THE Sunday-night service at a South African Pentecostal church was in full swing. A miracle was taking place! An Asian woman stood up and began speaking in a foreign tongue. ‘Surely it must be some divine revelation!’ thought her fellow worshipers.

But something about this manifestation struck another woman and her daughter as odd. They asked the pastor what the woman had actually said. To their surprise the pastor, who understood the language, admitted that the outburst was both vulgar and obscene. Even more startling was his admission that “there are both good and bad spirits.”

Perhaps you have been taught that phenomena such as speaking in tongues are manifestations of holy spirit. If so, you may find the above experience disturbing. “Bad spirits” speaking in church? Open-minded people truly have reason to question whether this conduct is really from God.

Researcher Barbara Rosen, editor of a book called Witchcraft, has observed that phenomena such as physical convulsions, exercising unusual strength, hallucinations​—often connected with worship—​are all typical of possession by evil spirits. Yet this author states that “hundreds of nominally Christian sects in Africa (and in remote parts of America) still regard trance, reached through convulsions, as ‘the descent of the Holy Spirit’ and structure their worship towards the attainment of this state.”​—Italics ours.

What about modern-day miraculous “tongues”? As shown at the outset, the content of “miraculous” speech may be anything but godly. A former Hindu priest who joined a Pentecostal church further said of worshipers that some at times “even mention the names of Hindu Gods, for example, ‘Siva, Siva, Siva,’ in their shouting.”

Of course, when a church member speaks in a foreign tongue, usually nobody knows what is being said. The apostle Paul, however, said: “Therefore let the one who speaks in a tongue pray that he may translate.” (1 Corinthians 14:13) Seldom is this counsel followed. The babbling certainly bears no resemblance to the orderly manifestations of God’s spirit that first-century Christians observed. It bears the earmarks of a demonic deception.