Religion and Psychology

Mapping the Terrain

Diane Jonte-Pace, William B. Parsons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134625345
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Religion and Psychology is a thorough and incisive survey of the current relationship between religion and psychology from the leading scholars in the field. This is an essential resource for students and researchers in the area of psychology of religion. Issues addressed are:
* The Psychology-Theology Dialogue
* The Psychology-Comparativist Dialogue
* Psychology, Religion and Gender Studies
* Psychology "as" Religion
* Social Scientific Approaches to the Psychology of Religion
* The Empirical Approach
* International Perspectives

Part I
Psychology of religion

Section 1
Empirical and cultural approaches

1 Psychology of religion
An overview
David M.Wulff

If we set aside “religious psychology”—the psychology that, in varying degrees, is implicit in the historic religious traditions—the psychology of religion constitutes the oldest form of encounter between psychology and religion. It is also the easiest to define. Strictly conceived, psychology of religion comprises the systematic application of psychological theories and methods to the contents of the religious traditions and to the related experiences, attitudes, and actions of individuals. In this configuration, “religion” is understood not as a system of reflection or scholarship that might actively engage in dialogue with psychology but as a domain of human ideation and activity that may—without its consent—be taken as the object of systematic psychological investigation. In contrast to religious psychology, which remains uncritically submerged in a specific religious worldview, the psychology of religion stands in principle outside of all religious tradition. It is thus often thought to call into question the entirety of the religious life, including the fundamental conviction of having made connection with some higher order.

The impulse toward reinterpretation and reform

Historically, however, the psychology of religion has seldom been carried out at such remove from religious commitment. Rather than conceiving of the field as a disinterested science, most of the earliest proponents saw it as a means of advancing certain religious agendas or of justifying religion as a whole. Whereas the psychology of religion was in some measure yet another expression of the burgeoning, nineteenth-century interest in applying scientific methods in the human realm, it was also a manifestation of the reform-minded Progressive movement and in particular the Social Gospel. Some of the leading figures in the field started out in theology, found it unexpectedly problematical, and then shifted to psychology as a base for reconstructing their conceptions of religion. Their ultimate goal was to make religion compatible with twentieth-century understandings and serviceable to a society that had been profoundly disrupted by the momentous and ramifying changes of industrialization.

Stanley Hall, for example, who, as the founding president of Clark University, established the Clark school of the psychology of religion, had earlier prepared for the ministry. But the increasingly liberal views he developed during his studies at Union Theological Seminary and his work on the streets of New York City finally led him to psychology instead. His interest in religion remained strong, however, expressed first in his studies of conversion and religious development and, later, in his reflections on the figure of Christ. The objective of religion, Hall was to conclude, is not contact with some transcendent realm but adjustment in the human one. His last work in the field, Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology (1917), was intended to convince others of this humanistic point of view.

George Coe, another major contributor in the inaugural period, underwent a similar evolution. At first he expected to follow his father into the Methodist ministry, but his theological studies at Boston University left him troubled by theology’s apparent incompatibility with both scientific method and historical criticism. He shifted, then, to the study of philosophy and world religions and finally to psychology. According to the functional view of religion that emerged out of Coe’s reading of Walter Rauschenbusch and others prominent in the Social Gospel movement as well as his involvement in settlement work and local political reform, the essence of religion lies in the heightening and fostering of personal and social values. Having concluded from his early studies of conversion and mystical experience that the Christian tradition is one-sided in its emphasis on feeling, Coe gave the rest of his professional life to promoting his social theory of religious education, in the department of Religious Education and Psychology that he established at Union Theological Seminary and through a series of books that profoundly influenced several generations of liberal religious educators (Wulff 1999).

Unlike Hall and Coe, Edward Scribner Ames (1910) followed through on his theological education by becoming a preacher. Yet he, too, was deeply influenced by the Social Gospel movement (see Ames 1959) and saw psychology as a way of liberating religion from dogmatic authority and transforming it into a non-theological, adventurous, and scientifically respectable way of dealing with social problems (Ames 1929). As a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and concurrently a minister of the University Church of the Disciplines of Christ, Ames saw the church as “a kind of laboratory for cultivation and observation of the living processes of religion, while the university was a place for their systematic study” (96).

Although in Europe the psychology of religion never threatened to displace theology as it did in the United States early in the twentieth century, even on the Continent the new field was perceived by some as either an alternative to theology or a means of revolutionizing it. The Swiss psychologist Theodore Flournoy, for example, was another early contributor who started off in theological studies; but he dropped out after only a semester and turned to medicine instead. Much like Coe, he found theology to be filled with unnecessary intellectual difficulties (Le Clair 1966:xvii). Later on, when Flournoy (1903b) published a collection of brief religious autobiographies, he concluded that emancipation from traditional theological doctrine is for some people a prerequisite for the development of an inner religious life. In the classic principles that he laid down for the psychology of religion, Flournoy (1903a) carefully excluded theological presuppositions, most notably assumptions about the nature of the religious object. At the same time he advocated the broadest possible application to religion of the diverse perspectives of psychology. In his subsequent case study of “Cécile Vé,” Flournoy (1915) further illustrated how a deepening faith can become increasingly alienated from traditional religious forms at the same time that he demonstrated the possibility of a non-reductionistic psychological understanding of exceptional religious experience.

Georges Berguer, who was the leading figure in a French eclectic tradition inspired by Flournoy and centered in Geneva, not only completed his theological studies but also became a pastor and then a professor in a Protestant school of theology. Yet, like the others introduced here, he saw psychology as an invaluable aid for reinterpreting religious history, symbols, and experience. Noting in particular the regrettable mythologizing of the life of Jesus, Berguer (1923) argued that what is ultimately asked of Christians is not dutiful belief in certain miraculous events but a dying and rebirth of the individual self. Thus, for Berguer, psychology offered a means of promoting a deeper and truer faith.

The critique of religion as irrational

There were other early contributors, on both sides of the ocean, who were far less interested in reinterpreting religion than in demonstrating its irrationality. One such psychologist of religion was James Henry Leuba, who, as a young man, immigrated to the United States from Switzerland and eventually wrote a doctoral dissertation on conversion under Stanley Hall’s direction. Leuba is best known for his questionnaire investigations of belief in God and immortality among scientists and historians. He found that traditional religious belief tended to be low among these scholars, especially among those most knowledgeable about biological and psychological processes and eminent in their respective fields. Having noted the sheer improbability and pettiness of much religious content, Leuba (1925) set about demonstrating that mystical experiences can be accounted for in terms of basic principles of psychology and physiology, both normal and pathological. Yet even Leuba (1950), who especially regretted the inhibitory effects of conservative religious views on scientific progress, postulated a spiritual urge in humankind and proposed the founding of non-theistic religious societies.

In the inaugural period of the field—that is, from the 1890s to the 1920s—it was Sigmund Freud who was most famously thoroughgoing in his critique of religion. Equating it with fervent belief in a father-god and careful observance of obligatory ritual, Freud viewed religion as an effort to reclaim, in moments of vulnerability, the protective care of the seemingly omniscient and omnipotent father of early childhood. The longing for the father, which Freud said was the origin of every form of religion, is marked by deep ambivalence, however, given the vicissitudes of the Oedipus complex. That is to say, the beloved father eventually becomes an object of resentment, fear, and guilt as well. Thus, only through obedient submission to the will of God can the devotee restore the long-lost relationship with the infantile father. Observing religious ritual’s seemingly compulsive character and the devotee’s proneness to feelings of guilt and to fear of divine retribution, Freud concluded that religion is a defensive maneuver akin to neurosis, a wish-fulfilling illusion that is dangerous for individuals and society alike. Only by abandoning religion and relying instead on science and reason, declared Freud (1961), can humankind grow into maturity and escape the oppressiveness of a society that operates through religious sanctions and rewards.

Systematic descriptive approaches

If the dominant trend in the early psychology of religion was toward the criticism and reconstruction of religion, there were nevertheless concurrent impulses toward more disinterested perspectives. William James, too, had undertaken a critique and evaluation of religion in his monumental The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), in an effort to justify religion in the eyes of his fellow intellectuals; yet he inexorably combined this agenda with two others: an empathic-descriptive exploration of religious experience and an explanatory account of it. These three agendas effectively established the fundamental trends in the field ever since: (1) systematic description of religious experience, ideation, and practice, both ordinary and exceptional; (2) theories of the origin and meaning of religious content and expression, in individual lives and in the human species as a whole; and (3) research on the fruits—the personal and social correlates—of the varieties of religious attitudes and experiences.

Both in James’s day and in ours, the Varieties has been most highly regarded for the striking descriptive material that James carefully assembled to make religious experience accessible to the understanding of outsiders. Convinced as he was that ordinary piety is little more than imitation and dull habit, he features excerpts from personal documents written by persons—some famous, others not—who were subject to exceptional religious experiences. To help the reader understand such experiences, James places them in their personal and historical contexts, compares them to analogous and often non-religious phenomena that are more familiar and better understood, and adds his own incisive yet sympathetic comments that help to drive home the crucial point or distinction he wishes to make. Himself a professed outsider to such experiences, James hoped through the testimony he gathered to make transparent their inner meaning and logic, if not also their value, for individuals as well as for society.

Among those who greatly admired James’s sympathetic approach but took exception to his emphasis on extreme and even pathological cases was James Pratt, who completed a dissertation on the psychology of religious belief under James at Harvard. Likewise accenting description, Pratt (1920) championed the value of ordinary piety and explored with exceptional sensitivity such phenomena as religious beliefs, symbols, and ritual, all of which James was inclined to dismiss. And just as Pratt valorized the gradual and imperceptible “moral” type of conversion over James’s “merely emotional” type, so he found greater value in commonplace mild mystical experiences than in the rarer—and in Pratt’s view, dangerous—extreme forms that James favored. An authority on Eastern religious traditions who was thoroughly acquainted with the international literature on the psychology of religion, Pratt offered a rare model for systematic work in this field.

A precarious field in decline

In Europe, the decade during which Pratt labored on his Religious Consciousness (1920) produced several other classic works in the descriptive tradition, including Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy (1950), Friedrich Heiler’s Prayer (1932), and, from the Dorpat school of the psychology of religion, founded at Dorpat University in Estonia, Karl Girgensohn’s (1930) weighty tome on the psychic structure of religious experience (Wulff 1985). But the ominously shifting social and political climates in both the United States and Europe were shortly to bring the promising inaugural period of the psychology of religion to a close. In America, the devastation of World War I and the subsequent economic crises dealt a death blow to Progressivism and fostered a resurgence of fundamentalism. In both Europe and the United States, the highly influential dialectical theology of Karl Barth and Emil Brunner succored a postliberal theocentric perspective that discouraged the interest in religious consciousness that the psychology of religion had promoted. More than that, it unequivocally rejected the field as offensively, reductionistic (Wulff 1997, 1998).

Religious experience was shut out from the side of psychology as well. The behaviorist movement, which caught fire in the 1920s and rapidly spread through academic circles in the United States, ruled out ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Introduction: Mapping Religion and Psychology
• Part I: Psychology of Religion
• Part II: Religion In Dialogue With Psychology