothing rather than ecstatic. So the phenomenon is broader than revivalist spectacle. But spectacle is where its social force becomes most visible.
Some of the most widely circulated recordings of tongues online are public performances by televangelists, including figures who have held real political access. I will not pretend to be neutral about these. They are showmanship. The performer is on a stage, with lighting and a sound system and a camera, and the display is timed for effect. It is showmanship of a peculiar kind, because there is nothing in it that anyone can check. If a preacher says God told him something, one can at least ask what God said. Here there is nothing to ask about. The sounds carry no meaning, so no one can evaluate them—and the performer knows this perfectly well.
What the display accomplishes is to establish the performer as a channel: someone God speaks through. Once that is established, whatever comes next arrives with the same authority. The appeal for donations. The political endorsement. The pronouncement about what the nation must do. One cannot cross-examine the Holy Spirit. I think that in some cases this is entirely deliberate. A person who can produce these sounds on cue, in front of a camera, and who then asks the audience for money, is doing something other than praying in an unusual way.
The best objection to these performances comes from inside the tradition. It is Paul's. In his first letter to the Corinthians—the founding text for the practice, and the passage to which charismatic Christians themselves appeal—Paul spends a long chapter restraining public tongues-speaking. No more than two or three should speak, he says, each in turn, and only if someone is present to interpret. If there is no interpreter, the speaker "should keep quiet in the church." He ranks intelligible prophecy above tongues, because tongues without interpretation helps no one, and he says he would rather speak five words that others can understand than ten thousand in a tongue. And he warns that if outsiders walk in on a whole congregation speaking in tongues, they will conclude the assembly has lost its mind. Paul saw the spectacle coming almost two thousand years ago and told the church not to stage it. A stadium of people speaking at once, on camera, with no interpreter, is not a loose departure from those instructions. It is the specific thing he prohibited, item by item. By the standard of the very letter that authorizes the practice, the modern performances are out of order.
This is where the social function matters most. Like the miracles discussed in an earlier chapter, and like the costly behavioural markers of the previous one, glossolalia can operate as a signal: it makes the group feel special, chosen, close to the divine in a way that outsiders "don't get." That feeling is intensely bonding. It strengthens loyalty, rewards conformity, and makes doubt feel socially dangerous—almost a betrayal. The experience itself becomes the evidence, and the shared intensity becomes the glue. This is also why argument has so little effect on it. One cannot refute a feeling, and the feeling is the point.
A leader skilled in spectacle and emotional orchestration can turn all of this to darker ends—manufacturing awe, certainty, and the sense that "we are witnessing the sacred." The danger was never the oddness of the behaviour. It is how easily the resulting conviction can be redirected into worldly power under the banner of a divine mandate.
I want to end somewhere other than the danger, though, because glossolalia is also the clearest illustration in this book of what I have been arguing all along. Every chapter so far has made some version of the claim that religion's benefits flow from the frame around a doctrine rather than from the doctrine itself—the relationship, the ritual, the community, the expectancy. Tongues is that argument in its purest form. Here there is no doctrine to be true or false. There is no proposition at all: no claim to assess, no theology to examine, not one word that means anything. And it still works. It still consoles, still bonds, still moves people to tears and to loyalty. Here is a room full of people deeply moved by a language nobody understands, including the person speaking it. If the content were what mattered, this could not happen.
References
Goodman, F. D. (1972). Speaking in tongues: A cross-cultural study of glossolalia. University of Chicago Press.
An anthropological and cross-cultural study arguing that glossolalia is a learned, ritually shaped vocal behaviour, usually accompanied by an altered or trance-like state, and occurring across many cultural and religious settings. Goodman documented the practice in Mexico, Yucatán, and the United States, finding similarities of rhythm and intonation across languages. Her emphasis on trance runs directly against Samarin's linguistic account, and the disagreement between them has never been settled.
Newberg, A. B., Wintering, N. A., Morgan, D., & Waldman, M. R. (2006). The measurement of regional cerebral blood flow during glossolalia: A preliminary SPECT study. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 148(1), 67–71. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pscychresns.2006.07.001
The first functional neuroimaging study of glossolalia. In five practitioners, speaking in tongues was associated with decreased activity in the frontal lobes compared with devotional singing—consistent with the speakers' report of a loss of intentional control—while the sense of self appeared preserved. It is a small and preliminary study, but a suggestive neural correlate of the subjective experience.
Samarin, W. J. (1972). Tongues of men and angels: The religious language of Pentecostalism. Macmillan.
The foundational linguistic analysis of glossolalia, concluding that it is phonologically structured but semantically empty—patterned sound that resembles language without being one—and that it draws on the speaker's native phonology. Samarin stressed that the behaviour is learned, normal rather than pathological, and not reducible to a trance state. His insistence on the second point remains the standard corrective to popular assumptions about the mental health of practitioners.
Spanos, N. P., & Hewitt, E. C. (1979). Glossolalia: A test of the "trance" and psychopathology hypotheses. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 88(4), 427–434. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843x.88.4.427
An experimental and psychometric study testing—and largely rejecting—the claims that glossolalia requires a trance state or signals psychopathology. Practitioners scored within normal ranges on standard measures, and there was no evidence that the behaviour depended on altered consciousness. It remains the strongest empirical case that glossolalia is a normal practice performed by ordinary people.
Spanos, N. P., Cross, W. P., Lepage, M., & Coristine, M. (1986). Glossolalia as learned behavior: An experimental demonstration. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95(1), 21–23. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.95.1.21
A direct experimental test of whether glossolalia must be a spontaneous gift. Naive volunteers with no prior exposure were given brief training, including audio samples, and a substantial proportion produced fluent glossolalia on the first attempt. The result establishes that the behaviour can be learned on demand, without religious conviction, altered consciousness, or divine involvement.
A note on scriptural sources, handled as primary references rather than formal citations: the New Testament contains two distinct phenomena often conflated under "tongues"—the Pentecost narrative of Acts 2:1–13, in which the apostles are understood by speakers of many foreign languages (closer to xenoglossy), and Paul's discussion in 1 Corinthians 12–14, in which the utterance is ecstatic and requires interpretation. It is the latter strand that corresponds to modern glossolalia. Paul's restrictions on public tongues-speaking are at 1 Corinthians 14:5, 14:18–19, 14:23, and 14:27–28.
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