Friday, September 02, 2011

Women preacher types in tongues


So I initially came here to post one thing. And now I am no longer posting that one thing and instead posting on another thing. And by another thing, the source can be found here. Basically a big time Pentecostal Televangelist, Juanita Bynum has taken to typing tonges within her own Facebook status...



Normally, I probably wouldn't blink twice about such things, but I stumbled upon the story on a secular "pop news" website which usually could care less about religious matters. And sure enough, other secular websites seem to be picking up on the story......

I don't know what to think yet. Really, I'm dumbfounded. Not that I would ever judge the authenticity of someone's Pentecostal experience, but I'm more so confused about what this implicitly says about social media (Facebook) and it's accommodation of church matters..... I honestly had thought that in many respects Pentecostalism was completely unique in many ways that it could never be imitated online. And the case of "typing in tongues" puts up a challenge to that notion....

2 comments:

'b' said...

Tongues has never sounded like that to me. I'm skeptical, because even if tongues isn't a language that we can understand, it has always maintained linguistic markers that would be able to be accurately represented by letters to form syllables and words.

Furthermore, if one is speaking in tongues and there isn't an interpreter, that person should keep silent.

Unknown said...

I would judge it. Not the person, but the action. I'm sure she thinks she's doing something good or she wouldn't do it, but typing a bunch of random letters is not 'tongues'. Supposedly there are people who truly speak in other real languages.

Chalk it up to ignorance though. It's sad when people are ignorant in their own religion let alone anything else in the world, but you can't judge the religion for it or say the person is mean or evil or some such thing.

I like the honesty in your confusion. Good post.