Psychology of Religion

The psychology of religion studies religious experience, belief, and practice as features of the mind and personality, examining conversion, mysticism, prayer, ritual, and their emotional and cognitive workings. Its foundational text is William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), which set the tone for the descriptive, respectful study of religious experience: James distinguished the "healthy-minded" from the "sick soul," analyzed conversion and mystical states in their own terms, and judged religion pragmatically by its fruits in the life of the believer rather than by the truth of its doctrines.

A quite different current runs through Sigmund Freud, who explained religion reductively, as an "illusion" rooted in the projected wish for a protective father, and as a form of collective obsessional neurosis, while Carl Jung, breaking with him, treated religious symbols far more positively, as expressions of the archetypes of the collective unconscious and as vital to psychological wholeness. The twentieth century added the study of religious development (the stages of faith), the psychology of conversion and of religious coping, and the attachment-theory analysis of the believer's bond with God. More recently the cognitive science of religion has sought to explain the recurrence of religious ideas in terms of the ordinary workings of human cognition, our tendency to detect agency, to attribute minds, and to remember "minimally counterintuitive" concepts. The field ranges, in short, from the sympathetic description of the inner life of faith to the attempt to explain religion as a natural product of the human mind.

The field's founding work is William James's study of religious experience, published in 1902 from lectures given in Edinburgh. Its method was to collect first-hand accounts of conversion, mysticism and the divided self, to describe them carefully, and to argue that their value should be judged by their fruits rather than by their origins. It set the terms for everything after, and it is still read.

The middle of the century was thinner, as psychology turned away from subjective report. The revival came from two directions: measurement of religious variables in large survey populations, and neuroscience.

The neuroscientific strand produced the field's most instructive failure. A laboratory reported that applying weak, complex magnetic fields to the temporal lobes induced a sensed presence in many subjects, and the apparatus was widely reported as a device for producing religious experience. An independent group then ran the procedure double blind, with subjects unaware whether the field was on, and found that reports were predicted by the subject's suggestibility and expectation and not by the field. The original laboratory disputed the replication's parameters, and the disagreement has not been resolved.

That episode arrived shortly before psychology's wider reckoning with replication, which has fallen on this subfield as on others, and it is why claims about the neural basis of religious experience should be read with the sample size and the blinding in view.