So far we have been considering religion in very general terms. Now we will redress the balance and get down to looking at the different facets of religion, one by one. A series of scholars have set out slightly different lists of the various facets of religion, but I will work here with the fairly simple one set out in Chapter 1. So, the next three chapters will look in turn at religious experience, practices, and beliefs, starting in this chapter with religious experience.

William James

We will start this chapter historically, looking once again at William James's Varieties of Religious Experience (James, 2012/1902). It has undoubtedly been a successful book, probably both James's most widely read book, and the most widely read book in the psychology of religion. Despite that, it has always been controversial and much criticized.

James had an ambivalent attitude to religion, being generally sympathetic to it and certainly respectful of it, but he was not a regular church-attender or able to make full creedal assent. His book is, on the face of it, a scientific study of religion, but James perhaps hoped that it would also be a scientific defense of religion. He remarked that writing the book was in itself a religious act.

The first chapter, as we have already seen, is a rebuttal of materialism and “nothing but” reductionism. In the next chapter, “Circumscription of the Topic,” James sets out his program. It is notable that he proposes to focus on religious experience, apparently regarding it as foundational to all other aspects of religion (sociocultural, cognitive-credal, etc.). It is a later flowering of the new turn in theology initiated by Schleiermacher (1958/1799), which focused on the feeling of absolute dependence and grounded other aspects of religion in experience. In emphasizing experience, James is probably focusing on the aspect of religion most congenial to him. It also enables him to emphasize religious universalism, which was also clearly attractive to him.

The emphasis on experience is given an extra twist by James's individualism, which, he says, is founded on feeling. That emphasis on individualism is reflected in his definition of religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (p. 31).

Any book on psychology and religion needs to begin by considering what is meant by “religion” and by “psychology.” As it is intended that this book should give more attention than most comparable books to conceptual issues, it is especially important to consider these two key terms. Neither is straightforward. Having done that, we will need to consider ways of bringing them into relation with each other.

What Is Religion?

The concept of “religion” has changed massively over the centuries, and it is really only since the latter part of the nineteenth century that having a religion has come to refer to the extent to which someone adheres to a faith tradition, and to be contrasted with non-religion. Before that, someone's religion (religio) might have been his or her pattern or rule of life. “Religion” is used in this book as a shorthand for “religiosity” or “religiousness” and is contrasted with non-religion.

“Religion” has had slightly different meanings in different cultures and historical periods. In most countries, Christianity is an elective religion, that is, people opt in or out of it. The same is probably true of Western Buddhism. However, most other religions are closely intertwined with cultural identity (rather in the way that being Protestant or Catholic in Ireland is intertwined with cultural identity). To be Jewish, for example, is as much a matter of cultural or racial identity as of what is now thought of as “religion.”

“Religion” also has different connotations in a culture in which everyone is religious, from one in which religion is contrasted with non-religion. The psychological study of religion has largely been carried on in the latter kind of culture, and so the psychology of religion is largely concerned with different aspects of religiousness or “religiosity.”

Though there are many religious traditions around the world, religion has been most extensively studied from a psychological point of view in the United States and in Europe, where Christianity predominates. It has to be admitted that, so far, the so-called psychology of religion is largely the study of American and European Christianity, and mainly Protestant Christianity. There is no reason in principle why it should be limited in that way. In fact, it would greatly enrich the psychology of religion if it included more cross-cultural psychology of religion, and there are promising trends in that direction.

I hope that this book does what any survey of the psychology of religion and spirituality needs to do, and gives an overview of what psychology can tell us about them. I believe it does that in a reliable and up-to-date way, and does it concisely and fairly comprehensively. I have tried to write in a way that assumes no background in psychology and will be accessible to theologians, philosophers, sociologists, church leaders, and the general public.

I have not tried to give a reference to scientific research for every factual claim made here; that would have turned it into a different kind of book. However, I hope that every factual claim made here is one that could be substantiated in that way; there are always references to good secondary sources that go into particular research studies in more detail than is possible here. Where I have speculated, I have tried to make clear that is what I am doing, and I have only offered speculations in which I have a reasonable amount of confidence.

“Religion” and “spirituality” are related and overlapping topics, and I welcome and endorse the recent trend to extend the psychology of religion to include the psychology of spirituality as well. So far, there is less psychological research on spirituality than on religion, but that is rapidly changing. Though I have tried to summarize what psychology can tell us about religion and spirituality, I have tried to do more than that. To be specific, I have tried to do three additional things.

First, I have tried to offer a critical appraisal of current psychology of religion, and to indicate what current lines of enquiry seem to me to be most promising to pursue in the coming period. I believe that several potentially important topics are not currently receiving the attention they deserve. I have tried, to some extent, to stand outside the current preoccupations of people working in the field, and to ask what would most interest people not working in the field.

Second, I have tried to attend to conceptual issues. These are hugely important in every academic discipline but are often ignored. They are certainly important in the psychology of religion. My intention here is to move to-and-fro between conceptual and empirical material, showing how there can be fruitful interplay between the two.

This chapter will focus on how psychology can be used to help understand religious doctrine, especially its personal and human significance. It will focus specifically on Christian doctrine, as an example, though parallel remarks can be made about doctrine in other faith traditions. We will look first at the contribution of psychology to the interpretation of scripture.

Psychology and Scripture

An important religious application of psychology involves using it as a tool for the interpretation of scripture. There has long been considerable interest in the use of the social sciences in biblical interpretation, but more recently there has been growing interest in the use of psychology. Wayne Rollins (1999) provided a helpful overview of such work, and the four volumes of Psychology and the Bible edited by Ellens and Rollins (2004) provide a good sample of some of the better work. Rollins and Kille (2007) have edited a helpful anthology.

It is often assumed that psychological exegesis is bad exegesis, as the leading Testament scholar, Gerd Theissen, acknowledges in his impressive psychological study of St. Paul (Theissen, 1987). I submit that that need not be the case; it is not difficult to set out guidelines for avoiding the worst pitfalls of psychological exegesis.

First, psychological exegesis should build on what is known in biblical scholarship generally about the texts being interpreted. If it ignores that, or gets it wrong, it will be unconvincing. Second, it should recognize that psychology is diverse and contains different subdisciplines. Various approaches to psychology may elucidate different aspects of a passage of scripture. Both of those points are well illustrated by Theissen in his work on St. Paul. For each passage of St. Paul that he considers, he first does a text analysis and then a “tradition analysis,” giving a survey of issues that have been raised in the interpretation of the passage. Only then does he bring in psychology, and when he does so, he looks at the passage from three psychological perspectives: learning theory, psychodynamic psychology, and cognitive psychology.

Using a variety of psychological perspectives also helps guard against another pitfall with psychological exegesis, which is making overconfident claims. Particular problems arise with claims made on the basis of psychoanalysis, which itself has a somewhat problematic status, as we saw in Chapter 2.

We will now turn to studies of religion from the perspectives of neuroscience and cognitive psychology. It is a relatively new area in the psychology of religion and one that has recently aroused much interest.

Neural Reductionism

First, let us dispose of the bogey of neural reductionism. It is an issue raised by William James (2012/1902), who devoted the first chapter of his classic Varieties of Religious Experience to this issue, which he called “medical materialism.” The book is based on James's Gifford Lectures given at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902, and it has become the classic text of the early days of psychology of religion. James had propounded a rather materialist theory of emotions (see Dixon, 2006), but clearly he wanted to be less materialist about religion. He made an important distinction between two kinds of judgments, existential judgments concerned with how something originates and spiritual judgments concerned with its value. It is a version of the well-known distinction between fact and value. James's point is that one cannot be reduced to the other, and that knowing how religious experience arises does not settle questions of its value and significance. He is surely right in his general point that admitting that spiritual experience has an organic basis does not invalidate it as spiritual experience, a point of much contemporary relevance. He is also scathing about the then fashionable survival theory of religion (which has echoes in current evolutionary theory of religion). James's chapter still repays careful study, but then he is the most distinguished philosopher ever to have worked on the psychology of religion.

There is no justification for using research about the role of the physical brain in religion to reach reductionist conclusions about religion. Equally, it is worth emphasizing that religious believers have no reason to be disconcerted by research on the role of the physical brain in religion. From a theological point of view, the brain is part of God's creation. If there is a God, and he wishes to reveal himself to humanity through religion, no theological argument suggests that God would want somehow to bypass the physical brain. It is often assumed in these debates that religious people are committed to a dualistic view of the human person.

In this final brief chapter, I will draw together three themes that have recurred through the book.

The Complexity of Religion

The first is about the complexity and multidimensionality of religion. In some ways, this is already widely recognized. Almost every leading researcher in the field would endorse the value of using multidimensional measures. What I think is largely lacking and currently needed is a theoretical perspective that leads to differential predictions about various facets of religion. We need a theoretical basis for predicting when dissociations between facets of religion are going to occur and what the consequences of those dissociations will be.

There are currently rather mixed feelings in the field about the categories of intrinsic, extrinsic, and quest religious motivations. However, despite the conceptual and methodological complexities that work on those categories has run into, it has at least provided a coherent approach to research on different types of religiousness. We badly need other comparable research programs.

I suggest that the distinction between internal and external religion may provide that. External religion is mere religious affiliation and activity. Internal religion is concerned with private experience and heartfelt inner commitment and is close to spirituality. External religion can exist on its own or in conjunction with internal religion. To put forward some specific hypotheses, I suggest that (i) internal religion has a stronger biological basis, whereas external religion is largely a cultural phenomenon; (ii) internal religion makes more of a contribution to personal change and adjustment than external religion; and (iii) internal religion will be less affected than external religion by any future trends toward secularization.

I also suggest that the psychology of religion should pay more careful and critical attention than it has so far to the phenomenon of conservatism, and how that relates to religion. Conservatism seems to have a relationship to religion that is in some ways parallel to that between spirituality and religion. Another important reason for attending to the impact of conservatism in religion arises from its current dominance. Unless researchers adopt a deliberate strategy of distinguishing conservative from more liberal forms of religion, they may find that they are actually just studying conservative religion when they believe they are studying religion more generally. It seems that liberal religion is currently going underinvestigated because it is swamped by conservative religion.

Religious people differ greatly from one another, so much so that you really cannot put them all in the same category. One of the main differences between the sociology and psychology of religion is how practitioners respond to this issue. Sociologists want to focus on religious culture, which means focusing on what is common to the people of that culture. Psychologists, in contrast, are fascinated by how people differ and want to get down to detail about what they call “individual differences.”

Exactly how best to do that, in connection with religion, is not straightforward. You can claim that every person is unique. That leads to case studies of particular religious individuals. That approach can yield much interesting material, but it is hard to move from case studies to generalizations of any kind. We need to find a middle way between assuming that all religious people are the same and of regarding each one as unique. That requires some kind of classification.

Individual differences in religion pose two main questions. One focuses on how religious people differ from nonreligious people. The problem with that question is that religious people differ so much among themselves that it is hard to find clear differences between religious and nonreligious people. The other question focuses on how religious people differ between themselves and seeks to explain those differences psychologically. I suggest that it is helpful to subdivide religious people in some relevant way before comparing them with the nonreligious, else the diversity of religious people confuses the comparison.

In this chapter, I will consider two main ways into these issues. One is to start with demographic variables or general personality variables, and see how religion maps onto them. For example, we can consider how men and women differ. The alternative approach is to survey the many ways in which religious people differ from one another, and to propose some types or dimensions that will be theoretically fruitful in distinguishing among them.

Gender

One of the most interesting differences in religiousness is that between men and women. The basic fact is fairly clear – more women than men attend church in countries such as the United States and the UK, where the psychology of religion has mainly flourished. The best recent overview of research on this topic is that of Leslie Francis and Gemma Penny (2014).

An interesting recent development in the psychology of religion is that it has broadened to include the study of spirituality, and considerable conceptual work has been done in this area (e.g., Oman, 2013). There have often been complaints (more from theologians than psychologists) that the concept of “spirituality” is hopelessly vague. The lack of precision indeed presents problems, though that is not to say that the concept cannot be clarified. The general cultural movement in many countries to interest in spirituality rather than in religion is one that cannot be ignored by the psychology of religion.

One obvious problem is that there is little agreement about what the term “spirituality” refers to. That is not just a matter of academics reaching agreement among themselves; a broader cultural problem concerns reaching agreement among the general population. Spirituality within a religious tradition means something rather different from spirituality outside religion. There are clearly common elements, but also differences. Even if a common definition is reached, such as “search for the sacred or the transcendent,” people may mean such different things by those terms that it only moves the problem on to another level.

Another question that can be raised about spirituality outside religion is whether it has enough institutional structure to constitute a sustainable tradition. Key questions, raised by Philip Sheldrake (2013), are whether there is a tradition that goes beyond the founding generation, whether it is gathering core texts and practices, and whether there can be transmission of a nonreligious tradition of spirituality from place to place. Some strands of nonreligious spirituality may meet those criteria, but most do not. When the New Age movement began, it tended to have clear structures, albeit in relatively small and isolated groups. With the passage of time, there are fewer such structures, and nonreligious spirituality seems to have been incorporated into the general culture in a way that is less organized and less identifiable (Heelas, 2003).

Another problem is that “spiritual” is not used as a term of self-identification as much as is “religious.” People generally know whether or not they regard themselves as religious. However, they do not, to the same extent, know whether or not to classify themselves as spiritual. Cross-cultural differences may also exist here.

This chapter will focus on psychoanalytic approaches to religion. It will be important to consider not only Freud himself but also some post-Freudians, some of whom take a much more positive view of religion than Freud himself did. For convenience, I will include Jung in this chapter too, though strictly speaking, Jung's approach is termed “analytical psychology” rather than “psychoanalysis.”

Freud

Psychoanalysis operates with a general concept of religion, and, as we have already noted, psychoanalysis is one of the psychological perspectives that try to explain why people are religious at all, rather than just attending to particular religious phenomena. Most psychoanalytic thinking about religion fails to consider that different forms of religion may have psychological appeal for quite different reasons. It also fails to consider that some forms of religion may be pathological and others not. For Freud, it is all just “religion.”

Another problem that we need to note at the outset is that Freud has no single psychology of religion. It is a subject to which he returns frequently, which suggests that it had a certain fascination for him (for an overview, see Meissner, 1984). Each time he develops a somewhat different position, though these are not necessarily incompatible with one another. Two of his books on religion, Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, are based on such dated and unreliable anthropology that I will not say much about them here, though it is intriguing that he was interested enough in Moses to present his own unorthodox quasi-rabbinic interpretation of the Moses story.

Let us focus first on one of the key ideas in Freud's psychology of religion, God as projection. Freud suggests that God is a projection of the human mind, an idea that is to be found in a more general form in Feuerbach (2008/1841), though Freud developed it considerably by fleshing out the psychological mechanisms by which he thinks the projection arises. It is an idea that he treats most in his essay on Leonardo (Freud, 1965).

Freud seems to be unaware of a fundamental problem in his treatment of God as projection. It is one thing to argue that people's concepts of God are shaped to some extent by psychological processes that can be understood as projection.

Having looked at religious experience and practice, we turn now to religious thinking and belief. It is not an area of the psychology of religion that has been explored systematically, so we will have to draw threads together from various sources.

Belief and Nonbelief

A long-standing tradition in philosophical theology provides rational arguments to support belief in God. The “five ways” set out by Aquinas provide a classic statement of that approach, though it is worth noting that they were intended to provide rational support for faith that people already held, not to provide a path to faith for nonbelievers.

These arguments took a new turn during the Enlightenment when they were brought into conjunction with empirical considerations and were used in a new way to argue for belief in God. That happened both through those such as William Paley who looked for evidence of design in nature and through those such as Friedrich Schleiermacher who looked for a foundation for faith in human feelings. It is not the role of psychology to evaluate the effectiveness of those arguments, though it is perhaps fair comment that they do not have a good track record of convincing those who do not already hold the conclusions to which they are intended to lead.

What is interesting about these arguments from a psychological point of view is that they challenge us to understand better the cognitive processes by which people actually arrive at belief. I suggest that this process is not as compelling as the kind of evidence-based or logical argument that would convince anyone. However, I also suggest that the path to faith is not wholly lacking in rationality, or lacking in an empirical basis. Religious belief is, after all, a matter of faith, but it is nevertheless rationally motivated. I suggest that cognitive psychology may, in principle, be able to tell us more about how the path to religious belief works than a philosophical approach that simply looks at whether the arguments are logically compelling.

There is nothing unique to religion about people holding views or beliefs with some rational basis, but no compelling argument. Indeed, the comment I would make from a psychological perspective is that this is the norm in human cognition, not the exception; it is not specific to religion.

In this chapter, I turn from religious experience to religious practice. Some religious practices are collective and institutional; others are private. I will first examine that distinction and then look in detail at a sample of specific religious practices.

Public and Private Religious Practices

Most religious people engage in private religious practices such as individual prayer; they also attend public places of prayer or worship. The social science literature has often made this distinction between public and private religion. Grace Davie (2015) distinguished between religious “belonging” and “believing,” with believing a more private matter than belonging to the structures of institutional religion.

Of course, some people practice religion just privately, and others just publicly. However, the norm is probably for people to do both, and for each to influence the other. A slight cultural shift may have taken place in recent decades toward private spiritual practices such as meditation, as well as a shift in the balance between public and private religion over the life-span. Impairments may affect some aspects of religion more than others. For example, if elderly people begin to suffer cognitive impairment, engagement in public religion might be sustained better than private spirituality.

I want to resist the idea that either public or private religion is foundational to the other, and take a systemic view. Certainly, private religion occurs in social, cultural, and linguistic contexts, as any sociologist would want to emphasize. However, I suggest the collective manifestations of religion are equally influenced by the personal religion of particular individuals, and that a systemic interrelationship normally occurs between public and private religion.

On the face of things, the distinction between public and private aspects of religious practices seems clear enough. However, the distinction may not actually be as clear-cut as at first appears. Much religious life is neither clearly in public institutions nor completely private. For example, it is an interesting feature of how religious life has developed in recent decades that many more small groups now meet in private houses for religious purposes. Some small groups meet for silent meditation rather than conversation or spoken prayer. Sometimes two religious people meet as prayer partners or soul friends. It is not clear whether such religious activities should be classified as public or private.

Evidence is growing that religion tends to be good for health and adjustment. I will discuss the evidence for that in relation to physical health, mental health, and moral functioning. However, many complexities surround this relationship. There are particular complexities, as we will see, in the relationship between religion and mental health.

One recurrent issue is about the concept of “religion.” As we have seen in other contexts, religion is not a unitary construct. Different aspects of religion may have different associations with health and adjustment. It makes a difference what aspect of religion is measured. A parallel issue concerns sampling. Religious people are diverse, and what relationship is found between religion and other variables will depend on what range of religious people are sampled. For example, conservative religious people may give different results than more liberal ones.

Health and adjustment are difficult to measure too, and important distinctions need to be taken into account. Moral attitudes may give different results than moral behavior. Self-report measures of mental health may give different results than more objective, clinical assessments. Positive measures of good health may give results that are different from, and not merely the inverse of, those for pathology. Religion may have a different relationship with the risk of onset of a health problem than what it has with health outcomes among those who already suffer from the problem.

Yet another problem is that many research studies simply demonstrate that religion is associated with health and adjustment. They often seem to provide reasonable grounds inferring that religion has causal effects, but that is usually an assumption rather than something that has actually been demonstrated. There are, logically, at least two other possibilities. One is that religiousness is affected by health or adjustment; that is, people with certain kinds of problems (such as abuse of drugs and alcohol) may be less likely to be religious simply because of those problems. The other possibility is that the association between religion and health arises because both are related to some third variable. That is difficult to rule out definitively. However, candidates for that third variable, such as socioeconomic class, can be proposed and measured, and then statistical procedures can be used for checking whether the relationship between religion and health/adjustment still holds up when relationships with the third variable are allowed for.

In this chapter, we will bring into dialogue the perspectives of psychology and religion on human nature and personality. General issues about human nature need to be considered, such as the relationship between social, biological, and personal life. Other issues include the place of religion itself in human life and whether, for good or ill, humans are essentially religious creatures.

We have already made the point that psychology is really a family of subdisciplines that are often only loosely related. In particular, psychology is both a biological and a social science. Though most psychologists would acknowledge that each has a place within the overall discipline, there is often little contact between them, and little attempt at integration. Where integration is attempted, it sometimes takes the form of greedy reductionism, in which biology tries to explain social life.

The problem arises in part from biological and social psychology being different kinds of sciences, with different methodologies. Both are sciences in the broad, continental sense of being careful, systematic forms of enquiry. However, biological psychology is a natural science in a way that social psychology is not. That relates to the fact that the entities with which biological psychology is concerned, such as DNA or the frontal lobes of the brain, have a tangible reality in a way that, for example, the social processes that lead to religious radicalization do not. There is, of course, a general sense in which all our concepts, even of DNA for example, are social constructions, but in some cases there is more tangible reality to what is being construed than in others.

The psychology of religion now includes both biological and social approaches, though the current emphasis on genetics, evolution, and the brain is a relatively recent addition. For the most part, the psychology of religion has not so far really tried to connect biological and social approaches. One topic where that is raised in an interesting way is religious experience. There is probably a genetic predisposition to some kinds of religious experience, and brain processes are certainly involved. On the other hand, it is in a social context that people learn how to facilitate certain kinds of religious experience through religious practice and learn how to interpret it in a religious framework.

In this chapter, I turn to the related questions of how and why religion has evolved, and what genetic influence there has been on religion. They have both been lively areas in the study of religion in recent years. I begin with genetics, as it is the more empirical of the two topics, and what you conclude about the genetic basis of religion influences where you stand on some of the debates about the evolutionary basis of religion.

Genetics of Religion

The investigation of the genetic basis of religion is an interesting and complex matter. It is still somewhat inconclusive, despite recent progress. To anticipate my conclusions, it seems likely that some genetic influences are relevant to religion. However, it is doubtful whether there is any genetic basis for religiousness as such, as a unitary package. There is probably more genetic influence on some aspects of religion than others. Also, the most significant genetic influences relevant to religion probably influence a broader range of things, not just religion.

The most widely publicized claim for the genetic basis of religion was made in Dean Hamer's book, The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired Into Our Genes (Hamer, 2004). Even if genes influence religiosity, the title is thoroughly misleading. First, genetic influence usually arises from multiple sites in the DNA, not from a single gene. No satisfactory evidence exists for a single “God gene,” and it is highly improbable that there would be one. Second, to talk of faith being “hardwired” implies a simplistic genetic determinism in which genes alone are supposed to control faith. Debate continues about how strong genetic influence on religion might be, but religion is certainly not controlled by our genes. At best, there is genetic influence on religion, not determination.

In discussing this, we also have to take into account radical developments in genetics that have occurred (e.g., Noble, 2006) that have made it problematic to engage in the old project of trying to gauge the relative influence of “nature” and “nurture.” It is now assumed that the interaction between the two is so rich and complex that the distinction between nature and nurture no longer makes any sense.