The Psychology of World Religions and Spiritualities

An Indigenous Perspective

Timothy A. Sisemore,Joshua J. Knabb

• Editorial: Templeton Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781599475776
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Religion

This compendium of introductory essays invites scholars and clinicians to better understand people of various faiths from around the world. It is intended to correct the tendency among scientists to study religious behavior without accounting for its human dimension. For example: a psychologist describes a religious ceremony in a certain community as a "sociological phenomenon." Such a technical description is likely to strike members of that community as an attempt by science to explain away their beliefs. This is counterproductive. In order to work effectively and empathetically with people of faith, psychologists should seek an intimate knowledge of how religion operates in the hearts and minds of living, breathing human beings.With this goal in mind, editors Timothy Sisemore and Joshua Knabb have made one of the world's major religions the subject of a separate chapter. In addition, they have arranged for each chapter to be written by a psychologist who practices—or is culturally connected with—that religion. This marks the book's unique contribution to the field: it is the product of people who have lived the world's religions, not merely studied them. By taking such a respectful approach, the book promotes an appreciation for the ways that religious belief animates, inspires, and instructs its adherents. Moreover, the indigenous point-of-view of these essays will help scholars identify their own biases when researching religious groups, allowing them to produce more accurate and holistic analyses. Psychologists understand that religion and spirituality provide meaning and purpose to billions of people around the globe. But the actual experience of these beliefs eludes the grasp of the reductionistic methods of science. With this resource at their side, psychologists in academic and clinical settings will be equipped to understand religious experience from the bottom-up, and honor the beliefs and practices of the people they are trying to help.

PART 1

CONCEPTUALIZING RELIGIONS FOR WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY

TIMOTHY A. SISEMORE AND JOSHUA J. KNABB

SEEING RELIGIONS AND SPIRITUALITIES FROM THE INSIDE

Problems for Western Psychology That Can Be Addressed with an Indigenous Psychological Perspective

Modern technology is wonderful. Having just moved to a new part of the United States, I am frequently trying to find new places. (First-person singular references [“I,” “me”] in this chapter are to Timothy Sisemore.) Modern science makes this easier than ever as I simply dictate my destination to my trusty phone, and it tells me how to get there. While not infallible, the technology is accurate and dependable. In its place, science is a boon to contemporary society.

But my phone has limits. While it will navigate me from place to place based on detailed maps and access to satellites, it is quite useless when it comes to telling me where I want to go. Even more so, it is useless in telling me why I want to get there. If I ask my phone to tell me where I should go, what I should do, or the meaning of the places to which I travel, I ask in vain. These questions are beyond the responses of what a navigation system is designed to offer.

Psychology as a science faces similar limitations. As a discipline it has helped us gain considerable insight into human behavior, from methods designed to peek into the unseen recesses of our minds to a better ability to understand and predict behavior. Science has even given us considerable insight into religious and spiritual behavior and thinking.¹ But the science of psychology is limited when it interprets what is it like to be a person of faith, or to act within a specific cultural context, and can lose perspective on its limitations and overreach its area of competence.

This is seen, as beautifully explained by Dueck in the chapter that follows, when psychology tries to study other cultures scientifically. It can lose its sense of boundaries and actually colonize other cultures when it strives to pursue a global understanding of local psychological functioning. After all, science is a Western way of knowing, and Western psychology views others through its methods shaped by efforts to be objective and agnostic. Indigenous psychology (IP) arose in response to this, arguing that people and people groups should be viewed from within their categories and concepts and not squeezed into the categorical boxes of Western psychology. To state it differently, psychologists have often utilized an etic, outsider, “top-down” approach to studying psychological phenomena, employing purely secular theories that are divorced from the very populations they strive to empirically investigate (Kim, Park, & Park, 2000, p. 66).²

This Western strategy becomes even more problematic when we try to look at religions and spiritualities. If science struggles to understand human cultures, it will have an even more difficult time grasping the nature of beliefs in the transcendent that mark most cultures. When psychologists encounter groups that believe something other than science provides an epistemology, be it a divine being, spirit, ancestors, or tradition, they tend to colonize these “backward” beliefs; a solid indigenous approach seeks to learn and understand from these. For example, Christianity values humility and meekness, yet psychology has pathologized that at times to assert that Christians lack “self-esteem,” for that is the Western value at present (Watson et al., 2003). With this approach, “indigenous knowledge” is viewed as a legitimate foundation for conceptualizing religion and spirituality, rather than merely “auxiliary” to the secular assumptions of Western psychological theories (Kim et al., 2000, p. 65; Kim, Yang, & Hwang, 2006).

INTENTION FOR THIS BOOK

An indigenous approach to understanding all peoples is at the heart of this volume. We have compiled this collection to be a one-stop resource for a thorough orientation to religious and spiritual diversity, covering the major religions and spiritualities as presented from within the cultural framework of such faiths by persons who also are familiar with scientific psychology. The reader thus receives these summaries from a perspective that can be understood by a student of Western psychology, yet spoken in a way amenable to these indigenous faiths. It is an exploration of the psychology of religions and spiritualities that is broken down by religion (not topics) and intentionally gives equal voice to the various faiths (whereas most psychology of religion books built solely on research are imbalanced in favor of Christianity, which has received by far the most scholarly attention—itself a reflection of the Western bias in science). This book also summarizes the available psychological science for each faith system while giving the indigenous context to fill in the areas lacking current research.

Moreover, this book also offers Western psychological scientists ways to better understand the “ideological surround” (Watson et al., 2003) of religious groups and individuals so that Western constructs are not inappropriately forced, like square pegs into round holes, onto indigenous groups. This sets the stage for a more accurate understanding of the groups and better approaches to research these groups while also making a case for the inadequacies of scientism (the overreaching of scientific methods) as a way of understanding them.

Overall, we offer an introduction to the psychologies of religion and spirituality for specific groups, spoken from an inside perspective, and incorporate the current research while opening doors for further and more appropriate research. Here, it is important to mention that the authors or coauthors writing from within each faith system offer one of many possible interpretations. Given that there is no way to fully capture the lived experience of billions of people from around the world, no one indigenous perspective exists for each world religion or spirituality. Rather, our hope is that these insider discussions will serve as a catalyst for subsequent theory building and research from an emic perspective, recognizing that the vast array of diverse indigenous perspectives from around the world can deepen our understanding of the psychology of the human experience.

We wrote this book with three audiences in mind. The primary audience is psychologists and other mental health professionals seeking to gain a working multicultural knowledge of the psychology of the major world religions. These include psychologists and others in practice and in training, as well as the broader group of psychologists in nonclinical settings desiring to be more competent in this field. This volume is also for graduate students to receive a scientifically founded yet culturally sophisticated perspective on persons of faith and thus gain more knowledge in this area. Even undergraduate students can benefit from this work as a cultural resource. Third, this book is written for researchers who may be drawn to a fresh perspective on ways to study faith groups and believing individuals. Finally, this book should find an audience in students of religion in seminaries and other religiously oriented schools, hopefully springboarding a discussion on viewing religions with more care.

PROBLEMS, SOLUTIONS, AND LOOKING AHEAD

For this initial chapter, we examine some of the problems science—particularly psychological science—must address. Like a car’s navigation system, science must concede its limitations but, moving beyond that metaphor, also learn to adapt to better understand the majority of humans who believe in some sense of the transcendent. We briefly trace a history of how science supplanted religious ways of knowing, then consider in detail the limitations of Western psychological science as a way of knowing. Then we survey some approaches to IP that may help bridge this gap and lead psychology to a better understanding of the beliefs, thoughts, actions, and cultures shaped by shared views of the transcendent. We conclude with some clinical implications of this shift in method, framing the following chapters that detail how this applies to some of the world’s major religious and spiritual groups.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE RISE OF SCIENCE

Western science is a relative newcomer as a way of knowing. For most of history up until some 500 years ago, the world was “enchanted” (Taylor, 2007). A realm of the spiritual crossed the boundary into our everyday lives and influenced us. Most people assumed that this enchanted dimension had to be reckoned with if we were to truly understand the way the world really was, and many assumed that the transcendent not only existed but interacted with the material in a variety of ways, such as by revealing itself into the world. Thus, the three major monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—are built on the belief that a transcendent God has spoken into our world, and these faiths draw knowledge from the supernatural. Other faiths and spiritualties have other views on how the transcendent enters the mundane.

In the West, Christianity dominated culture for centuries. Its authoritative text, the Bible, was seen as the primary source of truth and knowledge, with the study of it, theology, being coined the “queen of the sciences” due to its examining God’s revelation to humanity. Science itself was a term used consistently with its original meaning of “knowledge” until the nineteenth century, being applied to any area of knowing. It then came to refer to natural science, or the knowledge of nature, and then to mean science as specifically empirical science (Hutchinson, 2011).

As has been well documented (particularly in the work of Taylor, 2007), the Enlightenment effectively dethroned knowledge as in any sense determined by anything outside ourselves, at least in most of the West, and operated on the idea that we do not need “enchantment” to understand and master the universe. Science arose in the humanistic environment of the Enlightenment, donning a methodology that was committed only to the observable and measurable in an effort to objectify knowledge apart from a belief in enchantment. This new naturalistic methodology would bring about unprecedented progress in technology and multiply knowledge in the physical sciences, revolutionizing industry and even health care.

The areas of science’s impact were largely physical—understanding how the elements of the world act and interact. Emboldened by this success, proponents of the new, empirical, and agnostic methodology set their sights on other areas. Psychology came into view around the turn of the twentieth century (Lamiell, 2018). No less a psychologist than Wilhelm Wundt (2013) expressed concern with the shift of psychology away from philosophy and toward science as it would divorce the empirical from the metaphysical. To borrow again from Taylor (2007), psychology became disenchanted. This became a move into what Lamiell (2018) has called “statisticism,” the effort to explain human experience and psychological functioning by numbers, based on the assumption of science that human psychology can be known in the same way that we know how water boils. The drive for psychology to be deemed an objective science and thus earn respect meant that other approaches to knowing how persons think, feel, and act were essentially abandoned in service to empiricism. Over the past century, statistics have become more and more sophisticated, while it seems we languish in the genuine understanding of human nature. Yet only a few (e.g., Gantt & Williams, 2018; Polanyi, 1962) have challenged its orthodoxy and authority.

A position of holding science as essentially the way of knowing has led to a place where the method itself supplants religion. While those of the enchanted world had religions that were the source of knowledge, science became its own religion in a sense, one that has been called “scientism” (Williams & Gantt, 2018, p. 6). Scientism is the pushing of Enlightenment science beyond its bounds, with the intent of revealing our own humanity to ourselves and the hope of this understanding leading to a solution to our problems as a species. “The key aspect of religious conviction that scientism shares with most organized religions is that it offers a comprehensive principle or belief, which itself cannot be proved (certainly not scientifically proved) but which serves to organize our understanding and guide our actions (Hutchison, 2011, loc. 113).

The survey of this problem in Gantt and Williams (2018) is summarized by Wertz (2018). Scientism excludes mental life from the scope of science, as it is ultimately not observable or measurable (despite attempts to infer mental life from data). Moving beyond scientism will require seeing science as its own project having “teleology, meaning, emotions, values, and communal practices,” which embraces “humility, egalitarian openness, and accountability rather than assumed superiority in relationship to humanities, the arts, professional expertise, and personal experience” (Wertz, 2018, p. 110). We touch on several of these points again later in this chapter.

We would add to this that science’s Western heritage also leaves it ill equipped to consider other cultures of people who do not share its presuppositions and values, points that we see in Dueck’s comments in Chapter 2.

The key issue of science’s role in how we understand the transcendent is that the disenchanted scientist is required to understand the enchanted realm with only the tools of disenchantment available. While important information has come from the psychological study of religion, this fundamental disconnect is prohibitive of genuinely understanding human spiritual life and its encounter with the transcendent.

THE CHALLENGE OF SCIENCE IN CONSIDERING RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY: EPISTEMOLOGY

Science operates on the assumptions that only the observable and measurable can be studied, given its presumption that only objective knowledge that can be corroborated is permitted into the discussion of what is real. Science peels back the subjective aspects of humans attending to nature as best it can, leaving the (virtually) raw data of nature to be comprehended, and in so doing, rendered more useful for human thriving. Ultimately, science prioritizes empiricism above all other epistemologies.

This method of objective observation has been applied to religion since early in the history of psychology. William James (1902/1985) produced what was in many ways the seminal work in the field as he attempted to describe and explain some of the more colorful types of religious experience. Despite his being somewhat sympathetic, his survey was largely lacking in grasping what the experience was like for the person, given the etic perspective of science that he used. While he brings us some insight into these experiences, what we learn is not from within the person’s experience, but as an outside observer not privy to the nonempirical facets of the experience.

In the ensuing years, the psychology of religion has continued the trend of trying to understand human religious and spiritual experience, but largely from the outside in, consistent with an empirical approach. In my (Sisemore, 2015) extensive review of this literature, an impressive amount of information is helpful. The important distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity is an example, as is the insight into spiritual struggle. But the research ultimately falls short of grasping the lived experience of persons of faith. The situation is further complicated when one considers how some of the scholars who have studied religion have had the ulterior motive of dismissing it, proudly looking down at persons who believe from the new faith of scientism that “knows better.” Yet others have approached the study of religion to pro...