Starbuck Surveys Converts and Religion Becomes a Question Psychology Can Ask

The psychology of religion studies religious conversion, belief formation and reported mystical experience as psychological processes, using survey, case study and later experimental method to describe what is actually happening to a believer psychologically, without adjudicating whether the religious content of that experience is true. Edwin Diller Starbuck, a student of William James, published The Psychology of Religion in 1899, based on systematic questionnaires he collected from religious converts describing their own conversion experiences, giving the field its first substantial body of empirical data and its founding method of studying religious experience directly from the accounts of the people who had it.

The discipline supplies the atlas with a documented psychological account of conversion, religious crisis and mystical experience across traditions, letting common patterns, a period of doubt preceding conversion, a sudden versus gradual onset, be described as psychological phenomena that recur across otherwise very different religious content. The atlas draws on the psychology of religion wherever a described conversion or mystical experience is discussed in terms of its psychological structure rather than its doctrinal content.