I understand you feel the experience is good for you, but I cannot help but associate the practice with the people who practice it.

From my experience as a gay man, charismatic Christians are people who want to do terrible things to me. I experience their values as extraordinarily evil. I experience them as dedicated persecutors.

So you can cite all the statistics you want about how charismatic Christians who speak in tongues are mentally healthy and experience less stress or whatever. Those statistics don’t begin to touch the full picture.

You ignore that charismatic Christians generally hold vicious beliefs about harmless minorities, and are much more likely to than other sorts of Christians.

I can’t ignore that, because I am one such harmless member of one of those minorities.

For that reason I do and must despise charismatic Christians. I do and must despise their practices, including speaking in tongues, which I find to be a deeply suspicious mark of somebody who wants to hurt me.

That matters and must never be left out of the conversation. The fact that speaking in tongue is highly correlated with people who hold terrible moral values must be included in any discussion.