David M. Wulff (1996). Psychology of religion. Classic & contemporary. New York: John Wiley & Sons. (Chapter 1, p. 1-13). 1. ^^Lfr#řÉHrfíi»^Hlt«^ ■ r#:ys,*TiT?|j* INTRODUCTION: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION IN A CHANGING WORLD We live today in a situation of unprecedented crisis. Other ages, to be sure, have suffered no less than ours from massive starvation, social upheaval, and devastating war. Only in our time, however, has the very survival of our species— and of all others as well—been seriously called into question: by the poisoning of air and water, the destruction of vital forests, the irreversible depletion of soil, and the specter of nuclear war. Whether insidious or catastrophic, the end to life on earth looms today as an unthinkable yet growing possibility.1 The crisis in the outer world is paralleled by another within. The massive and devastating destruction of World War I left to this century a legacy of disillusionment and self-doubt unprecedented in recorded history (Scheler, 1928). Americans witnessed "a wave of spiritual depression and religious skepticism, widespread and devastating" (W. Horton, quoted in Handy, 1960, p. 6). By mid-century, it had become a truism that the modern world was in the midst of "an age of anxiety," a "time of upheaval of standards and values" and of "painful insecurity" (Rollo May, 1953, p. 7). This anxiety deepened in the next decades, according to the findings of two national surveys of American adults, the first conducted in 1957 and the second, a replication, in 1976 (Veroff, Douvan, and Kulka, 1981). Over the period of a generation, these researchers report, there was a significant increase in worry and symptoms of anxiety, especially among young adults. Moreover, among the sources of unhappiness reported in 1976, "community, national, and world prob- 1 Any reader who doubts the seriousness of this complex crisis should study the most recent assessment of it by the WorldWatch Institute, which publishes its annual report under the title State of the World (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984—). Translated into 27 languages and distributed to government officials around the world, this report documents a broad array of environmental, political, and social problems that threaten the planet's future. It also points to possible remedies that must be pursued in earnest throughout the world if unprecedented catastrophe is to be averted. 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION IN A CHANGING WORLD lems" were more often mentioned first or second than any other source, a rate nearly double that of 1957 (pp. 57, 528). In the interval between these two national surveys, another remarkable trend became apparent. For the first time in a history spanning up to two hundred years, most of America's major Protestant churches were losing membership. The substantial growth that these moderate-to-liberal denominations had experienced as recently as the late 1950s was replaced in the following decade by steady and sizable losses that have only recently begun to abate (Bedell, 1996; Jacquet, 1986, pp. 248-249). Parallel if less dramatic shifts in membership occurred in the Roman Catholic and Jewish traditions. This historic decline was reflected in a variety of other indicators as well. Church construction was down, denominational periodicals cut back production, and fewer missionaries were sent abroad (Kelley, 1972; Roof, 1982). Individuals, too, testified to the decline. Between 1965 and 1978, the proportion of Gallup poll respondents who reported that religion was "very important" in their lives dropped from 70 to 52 percent. Since then it has hovered in the mid- to upper- 50's (Gallup, 1995, pp. 63-64). Yet not all Christian denominations have suffered this trend. Some are thriving, including such organizations as the Assemblies of God, the Pentecostal and Holiness groups, the Mormons, the Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Seventh-Day Advent-ists. Why should these and similar groups prosper, sociologist Dean Kelley (1972) wonders, when they so often violate contemporary standards of reasonableness, relevance, and tolerance? How is it that they, and not the more socially concerned mainline churches, appear to be successfully addressing the contemporary "malady of meaning"? Is there a connection between the conservative revolution in America of which these trends are a part and the widely documented increase in anti-Semitism and other forms of prejudice, evident especially on college campuses? If so, does today's emerging religious response truly address the crisis we face, or is it in essence a symptom of it or perhaps even a factor in its aggravation? If it is a factor, are we doomed to play the role of helpless observers, or is it possible, by one means or another, to effect a more positive course of events? Such questions as these lie at the heart of the psychology of religion for many of its proponents. Some, such as Erich Fromm and C. G. Jung, write directly to these questions, and with manifest urgency. Others, like Gordon Allport, approach them more methodically and empirically, patiently seeking clarification through the systematic accumulation of well-specified evidence. We will be challenged to see whether there is an emerging consensus. These pressing issues are not, however, the whole of the psychology of religion. The field's rich inaugural period preceded the profound disillusionment brought about by World War I, and even some of those who wrote in the midst of it apparently thought of religion as a timeless something that bears no essential relation to current political and social events. Religion is, by its very nature, concerned with a dimension or complex of values that transcends mundane reality. Even in its diverse historical expressions there are constants of mythic and ritual content that seem to persist more or less unchanged in spite of political and social upheaval. The psychology of religion has been and continues to be concerned with these matters, too, as much of the content of this book demonstrates. Indeed, we are always at risk in trying to generalize about a subject matter as diversely conceived as the psychology of religion. A MISLEADING NAME 3 A MISLEADING NAME____________ _______________________________ Although "the psychology of religion" is the usual way of referring to the field, this expression is misleading in two important respects. First, the definite article suggests a degree of consensus and singularity of view that is far from characteristic of the field. Some psychologists of religion do present their theoretical perspectives or research methods as if everyone agrees on their value. What is apparent to the disinterested observer, however, is the diversity of theories, principles, and approaches, each with its own enthusiastic advocates. Some of these views are truly comprehensive—sufficient, it would seem, to encompass the whole of human piety; others are highly specific, limited to a narrow range of religious expression. Wherever an author refers to the psycholog)' of religion, we should remind ourselves of these varieties of psychological perspectives, of which the writer may represent only one. A Reified Object The second way in which "the psychology of religion" is misleading is far more serious. The problem lies in the noun religion, a satisfactory definition of which has eluded scholars to this day. In a well-documented study, Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1963) demonstrates that the noun religion and its plural, along with the nouns that we commonly use to refer to specific religious traditions—Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity—are not only unnecessary but also inadequate to any genuine understanding. What is worse, they may insidiously undermine the very piety to which they only vaguely refer. The word "religion" derives from the Latin religio, which some scholars say was first used to designate a greater-than-human power that requires a person to respond in a certain way to avoid some dire consequence. Other scholars have concluded that religio refers to the feeling that is present in persons who vividly conceive of and observe such power. The term also came to designate the ritual acts carried out at the shrine of a particular god. In every instance religio referred to "something that one does, or that one feels deeply about, or that impinges on one's will, exacting obedience or threatening disaster or offering reward or binding one into one's community" (Smith, 1963, pp. 20, 22). Over the centuries, the meaning of the word "religion" underwent an elaborate evolution. From designating something that one has perceived, felt, or done oneself, the word came to be used with a variety of alternative meanings. "Religion" referred in turn to the alien ritual practices of others, to a universal disposition or an inner piety, to an abstract system of ideas, to the totality of all belief systems, to a peculiar type of feeling, and to an unchanging essence that underlies the diversity of observable, dynamic forms. The general trend was toward reification: religion became in time a fixed, objective entity and each of the traditions a definable system. Understood as personal piety or reverence, "religion" made sense only in the singular; but once it came to refer to the abstracted, depersonalized, and reified systems of others, it could be used in the plural as well. The concepts of religion and the religions, Smith concludes, are recent derivations of Western and Islamic traditions and far less useful than many assume. It is crucial to note, he says, that these reified religious concepts—including the names of most of the religious traditions—were formulated to serve the practical purposes 4 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION IN A CHANGING WORLD of outsiders. From within the traditions, such concepts appear as serious distortions. Inherently depreciative, they overlook the dynamic personal quality of religiousness and leave out the crucial factor of transcendence. When these terms are unsuspectingly adopted by insiders as well, they may undermine faith from within. If inadequate for the insider, Smith declares, these concepts must be judged unser-vicable for the outside observer as well. Thus we are advised to abandon them once and for all. Tradition and Faith: A New Conceptual Framework In their place, Smith (1963) proposes that we use two alternatives, cumuiative tradition and FAITH. With these two terms, he suggests, we may conceptualize and describe the entirety of the human religious life, as believers or as sceptics, as members of a religious community or as outsiders. The phrase cumulative tradition, a human construct offered as a means of making the dynamic flow of human history intelligible without distorting it, refers to all of the observable contents— temples, rituals, scriptures, myths, moral codes, social institutions, and so on—that are accumulated over time and then passed on to succeeding generations (pp. 156-157). Unlike "religion," which misleadingly suggests an unchanging essence, cumulative tradition and its specific variants—for example, the Christian tradition— make explicit the changing historical contexts that sustain personal faith and that were founded and continue to be nourished by that faith in turn. In contrast to the perceptible and enormously diverse features of tradition, faith is an unobservable and less variable quality of persons. In a monumental work on faith and belief, Smith (1979) defines faith as one's orientation or total response to oneself, others, and the universe. It reflects the human capacity 'to see, to feel, to act in terms of, a transcendent dimension," to perceive meaning that is more than merely mundane. Faith, Smith says, is "an essential human quality" if not "the fundamental human category"; it is certainly the most basic religious one (pp. 12, 141,7). Although itself not directly observable, faith is expressed outwardly in a myriad of forms: "in words, both prose and poetry; in patterns of deeds, both ritual and morality; in art, in institutions, in law, in community . . . ; and in still many other ways." Among these expressions, human character stands out. When faith is spontaneously and compellingly embodied in a person's character, says Smith (1963), we realize how "secondary, if not actually irrelevant" other expressions can be (pp. 171, 178). Faith is emphatically not to be equated with belief, which is only one of faith's many expressions and a far from universal one at that. Of the traditional terms, Smith continues to use the adjective religious, for it suggests an attribute of persons, not a reified entity. The abstract noun religiousness might be retained on the same grounds, though in this case Smith would have us rehabilitate the venerable term piety instead (p. 194). Should we continue to use the remaining expressions—religion, religions, and all of the isms—they will require constant qualification, first to ourselves and then to our listeners. It would be better, in the light of Smith's argument, to drop them altogether. Old habits die hard, however, especially when succinct alternatives are not ready at hand. In this book, when it is not obvious which sense of the word is intended, "religion" should be understood as a concise way of referring to both faith and tradition. Except in quotations and the standard expression "the history of religions," the inevitably misleading plural form will be avoided. "Piety" should be SPIRITUALITY: A CONTEMPORARY ALTERNATIVE 5 understood as a synonym for religiousness and thus as referring to an inner state or process and its outer expressions. SPIRITUALITY: A CONTEMPORARY ALTERNATIVE______________________ Today many decline to use the noun religion and even the adjective reägious, not because they are aware of the historic process of reification, but because they find the terms spirituality and spiritual to be more apt. When James Day (1994), for example, interviewed three former participants in an experimental curriculum at the University of California at Irvine, all of them resisted being characterized in traditional religious terms. They were all "at pains to distinguish the 'religious' from the 'spiritual,' to distinguish [themselves] from the former descriptor and to embrace the latter," which they spoke of in "more encompassing, familiar, and positive terms" (p. 162). Most of the hundreds of baby boomers that Wade Clark Roof (1993) and his collaborators interviewed likewise saw a disjunction between the religious and the spiritual, and some of them, too, thought of themselves as being spiritual but not religious. This ascendance of spirituality is also evident in professional publications, including three decades of nursing literature (Emblen, 1992). The separation of spirituality from religious tradition is a modern development. The word spirituality derives from the Latin noun spiritus, breath, from spirare, to blow or breathe. In Latin translations of the New Testament, the spiútualis, or "spiritual" person, is one whose life is ordered or influenced by the Holy Spirit or the Spirit of God. The abstract word spiritualitas (spirituality), used at least as early as the fifth century, retained this biblical meaning. By the twelfth century, however, spirituality began to acquire the connotations of a virtual psychological function that was contrasted with corporeality or materiality. Soon yet another meaning emerged, according to which spirituality designated ecclesiastical persons or properties. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the word went into eclipse— perhaps because Voltaire and others had used it disparagingly—only to reappear early in the twentieth century in its original religious or devotional sense. Revived chiefly by French Catholic writers, it has gradually come to be applied to a great diversity of particular forms. Now it is even used to designate a branch of study within theology and the history of religions (Principe, 1983). The popular understanding today of the words spirituality-and spiritualit clarified in a 1995 national survey of 1713 adult Canadians, 52 percent of whom acknowledged that they had "spiritual needs." When asked to explain what they meant by spirituality, just over half of these respondents used conventional expressions, such as belief in God or Jesus, praying and going to church, and helping others. The rest were less conventional in their responses. They associated the word with the human spirit or soul, with such practices as meditation or reflection, with a sense of wholeness or oneness, and with inner or outer awareness (Bibby, 1995). An Emergent Model Writers on contemporary spirituality offer us yet another perspective on the term. In Table 1.1 are 129 nouns that have been modified by the adjective spiritual in recent publications. Some of these combinations, such as spiritual director or spiritual perfection, have been in use for centuries; others, like spiritual emergency, are of recent coinage. These terms are grouped into six categories that seem to CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION IN A CHANCING WORLD Table 1.1 NOUNS THAT ARE MODIFIED BY THE ADJECTIVE SPIRITUAL IN THE CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE ON SPIRITUALITY 1 2 3 4 5 6 The Initial The Quest The Goal Ways and The Goal Pitfalls Intimation Sought Means Attained Positive: aim connection Persons: attainment abuse concern aspiration depths authority awakening authoritarianism d ť si it- choice destiny care awareness charlatanism hope development dimension community benefits derailment hunger evolution essence director consciousness disillusionment inclination goal grounding friend discernment exploitation issue growth healing guide elite failure longing journey heights intervention emergence fraudulence need progress home leader enlightenment inauthenticity potential quest knowledge master experience inflation yearning seeking life teacher gifts isolation unfolding mastery gnosis malpractice Negative: venture orientation Resources: health materialism bankruptcy perfection beliefs insight narcissism conflict possibilities context integration pathology crisis purification direction joy pride degeneration reality discipline living tyranny deprivation realm discourse maturity disorientation self exercises moment distress sensitivity itinerary perspective doubt skills language rebirth emergency strength path sensibility emptiness style practice state problem transcendence system truth suffering values techniques vision vacuum worth tradition writings well-being accommodate virtually all combinations, excluding references to spiritual beings or entities. Some terms could be placed in more than one category, and those in columns 3 and 5 are to a large degree interchangeable. What is important, however, is the overall impression that the terms in each column give and the process that may be inferred from the essentially chronological sequence of categories. This array of expressions suggests that commentators on what is touted today as the "new spirituality" employ an emergent model. They think of spirituality as a natural process akin to physical growth or development. Its chief impetus thus comes from within, sometimes in the form of a sensed capacity or yearning, other times out of a deeply negative feeling of emptiness and conflict. Although spiritual growth is occasionally conceived as an unfolding, it is more typically construed in terms of the metaphor of a journey or quest, implying not only an anticipated destination or goal but also a sustained effort extending over a long period of tíme. The ideal endpoint or goal state entails a radically new outlook, perspective, capacity, or state of consciousness, the potential for which was there at the beginning. The uncertainties and difficulties of this journey are such that the spiritual seeker is expected to need help in various forms from those who have gone before. This help may be given directly, by a spiritual director or the caretaking of a spiritual community, or the seeker may find it in the form of spiritual writings and other resources preserved by the spiritual traditions. There are also dangers or pitfalls, THE NEW RELIGIOUS PLURALISM 7 including authoritarianism on the part of the spiritual master and distortions or pathological developments in the individual spirituality that unfolds. This model of the new spirituality is itself not new, but has deep roots in the historic religious traditions. Indeed, the classic Christian mystics would find every element in the model familiar. Put another way, some of the nouns in Table 1.1 have long been as commonly modified by religious as they have by spiritual, and virtually all the rest could be conjoined with religious as well, albeit with slight shifts in connotation. The preference in the past for the words spiritual and spirituality can be traced to their simple advantage of denoting more clearly than religious and religion an inner process or attitude. What is conspicuously new in today's spirituality is the frequent absence of an explicit transcendent object outside of the self. Life is ordered not in relation to the demands of the Holy Spirit or some other divine force, but in reference to the possibilities of the human spirit. Thus Clive Beck (1986), for example, maintains that spirituality is a combination of human qualities that may be possessed by religious and nonreligious people alike. Spiritual persons, he says, are characterized by (1) insight and understanding; (2) a sense of context and perspective; (3) awareness of the interconnectedness of things, of unity within diversity, and of patterns within the whole; (4) integration of body, mind, soul, and spirit, and of the various dimensions and commitments of their lives; (5) a sense of wonder, mystery, and awe, of the transcendent in life; (6) gratitude, gladness, and humility with respect to the good things of life; (7) hopefulness and optimism; (8) a courageous, "spirited" approach to life; (9) energy; (10) detachment; (11) acceptance of the inevitable; (12) love, "the characteristic par excellence of the spiritual person"; and (13) gentleness—a sensitive, thoughtful, caring approach to other people, to oneself, and to the cosmos as a whole. Roof (1993) likewise takes a humanistic view when he writes that spirituality "gives expression to the being that is in us; it has to do with feelings, with the power that comes from within, with knowing our deepest selves and what is sacred to us" (p. 64). THE NEW RELIGIOUS PLURALISM___________________________________ There is something else strikingly new in modern spirituality, even for those who subscribe to a conventional religious outlook. The world's diversity of religious traditions, once easily overlooked or dismissed, has come home to us in a quite literal way. In almost every American city, one can now find Hindu and Buddhist temples as well as Muslim mosques, some of them as ornate and imposing as the prototypes in Asia and the Middle East. Throughout the United States one can also find some 60 Jain temples and centers as well as communities of Zoroastrians and Sikhs. This new religious pluralism is similarly evident in England, where there are now more than one million Muslims, 400,000 Hindus, and 400,000 Sikhs. In France, Germany, and Sweden the story is much the same (Eck, 1993, pp. 37-41). The immediate presence of so many people of once-alien traditions has sharply heightened the general awareness of religious pluralism. It is also requiring a degree of accommodation and respect that was earlier unknown. Consider the situation of teachers at the Lauriston School in Hackney, East London, which enrolls children aged 3 to 11. British law requires state-financed schools to provide religious instruction and daily worship that are "broadly Christian." At Lauriston, 47 percent of the 265 children are members of ethnic minor- CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION IN A CHANGING WORLD ities. Thus in addition to Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and evangelical Protestants there are Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Muslims, Rastafarians, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Greek Orthodox Christians. Moreover, some of the children, like many of the teachers, identify themselves as atheists or agnostics. In trying to follow government requirements, teachers offer what comes down to comparative religious studies. The major holy days in various traditions are observed and discussed as they come along, and values that the world's traditions have in common, such as compassion and sharing, are given primary emphasis (Lyall, 1995). The sheer presence of people from other traditions in our classrooms and cities is naturally a major contributor to the new realization of religious pluralism. But beyond that is the reality of globalization, the growing sense of a new global social reality or interdependent world-system that, through the influence of modern communication technology, is increasingly becoming the context for all particular cultures. What globalization will mean in the long run for the world's religious traditions is impossible to say, but Peter Beyer (1994), for one, anticipates that for the foreseeable future many if not most people of the world will remain adherents of traditional forms. They will nevertheless be aware of, and affected by, the religious commitments of others to an unprecedented degree. Such intimate awareness of the faith of other people makes it increasingly difficult to claim superiority for one's own. On the one hand is the dawning realization that the foundations for one's own faith are in large measure an accident of having been born at a particular time and place. On the other is the discovery that the various religious traditions are equally capable of providing life with co- THE NEW RELIGIOUS PLURALISM 9 herence and meaning. Many people have recoiled from these relativistic implications, thus fueling the spread of fundamentalism around the world (Marty and Appleby, 1991). Others, however, having grown up with many forms of pluralism and the notion that religion is a matter of "preference" or "choice," are deeply committed to pluralism as both a social and a religious reality (Roof, 1993, p. 245). For many in the post-World War II generation, in the United States and elsewhere, the outcome of the new religious pluralism is a distinctive form of spirituality. Drawing on cross-national evidence, Wade Clark Roof, Jackson Carroll, and David Roozen (1995) identify five prominent characteristics of this new "religious style": (1) an emphasis on individual choice, a "cafeteria" approach that selects religious beliefs and practices as well as moral precepts independent of, and even in opposition to, religious authority; (2) a mixing of codes, the eclectic combining of elements from various religious and quasi-religious traditions—"Eastern spiritual practices, various forms of New Age spirituality, witchcraft, the ecology movement, psychotherapy, feminism, as well as more traditional Judeo-Christian elements"— into a personal form of spirituality; (3) an attraction either to new religious movements, in particular the New Age variety, or to conservative Protestant traditions, especially Pentecostal or charismatic groups; (4) in either context, a valorizing of religious experience and growth, with an accompanying sense of the nearness of God and the possibilities of personal transformation (the emergent model once again); and (5) an indifference to religious institutions and hierarchies that breeds loyalty to local organizations rather than denominations, and that only if such organizations address individual needs (pp. 247-253). Postmodernism Pluralism and spirituality in their new forms are integral to a broader cultural context that is known as postmodernism. Lacking any positive core assertions of its own, postmodernism takes its name from its position as successor to the modern world. Those living in the modern age share a confidence that, in spite of the obvious diversity of conflicting beliefs, reality can become progressively known—if not through some religious revelation, then with the aid of human reason and scientific methods. Postmodernism, in contrast, denies the very possibility of knowing reality. All beliefs, religious and scientific alike, are SOCIAL constructions, linguistic products of negotiation among persons living at a particular time and place. There are no privileged points of view, no universally accepted methods by which to test one proposition against another, no settled criteria for choosing among options. Thus postmodernism is itself not a single view but comes in almost as many varieties as there are people talking about it. In the postmodern age, a new polarization has taken shape, a political spectrum resembling the modern era's con serva tive-through-liberal-to-revolutionary spectrum, yet differing from it in the odd bedfellows it creates. At one extreme are those who are confident that they possess the truth, or at least the means for obtaining it; clustered here, in odd array, are religious fundamentalists, convinced scientists, and a variety of other true believers and objectivists. Near the other extreme are the postmodern constructionists and relativists, who while granting the existence of reality, disclaim any possibility of knowing it. Beyond them, at the far extreme, is the position of solipsism, the view that reality itself is the individual's invention. While there are probably no true solipsists, the position is the logical outcome of arguments that have been advanced against the convictions of others (Anderson, 1990; Cobb, 1990). 10 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION IN A CHANGING WORLD THE NEW PLURALISM IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY______________ A product of the modern era, psychology is only now beginning to face the implications of postmodernism. From its beginnings late in the nineteenth century, modern psychology has been a pluralistic science. But it has long been an embattled pluralism, with dozens of schools and theories vying with each other for dominance in the field. Through the years, if the protagonists in this struggle agreed on anything it was in their optimistic hope that the field would someday become unified into a coherent and systematically progressive discipline. That achievement, they also concurred, would likely take a long time. While some today still hold out for a unified science (Staats, 1987), others take the ever-increasing fractionation in psychology as evidence that unification is a hopeless dream. In a book on the conflicts that divide psychology today, Howard Kendler asserted in 1981 that The unity of psychology has all but collapsed. Psychology is a multidisciplinary field with different segments employing irreconcilable orientations. As a result, bitter disputes have occurred concerning the proper methodological position that psychology should adopt. . . . These differences are unavoidable considering the fundamental nature of psychology. A choice of competing methodological alternatives cannot be made by purely rational means. . . . The best that can be hoped for within psychology is a mutual understanding of the competing methodological positions and an appreciation of the decisions that led to their adoption (Kendler, 1981, p. 371). A few years later, after participating in several symposia on the future of psychology, Kendler (1987) decided that his hope for mutual understanding had been too optimistic. "Many psychologists," he said, "are so dominated by ideological commitments that they cannot understand competing conceptions of psychology, much less tolerate them. Consequently, the profession of psychology inevitably will be divided into warring camps that cannot achieve any real peace or even an armistice" (p. 56). Agreeing with Kendler that contemporary psychology is hopelessly divided, "a jumbled 'hidden-figure' puz/le that contains no figure" (Koch and Leary, 1985, p. 2), Sigmund Koch proposes that we acknowledge this lack of cohesiveness by replacing the term psychology váůi a phrase such as "the psychological studies." Unlike Kendler, however, Koch finds grounds for optimism about this pluralistic field. As he reviewed the 42 papers that he and David Leary (1985) collected for a massive retrospective reassessment of psychology after its first 100 years, he was struck not only by an unprecedented restiveness in the field but also by the changed character of its evident pluralism: in place of the polemics of the early schools was an "un-dogmatic civility," a "responsible tentativeness." The earlier, once-monolithic sci-entism, he concludes, is giving way to a "new pluralism," a "pluralism of search rather than assertiveness, marked by humility, not hubris" (pp. 940, 938). Postmodernism in Psychology In the framework of postmodernism, pluralism is no longer a sign of immaturity but evidence, rather, of health and creativity. Rejecting the positivistic "unity-of-method" thesis of earlier philosophers of science, according to which the natural and social sciences share the same methodological principles, philosopher Paul Roth (1987) advises psychologists and other social scientists to adopt a pluralistic view of rational inquiry, or what he calls methodological pluralism. It is a perspective, he argues, that will encourage research and promote intellectual inquiry. INTIMATIONS OF A POSTMODERN PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION // Because there is no final court of appeal, no higher standard of rationality, our choice of method will come down to a moral decision, he says; we will have to decide how we are going to view our fellow humans and what our purposes will be in studying them (p. 110). Our choice of a frame of reference will finally be made on pragmatic grounds, in accord with our needs and the life we want to live (pp. 245-246). The profound implications of postmodern thought are only slowly finding their way into psychology. As Steiner Kvale (1992) notes in his introduction to a collection of essays on psychology and postmodernism, there is typically a "time lag" before psychologists take up new ideas being entertained in philosophy and the humanities. The delay may also be accounted for, he suggests, by the fundamental incompatibility of the assumptions of modern psychology and the outlook of postmodern thought. However long it takes, postmodernists believe that the model of inquiry shared by most psychologists throughout the course of the twentieth century will eventually give way to new and more adequate possibilities. Meanwhile, resources for rethinking psychology's agenda within the postmodern framework are steadily accumulating, including works on social constructionism (e.g., Danziger, 1990; Gergen, 1991; Gergen and Davis, 1985; Harré, 1986), narrative psychology (Hermans and Kempen, 1993; Josselson and Lieblich, 1995; Polkinghorne, 1988; Sarbin, 1986; Spence, 1982), hermeneutics (Messer, Sass, and Woolfolk, 1988; Packer and Addison, 1989; Polkinghorne, 1983; Strenger, 1991; Terwee, 1990), metaphor (Leary, 1990; Olds, 1992; Soyland, 1994), and phenomenology (Fuller, 1990; van Manen, 1990). INTIMATIONS OF A POSTMODERN PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION_________ As the contents of this book testify, the psychology of religion, too, has been highly pluralistic from its beginnings. There is hardly a theory or method in psychology, it seems, that has not been championed by someone for the study of religion. Paralleling developments in the broader field of psychology, this pluralism has at times been contentious, the battling of one perspective against another. For the most part, however, the varying perspectives have developed independent of each other, their proponents ignoring alternative approaches except for occasional dismissive remarks. Complicating matters is disagreement on where the psychology of religion chiefly belongs: Is it a subfield of psychology or is it a specialty within religious studies? It has been fostered in both contexts, in fact, but developments within one setting are often either unknown or inaccessible to workers in the other. Adding still further to the field's contentious pluralism are the diverse understandings of and personal attitudes toward religion among its contributors. Yet here, too, postmodern thought is gradually creeping in. Paul Watson (1993), for example, points out that the psychology of religion is the product of the Enlightenment mode of thinking and its pretentions to unbiased rationality and objective empiricism, both assumed to transcend the limitations of local or historical knowledge. With the collapse of Enlightenment thought and the subsequent chaotic proliferation of alternative traditions, it has now become apparent that every psychology of religion exists within an "ideological surround," that is, each rests upon certain philosophical and normative assumptions. Far from being value-free, research programs often merely confirm the assumptions with which they start. Watson says that both apologetics and ethnocentrism—the defense of one's own position and the prejudicial judgment of the other's—are unavoidable 12 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION IN A CHANCING WORLD in this work. The solution lies, he suggests, in acknowledging the ideological surround and conceiving of research as a dialogue between the observer and the observed, each balancing in the other the natural tendencies toward apologetics and ethnocentrism. In a similar vein, Stanton Jones (1994) observes that postmodern philosophy of science reveals to us the human face of all scientific research. Like every other form of human inquiry, it is grounded in prescientific world-views, in foundational presuppositions that are rarely thought out or explicitly acknowledged. Moreover, scientists frequently commit themselves to a theory in advance of collecting and evaluating relevant data, which in any case will never unequivocally support one theory over another. And the complex process of theory evaluation is shaped throughout by the host of values held by the individual scientist. Jones concludes from these postmodern principles, which acknowledge the cultural and human dimensions of the scientific enterprise, that science has much in common with other ways of knowing, including religion. Historical and Functional Continuities Between Psychology and Religion Observed commonalities between religion and psychology have prompted some commentators to ascribe to certain forms of psychology the character of a religious movement (e.g., Berman, 1927; Vitz, 1977). With varying degrees of seriousness, they have noted the revering of sacred texts written by charismatic leaders or prophets who help to formulate the dogmas and creeds by which orthodoxy is defined. Evident, too, are objects of veneration—experimental apparatus, psychological tests, electronic computers—and even objects of sacrifice, in the form of laboratory animals. Much like religious devotees, psychologists have sacred places for their various rites, including the conference halls where they gathered periodically to recite their creeds and to testify, as well as the offices and classrooms where they work to win converts. More generally and profoundly, beneath these obvious forms lies a faith that adherence to the teachings of the tradition will in time bring salvation, whether it be in the form of a personal career, the health of a patient, or the transformation of society. Psychologists unaccustomed to thinking of their commitments and activities as religious in nature will be no less startled by the suggestion that there are continuities between specific religious traditions and particular orientations within psychology. David Bakan (1965), for example, finds various parallels between behaviorism and the Protestant Christian tradition, especially its ethic of mastery. Bakan (1958) has also argued that many of the basic teachings of psychoanalysis are foreshadowed in the literature of the Jewish mystical tradition. In the case of Jung's analytic psychology, which both R. C. Zaehner (1959) and Richard Noll (1994) take to be a religious cult, the prominence of both Western and Eastern religious symbolism, particularly Gnostic (Segal, Singer, and Stein, 1995), is unmistakable. Much of contemporary humanistic psychology is said to be permeated by a religious atmosphere in which religious, philosophical, and psychological matters are mixed together without distinction (Murphy and Kovach, 1972). And transpersonal psychology, which seeks to integrate Eastern religious insights and Western psychology, has been identified by Paul Swartz (1969) as a refinement of the Western prophetic tradition and by Jeremy Carrette (1993-94) as one of the new religious movements. The historical continuity of religious traditions and contemporary psychological views can also be expressed in terms of the functions they have served. Traditionally, questions about the nature of human existence have been answered within OBJECTIONS TO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 13 a religious framework. The vital task of ordering and comprehending both personal and social life was accomplished largely through the teachings and ceremonies that form a major part of the world's religious traditions. Today, many of these questions and tasks are directed instead to psychologists. It is they who are now expected to be knowledgeable about human nature, to give counsel to the troubled, and to make meaningful the entire course of life, from birth to death. Not infrequently it is the psychologists who take on the problems of good and evil, of morality and social responsibility. As psychotherapists, they often become in effect both confessors and spiritual directors (Browning, 1987; S.Jones, 1994). Such continuities do not surprise Bakan (1966b), who believes science and religion pursue the same goal: to make the unmanifest manifest. To Stanton Jones (1994), religion's overlap with clinical psychology in particular suggests the possibility of a more constructive, dialogical relation between religion and psychology, which would pave the way for significant changes in clinical education and practice alike. He also sees implications for psychology as science: rather than viewing religious beliefs as distorting biases to be overcome in the research process, he takes the postmodern view that biases or presuppositions of some kind are a prerequisite for perceiving and understanding anything at all. What is crucial, he says, is recognizing their presence and being aware of the effects they have (p. 197). OBJECTIONS TO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION_____________________ Most psychologists, we may assume, continue to view psychology as a strictly scientific undertaking that has nothing in common with religion. Some even view them as antithetical to each other. If the two are to be brought together, it will be in the form of psychology of religion—psychology as a disciplined set of procedures and interpretive constructs, on the one hand, and religion as an object for disinterested study on the other. Religion will be treated like any other object of psychological investigation, though there may be some recognition of its enormous complexity and the peculiar difficulties that aspects of it present to scientific investigators. Yet even to this combination of psycholog}' and religion there is widespread objection. Although a surprising number of the world's most eminent psychologists have contributed to the psychology of religion, the field is commonly overlooked, if not treated with suspicion or contempt. Psychologists are not alone in this attitude; religious people, including scholars in religious studies, often exhibit it as well. Here we will consider the reasons why. Objections from the Religious Point of View Some persons, it may be said, seem to find any systematic study of religious experience offensive. When Edwin Starbuck (1937) began circulating his questionnaire on conversion in late 1893, under William James's signature, one critic wrote to James to protest this "moral and spiritual vivisection." Another, a minister, threatened to withdraw his daughter from Smith if she were subjected to such a "spiritual inquisition" (p. 225). Sweeping rejection of this sort may well reflect a fear of the effects on naive belief of any form of self-reflection. Others have been more selective in their objections. With obvious concern over the growing influence of psychologists of religion in the training of religious educators, professor of education Charles Ellis (1922) identifies and quotes from ten works that appear to be antagonistic to the conservative evangelical Christian out- 14 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION IN A CHANGING WORLD look, including Sabatier (1897), James (1902), Pratt (1907, 1920), Ames (1910), Leuba (1912), and Coe (1916). A like number were judged to be either "favorable to the fundamentals" or, as in the case of Starbuck (1899), Coe (1900), andStratton (1911), neutral or ambiguous. J. C. M. Conn (1939), a Presbyterian minister who had studied in England with the psychologist Robert Thouless, seeks in turn to preserve "the Christian religion" by sorting out those in the psychological camp who are enemies of the faith—notably the behaviorists and orthodox psychoanalysts—from a handful of others who seem to be friends. Reductionism: The objections raised by Ellis and Conn deserve careful reflection and perhaps subtler restatement. The perennial debate over the legitimacy of any social-scientific interpretation of religion has centered chiefly on the issue of reductionism, a term designating the explanation of complex phenomena in terms of simpler, underlying processes. In this context, the reductionist view implies, first, that religious phenomena can be adequately understood by applying explanations developed outside the arena of religious studies. Making such a claim, however, also calls into question the very object of religious faith, and thus also the religious person's understanding of the origin and significance of that faith (Pals, 1986). Max Scheler (1921) states with particular clarity the case against reductionism in the psychology of religion. Any explanatory psychology of religion, he observes, finds itself in a unique situation. Whereas all other branches of psychology presuppose the reality of the objects whose effects they investigate, the psychology of religion deals with an object whose reality can be received only in the state of faith. Thus every explanatory psychology of religion is necessarily atheistic, he says, and thus also spurious, for it empties religion of its meaning and intention. A "merely descriptive" psychology of religion is possible and meaningful, on the other hand, but only within individual religious systems or communities that share the same psychological states. "There are therefore as many psychologies of religion as there are separate confessions" (p. 159). The case could be stated even more radically. If we concur with Wilfred Smith (1963) that, even within a single tradition, faith is always personal and hence unique, we might rule out the possibility of any psychology of religion. Himself more optimistic, Smith maintains that "By the exercise of imaginative sympathy, disciplined by intellectual rigour and checked by elaborate procedures, crosschecked by vigorous criticism, it is not impossible to infer what goes on in another's mind and heart" (p. 188). Yet so to understand the faith of others, Smith (1979) suggests, will require a new comprehension of psychology and the other social sciences. Reconstructing Complexity: For now, a clearer understanding of existing views may prove to be helpful. According to sociobiologist Edward Wilson (1978), the reduction of observed phenomena to testable principles is "the heart of the scientific method." Yet, he emphasizes, it is only half the process. "The remainder consists of the reconstruction of complexity by an expanding synthesis under the control of laws newly demonstrated by analysis." That is to say, although phenomena at each level of organization are expected to obey the laws of the levels below, "new and unexpected principles" are required to comprehend the increasingly complex phenomena that emerge at each higher level (p. 11). The fear and resentment with which humanists greet the method of reduction, Wilson says, is based on the erroneous equation of the method with the attitude of diminution. Yet that OBJECTIONS TO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 15 equation, we must add, is not exclusively the error of apprehensive humanists; reductionists in diverse fields have also fallen victim to it. Psychologists of religion are themselves deeply divided on the issue of reduc-tionism. Some undertake the first half of reductionistic analysis with exceptional fervor and entirely neglect the further challenge of reconstructing complexity. It is they who have won for the psychology of religion the reputation for being "the most irreligious of all the sciences" (Andres, 1944, p. 40). Others, however, oppose all forms of reductionism, insisting that religion is in all essential respects unique and hence irreducible. Most of the field's proponents lie somewhere in between. Typically, they avoid the more reduction-prone psychology of religious contents in favor of the less threatening psychology of religious persons. By studying individual differences in attitudes toward God, for example, rather than analyzing the idea of God itself, these scholars appear to leave unchallenged the cherished content of a faith that may also be their own. The implicit desire to preserve that faith is further reflected in the various attitudinal distinctions some of them draw—between, say, mature and immature forms of piety, or intrinsic and extrinsic religious orientations. Curiously enough, such simple discriminations and the questionnaires they have inspired are in their own way reductionistic—though perhaps usefully so. Intimated here is the wide range of attitudes that can be found within the psychology of religion. That diversity disallows most sweeping generalizations about the field, and it ought also to forestall any generalized opposition to it. The dilemmas that the psychology of religion faces are by and large common to every other scholarly approach to religion; some present themselves to any form of human reflection whatsoever. Such dilemmas should invite thoughtful interest, not escape into the dogmatic certainties to which the religious and irreligious are equally prone. Objections from the Psychological Point of View That the religious should feel threatened by the psychology of religion is not difficult to understand. That psychologists should also object to it, however, presents us with a puzzle of a different sort. Because psychologists of religion are sometimes quite open about their own piety, we might assume that the field's critics object chiefly to the mixture of science and faith. Ian Vine (1978) expresses such an attitude: "As long as the area continues to be dominated by researchers who are themselves believers," he writes, "one cannot yet be sure how many findings are objective and reliable" (p. 416). Although the practical religious interests that are common among its proponents may be a factor in the field's failure to thrive, the truth is that most opponents of the psychology of religion know little or nothing of its content. As we will see, the problem seems to lie more with the object of study—religion—than with the field itself. "In the absence of reliable evidence," writes psychologist Robert MacLeod (1952), "one is inclined to judge the prevailing attitude of psychologists toward religion as one of wary detachment or mild hostility" (p. 263). This attitude was already apparent late in the nineteenth century. When Starbuck approached Hugo Münsterberg for advice relating to the study of religion, me Harvard experimentalist—who otherwise was highly sympathetic to applied psychology and "always meticulously helpful"—proved to be "antagonistic and finally explosive." "He declared that his problems were those of psychology, while mine belonged to 16 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION IN A CHANCING WORLD theology, and that they had absolutely nothing to do with each other" (Starbuck, 1937, p. 225). A Suspicious Neglect: That succeeding generations of psychologists share much the same attitude is often inferred from the virtual absence of religion as a topic in most textbooks of psychology. Early in the 1940s, Gordon Allport (1948) analyzed the treatment accorded religious experience by 50 textbooks of that day. "About most psychological texts," he concluded, "there is nothing to report excepting that they contain no treatment of the religious sentiment or closely related mental functions" (p. 83). A series of subsequent surveys reveals that the situation has not fundamentally changed today. Of the texts published in the 1950s and 1970s, most make no reference at all to religion. In the surprising 89.2 percent of textbooks from the 1980s that do mention religion in some form, discussions are most often brief and speculative, commonly featuring research on meditation or the sensational 1978 mass suicide at the People's Temple in Jonestown, Guyana. Although the marked decline in explicitly negative evaluations of religion in the textbooks of the 1970s is still evident in those of the 1980s, religion remains chiefly an incidental source of illustrations, not a subject matter worthy in its own right of sustained discussion (Kirkpatrick and Spilka, 1989; Lehr and Spilka, 1989; Spilka, Comp, and Goldsmith, 1981). Some psychologists would argue that religion, as a higher-order phenomenon, is properly omitted from textbooks surveying the fundamentals of psychology. With an understanding of more basic topics, such as child development, motivation, attitude formation and change, and psychopathology, students will have learned the principles that are necessary for the comprehension of religion; no separate treatment is necessary. These psychologists might also point out that art, music, and poetry are also "neglected," and for precisely the same reason: they are higher-order or derivative phenomena about which psychologists have little to add. Agreeing that a scientific psychology in search of elementary principles quite naturally leaves the data of religious consciousness out of its account, Charles Shaw (1917) points out that James, the writer of the psychology of religion's one great classic, almost totally ignored the subject in the 1400 pages of his Principles of Psychology. Yet the psychologist's reticence about religion is more profoundly motivated than this argument suggests. We may note first that all introductory psychology textbooks treat phenomena of a higher order in chapters on personality, psycho-pathology, and social psycholog)'. Second, in accord with Wilson's principle of reconstructing complexity, these phenomena are at least implicitly recognized as requiring novel principles that cannot be derived from a knowledge of lower-order events. Antipathy Toward Religion: Now and then evidence appears that points to a genuine antagonism toward religion among typical psychologists. The low mean score of a randomly selected group of psychologists who returned Clifford Kirkpatrick and Sarah Stone's (1935) Belief Pattern Scale was said to reveal "considerable religious hostility" (p. 580). At about the same time, Leuba (1934) found that the psychologists in his samples of American scientists were less likely to believe in God and immortality than any of the other groups. Several decades later, when Paul Heist and George Yonge (1968) intercorrelated the scales of the Strong Vocational Interest Blank for Men and their own Omnibus Personality Inventory, they found that the more men's interest patterns resembled those of psychologists, the more likely they were to reject conventional religious expressions. No other occupational scale showed this trend to the same degree (p. 36). That this trend is not OBJECTIONS TO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 17 limited to male psychologists is demonstrated by one of Donald P. Campbell's (1971) findings: on both the men's and the women's Religious Activities scales, psychologists score among the lowest groups. It is thus not surprising that many psychologists treat religion as a taboo topic (Douglas, 1963). The antipathy that the psychologically oriented apparently feel toward religion is already evident during the student years. In their study of sentiments among Harvard undergraduates, Henry Murray and Christiana Morgan (1945) found a large negative correlation ( — .70) between a positive attitude toward psychology and a favorable disposition toward religion (p. 205). More recently, Rosalia Paiva and Harold Haley (1971) discovered that, in a national sample of students entering medical school, those who anticipated specializing in psychiatry scored lower than any other group on the Religious scale of the Allport-Vernon-Lindzey Study of Values. We can only guess at the source of this negativity toward religion. As Allport (1950) suggests, speculation about human nature was long the province of religion and philosophy, and thus only by repudiating these traditions have psychologists thought themselves able to develop new methods and to chart a different course. Moreover, the psychological science that evolved in twentieth-century America was strongly influenced by positivistic philosophy, according to which most if not all religious statements are philosophically meaningless. Salvation, such as it might be, was no longer considered the concern of religion. Only the new social sciences, !n concert with the physical and biological sciences, might hope to deliver humankind from the fears and suffering that some say inspired the first prayers and magical incantations. It is understandable that these trends in psychology would attract persons who have rejected religion and repel those for whom traditional religious language and forms remain important.2 It is thus comprehensible why many students, teachers, and practitioners of psychology view religious faith as an outdated and perhaps regrettable phenomenon. A fuller understanding of the vehement hostility toward religion that some psychologists show would require a careful study of their lives. James Burtchaell (1970) suggests that many of the prominent physical and social scientists who speak disdainfully of religion have in fact ''broken free from cloyingly fundamentalist childhoods. Having little or no subsequent contact with any more discriminating forms of faith, they too easily [think] of all religion in terms of the old sawdust trail" (p. 97). Kenneth E. Clark's (1957) study of American psychologists reveals that, in the mid-1950s, as many as one-third of the psychologists in some areas of specialization came from fundamentalist Protestant backgrounds. As we have already noted, the suspicion or hostility encountered by psychologists of religion is experienced by all scholars of religion. Sociologist Robert Bellah (1970b) observes that "There is no other sphere of human culture which is excluded from sympathetic academic consideration on its own terms on the grounds that such a study endangers science, reason, logic, and the whole heritage of the Enlightenment" (p. 113). The prevalent attitude in American universities, accord- y Psychologist Donald T. Campbell (1975) writes that "The recruitment of scholars into psychology and psychiatry . . . may be such as to select persons unusually eager to challenge the cultural orthodoxy. In fact, the social and behavioral sciences do overlap much more in knowledge claims with traditional moral belief sysiems than do nonhuman biology, chemistry, and physics. It is a prerequisite to a scientific approach in the social sciences that investigators be willing to challenge the cultural orthodoxy. Bui a science with this entrance requirement may end up recruiting persons who are not only willing to make this challenge but in fact ovcreager to do so" (pp. 198-199). 18 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION IN A CHANGING WORLD ing to Bellah (1970c), is what he calls "enlightenment fundamentalism." "This is the view that science and historical scholarship have effectively disposed of fallacious religious beliefs. If the study of religion has any place in the university at all, which is doubtful to enlightenment fundamentalists, it is to disclose the true reasons why religious believers have been so misguided" (p. 3). That religious traditions and faith can be approached with a scholarly attitude, sympathetically and without preconceptions or prejudgments, is a notion that is apparently foreign to some academic minds, both conservative and liberal, who think of religion only as something that can be preached. The general inhospitality encountered by the study of religion is undoubtedly responsible for the fact that it is "a grossly 'under-developed area' in our academic life" (Michaelsen, 1964, p. 26). Perhaps the recent upsurge of interest in the world's religious traditions, along with the ever-increasing availability of scholarly publications in this broad field (see Adams, 1977; Eliade, 1987), will gradually ameliorate a situation that ought to disturb every person who cares about the survival of human culture. A LOOK AHEAD__________________________________________________ In the chapters that follow, we explore a wide variety of approaches in the psychology of religion. In the first of these chapters, we trace out the origins of the field, beginning in the nineteenth century and focusing on the most conspicuous trends in the three historic traditions: the Anglo-American, the German, and the French. There, we also briefly consider the situation worldwide today. Objective Approaches The remaining chapters may be thought of as forming three clusters, each centering on some basic principle or explanatory construct. The first cluster, consisting of four chapters, is dedicated to objective approaches, so-called because their proponents view human beings from an external perspective; experience, they say, is private and unverifiable and thus unusable in scientific research. They treat religion, then, either as observable behavior or as the outcome of biological processes. Modeled more or less after the physical and biological sciences, the psychologies in this cluster aspire to explain, predict, and control behavior. Because most contemporary academic psychologists embrace the objective approach, it is often referred to simply as psychology. When objective psychologists wish to distinguish their perspective from others, they employ the adjectives "scientific" or "empirical," terms that for them sum up and valorize the objective, natural-scientific approach. Chapters 3 and 4, the first two in this cluster, represent researchers who have sought a scientific explanation for religion in terms of either biological processes, behavior theory, or cross-species tendencies. The remaining two chapters in this group feature research that is distinguished by its use of objective research methods, often independent of any particular theory. Experimental and quasi-experimental approaches are the ideal, for they allow investigators to test hypotheses about cause and effect. Experimental investigations of religious phenomena, including meditation, mystical experience, and helping behavior, are reviewed in Chapter 5. Where experimentation is not possible, as is usually the case with religion, correlational methods may be employed instead. Their use for exploring the association of religion with various social attitudes and mental health is reviewed in Chapter 6. A LUUK. AMtAU 17 jpth-psychological Approaches The second cluster, likewise composed of four chapters, represents the depth psychologies. Emerging out of the clinical consultation room rather than the research laboratory, these psychologies hold in common the view that dynamic, often irrational unconscious processes play a major role in human experience and conduct. They also ascribe to the experiences of the early childhood years, especially in relation to the parents, a formative influence that persists for the rest of the individual's life. Hereditary and constitutional factors may likewise be assigned a significant place in the psyche's economy. The depth psychologists interest themselves in the feelings and images of conscious experience, but only to the degree that they provide clues to underlying unconscious forces. While thus sharing the humanistic psychologists' subjective orientation, they treat the content of experience as disguised and projected material that invites radical reinterpretation. The first of the chapters on the depth approach, Chapter 7, considers the orthodox psychoanalytic perspective of Sigmund Freud and his immediate successors, who trace religion chiefly to the Oedipal relationship of the young boy to his father. Chapter 8 explores the interpretations of religion offered by proponents of the revised psychoanalytic approaches known collectively as object-relations theory. Together, they accent the contributions of still earlier experience, especially in relation to the mother, while at the same time casting religion in a more favorable light. The related perspective of ego psychology, as developed by Erik Erikson, is the sjbject of Chapter 9, where we also encounter the work on religious development of James Fowler. The final chapter in the cluster of depth approaches, Chapter 10, is given over to the analytical psychology of C. G. Jung, whose postulating of a collective unconscious sets him apart from the various psychoanalytic schools. For Jung, religious symbols and rites are the elements that have traditionally facilitated the complex unconscious processes that are directed toward self-realization. lumanistic Approaches The final cluster of chapters represents a variety of humanistic approaches. Like the objective psychologists, the humanists conceive of their work as scientific and empirical. Yet for them these words retain their original, broad meaning: science is any body of systemically obtained knowledge, regardless of object or method, and empiricnl refers to any approach that is grounded in experience rather than speculation. Thus the humanists pursue what they call the human sciences, which draw on the human capacities for empathy and understanding and thus employ methods and pursue goals rather different from the natural sciences. Subjective in their orientation like the depth psychologists, the humanistic psychologists differ from them in taking conscious experience to be significant and interesting in its own right. Employing various methodological principles and descriptive typologies, they focus on the subdeties and variations in the personal world, especially of exceptional individuals. If they also posit significant unconscious processes, they side with Jung in ascribing to these processes a highly constructive role. As frequent critics of ordinary piety and traditional religious institutions, they are disposed to valorize some religious forms over others, especially those that promote the achievement of positive human potential. Chapter 11, the first of the three humanistic chapters, centers on the enduring contributions of William James, who is famous for preferring the more dramatic forms of religious experience. Complementing his views, then, is the work of his 20 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION IN A CHANGING WORLD student James Pratt, who casts light on more ordinary forms and expressions of piety. In Chapter 12, we meet the chief representatives of the German descriptive tradition, which is noted for its phenomenological and interpretive approaches. This chapter features the classic work on the experience of the holy by Rudolf Otto and the varieties of prayer by Friedrich Heiler, along with the existential-interpretive views of Eduard Spranger, the applications of experimental introspection by Karl Girgensohn and others of the Dorpat School, and more recent research on mystical consciousness and religious development. Chapter 13 rounds out our survey of the humanistic tradition by considering the views of prominent American humanistic psychologists, notably Gordon Allport, Erich Fromm, and Abraham Maslow, along with research that their work has inspired. There, we also take into account transpersonal psychology and the reflections of Rollo May and Victor Frankl. The book concludes with an epilogue that provides a summary schema and final reflections on the relevance of the psychology of religion to the crises that confront the world today.