Who Is Doing Your Thinking?

A small child has no choice but to trust. The adults around her tell her what is safe, what is good, what God is like, and who she is. She cannot check any of it. She does not even know that checking is possible. Her whole picture of the world is borrowed, and for a child that is exactly right.

It is also exactly what makes children easy to sell to. A task force of the American Psychological Association reviewed the research and found that children under about eight cannot grasp that an advertisement is trying to persuade them. They tend to take commercial claims as simple, honest information.¹ Advertisers know this. That is why so much money is aimed at children.

We grow up, and in many ways we grow out of it. We learn that commercials exaggerate. We learn that people have motives. But in a deeper way, many of us never make the move that adulthood asks of us. We stop trusting our parents' every word, and then we hand the same trust to a television network, a political party, a brand, or a church. The reference point changes owners, but it never moves inside.

Becoming an adult, in the full sense, means starting from ourselves. That does not mean throwing away everything we were taught. Much of it is wise. It means testing it. It means building a personal religion and a personal philosophy out of what we have actually observed and found to be true, rather than accepting a package someone else assembled for their own purposes.

The question is not whether we have been conditioned. Everyone has. The question is whether we can step back far enough to see it.

I am not writing this to mock those people. Many of them were probably finding real joy, real relief, and real belonging, and those things matter. I am writing it because what I saw was not an accident. Every element of that service was produced, and each one has a known effect on the human mind.

A kind of hypnosis

What I felt in that room has a name. It is hypnosis, one of the most carefully studied states of the human mind. It is not magic, and it is not a stage trick. The hypnosis division of the American Psychological Association defines it as a state of focused attention and reduced awareness of one's surroundings, in which a person responds more readily to suggestion.² That describes the service closely. Every eye was drawn to the stage. The darkness hid everything else. And for two hours, the room was filled with suggestion.

The state is brought about in three ways, and the service used all three. First, attention is fixed on one person or one place: the stage, the screens, the leader. Second, the thinking mind is lulled by rhythm and repetition until it grows bored and stops checking what comes in. Third, the person lets go into a sense of oneness with the leader or with the group around them. No one in that room was told to go into a trance. No one needed to be. The setting did the work.

Brain scans show what happens inside. A team at Stanford scanned people while they were hypnotized. Activity dropped in a part of the brain that acts like an alarm, the part that decides what is worth worrying about. At the same time, the planning part of the brain became less connected to the part we use to reflect on ourselves. The researchers think this opens a gap between what a person does and their awareness of doing it.³

The study closest to what I saw comes from Denmark. Researchers at Aarhus University scanned the brains of Pentecostal Christians while they listened to recorded prayers. The volunteers were told that some of the prayers were spoken by a healer with special gifts from God. In fact, all of them were read by ordinary Christians. When the believers thought they were hearing the healer, the front areas of the brain that handle doubt and careful judgment went quieter. The more those areas quieted, the more charismatic the listeners judged the speaker to be, and the more strongly they reported feeling God's presence.⁴ The researchers compared this to the way a hypnotized person hands their judgment over to the hypnotist, and they suggested that the same thing may happen with doctors, parents, and politicians.

Rhythm plays its part too. In many cultures, shamans enter trance by listening to steady drumming. When researchers scanned experienced practitioners in that state, they found that the brain had largely stopped processing the drumbeat itself. The sound was so regular and predictable that the brain tuned it out, and attention turned inward.⁵ This is the boredom I mean. A steady beat and one word sung over and over give the thinking mind nothing new to examine. It stops listening, and the experience carries us.

Not everyone responds the same way. Stanford researchers estimate that about two out of three adults can be hypnotized at least somewhat, and about fifteen percent very easily.⁶ That fits what I saw. Some people in that room were swept away completely. Others, like me, felt the pull and could still stand back and watch it.

I want to be fair about one more thing. Hypnosis is not evil in itself. Doctors use it to ease pain and anxiety, and the same focused attention is part of meditation and prayer. Scientists who study hypnosis still argue about whether it is a separate state of mind or a form of ordinary focus and expectation.⁷ Either way, the important question is the same: who is directing our attention, and what are they asking us to accept? In meditation, we direct our own attention. In a hypnotist's office, the person knows what is happening and has agreed to it. In that church, few people would have called what was happening to them hypnosis.

Moving together

Researchers at Stanford had volunteers walk in step, sing together, or move together to music. Afterward the people who had moved in unison felt more like a team and cooperated more with their group.⁸ That much sounds harmless. But a follow-up study at the University of Southern California found that people who had walked in step behind an authority figure became more willing to follow that person's instructions, even instructions to do harm. The researcher pointed out that marching and chanting are still used at political and religious rallies around the world.⁹

The sociologist Émile Durkheim had a name for the feeling a crowd generates when it moves and sings as one: collective effervescence.¹⁰ It is real, it is powerful, and it is why the same tools appear wherever someone wants a crowd to feel one way and act one way.

Saying it again and again

In 1977 psychologists showed that simply repeating a statement makes people more likely to believe it is true, whether or not it is.¹¹ This is now called the illusory truth effect, and it has been confirmed many times. Later work found that the biggest jump in belief comes from hearing something just a second time, and that this happens whether the statement is true or false.¹² Repetition does not make anything true. It makes things feel familiar, and the mind easily mistakes familiar for true.

The same toolkit, everywhere

Once you see these tools, you find them everywhere. The megachurch did not invent them, and it is not the only place that uses them.

Most of us think of television as something we watch. From the point of view of the business, it is the other way around. Television exists to gather an audience, and the audience is what gets sold, to advertisers.

The numbers make this plain. In 2013 Nielsen found that commercials filled about 14 minutes of every hour on the broadcast networks and more than 15 and a half minutes of every hour on cable.¹³ That is roughly a quarter of every hour. The shows are written around those breaks, building to a moment of suspense just before each one, so we stay through the commercials.

Selling feelings, not things

Watch a few commercials with the sound off and ask what is really being sold. Car ads rarely talk about engines. They show open roads and freedom. Beer ads show friendship and laughter. Soap ads show a good mother and a happy home. The product is attached to a feeling we already want, and over time the feeling and the product fuse together. We do not buy the soap. We buy the picture of ourselves using it.

This approach has a founder. Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, took his uncle's ideas about hidden desires and applied them to selling. In his 1928 book, plainly titled Propaganda, he opened by calling "the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses" an important part of democratic society.¹⁴ He meant it as praise.

His most famous campaign came the next year. Women smoking in public was frowned upon, and the American Tobacco Company wanted to sell them cigarettes. Bernays arranged for young women to light up during New York's Easter Parade and presented their cigarettes to reporters as "torches of freedom," a protest for women's equality, with no mention of the tobacco company behind it.¹⁵ A product that harmed health was sold as liberation.

There is a twist that teaches the lesson twice. Historians who went back to the 1929 newspapers found that the stunt itself got far less attention than the legend claims. The story of its great success was largely built later, partly by Bernays himself, and it became one of public relations' most successful products.¹⁶ Even the history of persuasion has been persuaded.

The box in your pocket

The phone took everything television learned and made it personal, constant, and portable. Aza Raskin, the designer who invented endless scrolling in 2006, meant it to save people the trouble of clicking to the next page. He has since said he regrets it. Taking away the natural stopping point at the bottom of a page, he explained, keeps people scrolling long after they meant to stop, and companies had every reason to use it that way.¹⁷ Autoplay does the same thing with video. The stopping points that once gave us a moment to choose have been engineered away.

When a service is free, our attention is what is being sold.

If you want to know how an industry sees people, listen to the words it uses about them when they are not in the room. These are ordinary, everyday terms in marketing and media:

• target audience
• consumers
• eyeballs
• impressions
• capture
• conversion
• retention
• monetize
• whales

A target is something you aim at. A consumer is someone defined by what they use up. Eyeballs are body parts. "Whales" is what some casinos and game makers call the small number of people who spend enormous amounts. None of these words describes a whole human being with a soul, a family, and a life to live. They describe a resource from which money, attention, or loyalty can be extracted.

Religion is not exempt. The prosperity gospel teaches that God rewards faithful giving with money and success. A 2023 Lifeway Research survey found that just over half of American Protestant churchgoers, 52 percent, say their church teaches that God will bless them if they give more money to the church and charities, up from 38 percent in 2017.¹⁸ It is worth noticing that the sharpest critics of this teaching are Christians themselves: Southern Baptists and mainline Protestant leaders have called it heresy.¹⁸ The old warning still stands: "Ye cannot serve God and mammon" (Matthew 6:24).

Giving to God, or giving to people

Most services come to the same moment. The plate is passed, or a number for a giving app appears on the big screens. The giving is presented as worship, a way to show trust in God and to draw closer to Him. A verse often read at this moment is Malachi 3:10, where God says to bring the tithes into the storehouse "and prove me now herewith," and He will "open you the windows of heaven." The message is that money given to the church is money given to God, and that God will answer it.

The prosperity gospel takes this one step further and turns the gift into an investment. The best-known version is "seed faith," taught by the television evangelist Oral Roberts. Money given is a seed, and God will return it multiplied as a harvest. One of the key principles of his book The Miracle of Seed-Faith was to "sow your seed out of your need."¹⁹ In other words, the more you need money, the more reason you have to give it away.

That is why this message falls hardest on the people who can least afford it. Sociologists who studied a Pew national survey found that people with lower incomes and less education are more likely to hold prosperity beliefs.²⁰ A separate analysis of the General Social Survey found the same pattern: the lower the household income, the more likely people were to read the Bible looking for a path to wealth.²¹ Picture a single mother who is behind on rent, hearing that if she gives her last twenty dollars, God will multiply it. If the money does not come back, the teaching has an answer ready. Many prosperity believers hold that the poor are poor because their faith is too small.²² The loss is turned into her fault.

Where does that money go? From 2007 to 2011, the Senate Finance Committee looked into six large television ministries after reports of high salaries, private jets, and Rolls-Royces. Two of the ministries made reforms. The other four gave incomplete answers or none at all. One former employee of a ministry said staff had been warned that God would ruin their finances if they talked to investigators.²³

I believe in God, and I do not believe God needs our money. He made everything. The Bible says so plainly: "For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills.... If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine, and the fulness thereof" (Psalm 50:10, 12). Money can buy a building, a sound system, or a jet. It cannot buy closeness to God. When a man named Simon offered the apostles money for the power of the Holy Spirit, Peter answered, "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money" (Acts 8:20).

When the Bible does tell us where giving belongs, it points to people. Jesus said, "I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink," and then explained, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" (Matthew 25:35, 40). The first letter of John asks how the love of God can live in anyone who has plenty, sees a brother in need, and closes his heart to him (1 John 3:17). By this measure, the way to give to God is to give to the hungry, the sick, and the stranger.

Even the story most often used to encourage sacrificial giving may say something different. In Mark 12, a poor widow puts her last two small coins into the temple treasury, "even all her living." It is usually preached as a lesson in generosity. But just before it, Jesus warns against religious leaders "which devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayers" (Mark 12:40). The Bible scholar Addison Wright argued that, read in that setting, Jesus is not praising the system that took her last coins. He is lamenting it.²⁴ Other scholars still read the story as praise for her devotion, but the warning about devouring widows' houses sits right beside it either way.

There is a plain difference between these two kinds of giving. Money given to a hungry family buys food today. Money given for a neighbor's medicine keeps someone alive. Money given as a "seed" to a ministry promises a return that cannot be checked, from a God who never asked for it, while the people who need it most go without. If giving brings us closer to God, I believe it does so through love for the people in front of us, not through a transaction. Before giving, it is fair to ask the same question we ask of any pitch: who benefits? Does the church show where the money goes? How much of it reaches people in need? A church that feeds the hungry with our gifts is giving to people, and that is a good thing. A pitch that asks the poor to pay for a promise is something else.

Words are symbols. They point at things. The word apple is not an apple, and no one has ever eaten one. Most of the time we know this. But when a word is repeated often enough, with enough feeling attached, the pointer starts to feel like the thing itself. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called this mistake, treating an abstraction as if it were solid reality, "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness."²⁵

We do it all the time. We say "the market wants" or "the economy demands" as if the market were a person with wishes. A brand name becomes a feeling: a soft drink stands for happiness, a sneaker for winning. The word does its work in us without passing through careful thought at all.

The same thing can happen with sacred words. The man Jesus, as the gospels describe him, taught people to love their neighbors and their enemies, to care for the poor, to forgive, and not to store up treasure on earth. That is a demanding, specific teaching. The word "Jesus," sung for two hours under flashing lights, can become something else: a sound that releases a powerful feeling, detached from any particular teaching. Once a word has been emptied that way, it can be filled with whatever the people repeating it want to put there, including messages the man himself warned against.

I am not saying the name is empty. For many people it points to the deepest thing they know. I am saying that any word, even a holy one, can be turned into a switch that triggers a feeling, and that a feeling triggered on command is not the same as understanding. The Deep Study page Words and Meaning explores this more fully.

Conditioning on a large scale is very old. For most of history, religion and political power were joined. Kings claimed God's authority, and state churches taught obedience to the crown along with faith. What people were allowed to believe was decided at the top and handed down.

What changed in the twentieth century was the science and the reach. During the First World War the United States government built a propaganda office, the Committee on Public Information, to rally the public behind the war. Bernays worked in that effort, and afterward he and others carried its methods into business.¹⁴ Psychology, which was supposed to help us understand ourselves, became a tool for steering us.

Radio brought the message into the home. Television added pictures and filled the evenings. The phone put it in our hands every waking hour, tuned to each person individually. At each step the messages came closer, became more personal, and left less silence around them. Silence, it turns out, is where thinking happens.

Waking up does not mean becoming angry at everyone, and it does not mean believing nothing. Cynicism is just another kind of programming. Waking up means stepping back far enough to see what is acting on us, and then choosing. Here are some practical tests anyone can use.

Underneath all of these tests is one skill: the ability to step back from the noise and watch what is happening inside us. Deepermind calls it the Innerscope. With it, we can see the senses being pulled, the ego wanting to belong, the emotions being stirred, and the mind being handed a story. Those are four of the five elements of SEEMS. The fifth, the soul, is the part that can see all of this and still choose for itself.

Building your own

The goal is not to stand outside every church, every store, and every tradition with arms folded. It is to build a personal religion and a personal philosophy from the inside out. Take what you find, from any source: the Bible, the Buddha, science, your grandmother, your own careful observation. Test it in your own life. Keep what proves true and good. Set aside what does not, no matter how loudly or how often it was repeated to you. The pages on Belief Formation and Triggers and Beliefs show how our beliefs were planted and how they can be examined and revised.

As children we looked up to find out who we were. As adults, we look within.