1

Concepts and Approaches

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 con-
ceptual 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,
someones 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

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 2 Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality

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.
One of the main problems facing the psychology of religion is that
religion is multi-faceted. Adherence to a religion is now generally recog-
nized to be complex, in that a person can be religious in one way but not in
another. For example, someone might be a believer but not a religious
practitioner. Of course, empirically, there tend to be correlations between
different aspects of religion, but it is nevertheless true that different people
are religious in different ways. Psychology has perhaps been too ready to
assume that religiousness is unitary. It is part of a general problem of
psychology being over-impressed with the explanatory power of traits.
We constantly need to be reminded of just how different people can be in
different situations. It is also important to remember just how different
religious people can be from one another. Under some circumstances, the
different aspects of religion can become unusually dissociated, as may
happen, for example, in some patients with neurological disorders.
So, how does religion subdivide? The most important distinctions are
probably between experience (or feeling), practice (or behavior), and
belief (or thinking). As a general framework for understanding how
humans function, it is not specic to religion and goes back to Aristotle.
Some such threefold categorization arises in many areas of psychology; it
applies equally to morality, for example.
This threefold distinction has been made in varying terminologies and
is the most commonly used framework in books on the psychology of
religion (e.g., Loewenthal, 2000). It features in what is probably the most
widely used such scheme, developed by Glock and Stark (1965), which
distinguishes (among other things) between what they called the ritualistic
dimension (i.e., religious practices), the ideological adherence (i.e., adher-
ence to religious beliefs), and the experiential dimension (i.e., religious
feelings and experiences). Chapters 57 of this book will consider, in turn,
religious experience, practices, and beliefs.

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 Concepts and Approaches 3

I think this conceptual framework is more helpful than one that is

currently fashionable in the sociology of religion, between believing,
belonging, and behaving (sometimes becoming is added too).
The main deciency is that this scheme leaves out religious experience;
any conceptual framework that has no place for that is clearly inadequate.
(I am not saying that experience is especially important, just that it ought
to be included.) There is also a problem in distinguishing between belong-
ing and behaving, as belonging is largely manifest through behavior.
An important recent issue has been whether and in what sense spiri-
tuality extends beyond religion, and what the relationship is between
spirituality and religion. Spirituality is notoriously difcult to dene and,
despite considerable effort, there is a lack of agreement about what
spirituality is and how psychology should study it. One problem is that
spirituality, like religion, is multi-faceted.
Some circles tend to regard one of these aspects of religion as founda-
tional, and the others as derivative. William James, in his Varieties of
Religious Experience (James, 2012/1902), regarded experience as primary,
and the organizational and doctrinal aspects of religion as secondary. It is
a view for which he has been much criticized, because it is over-
individualistic and neglects inuences in the other direction, that is, social
and doctrinal inuences on experience. In contrast, some sociological
thought regards society, language, and culture as primary. Yet again, the
current atheist critique of religion tends to focus on religious belief as the
root of the religious problem, and to regard that as primary.
All of these views are, in different ways, foundationalist in that they
take one aspect of religion as foundational. I suggest that no single aspect
of religion should be regarded as foundational to the others, and that there
are mutual inuences between all three of these facets of religion each
one inuences the others in a systemic pattern of interrelationships.
Psychology can make a contribution to understanding each of them.
The relative importance of different aspects of religion can change over
time. The psychology of religion has a long tradition of distinguishing
between different conversion types. People can have different entry
points into religion; experience, practice, and belief can all, in principle,
be the point of entry to religion. In principle, intellectual conversions can
arise from extensive exploration, though it is generally agreed that these
are relatively rare. Mystical conversions can arise from a sudden, powerful
religious experience, but they are also probably not very common. What
might be called affectional conversions can arise from the experience of
being loved by members of a religious community.

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 4 Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality

The most common point of entry to religion is probably belonging,

that is, becoming part of a religious community, though there can be
exceptions. Whichever aspect of religion is the initial draw and point of
entry, there will be a tendency for other aspects of religion to be added. For
example, those whose rst contact with religion is through social contacts
and public religious practices are likely to develop religious beliefs and
private religious practices too.
Another important distinction is between relatively social and relatively
individual aspects of religion. It seems that religion often starts social,
though again there can be exceptions. It sometimes seems that the sociology
and psychology of religion are locked in an ideological clash about the
relative importance of society and the individual. I suggest that is unhelpful.
Social and individual aspects of religion inuence each other. They are both
interesting and important, and psychology studies both. It is worth dispel-
ling the idea that psychology only studies the individual. Psychology includes
social psychology and can focus on social processes. The distinction between
social and individual aspects of religion is perhaps clearest for religious
practices, and it is something to which we will return in Chapter 6.
Some facets of religion occur more frequently than others, and I suggest
that distinction between frequent and infrequent aspects of religion may
also be quite important. There seems to be a tendency for the more common
aspects of religion to be rather general, and for the less frequently occurring
forms of religion to be more specic. That is seen most clearly with religious
belief. The most common form of religious belief is to believe in God or,
even more generally, to think that at least there is something more than
the natural world. Fewer people hold religious beliefs that are dened in
more specic terms, such as belief in the virgin birth of Jesus.
A signicant development in the psychology of religion has been the
study of non-religion. From the point of view of those who see non-
religion as the obvious, rational default position, there may not be much
need to study it psychologically. However, the psychological study of
religion and non-religion makes no presuppositions about the truth of
either. Both religion and non-religion are worthy of psychological study,
regardless of assumptions about their validity.

What Is Psychology?
Let us now turn to psychology. There has long been interest in matters that
we would now call psychological, mainly under the auspices of either
philosophy or religion. However, psychology only emerged as an

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 Concepts and Approaches 5

independent discipline in the late nineteenth century. It has generally

endeavored to be scientic, though that term has been understood in
different ways at different times.
The psychology of religion has had a uctuating position within this
new discipline of psychology. (For a good overview of the history of
psychology of religion, see Paloutzian, 1996). It was an important part
of psychological theory and research in the early decades of the discipline,
and William Jamess Varieties of Religious Experience is the classic of that
period. By c. 1925, psychology generally was moving into a more beha-
viorist period, with much less interest in the psychological study of
religion (though psychoanalytic approaches to religion continued to be
inuential with the general public in the middle of the twentieth century,
even if they had little impact in academic psychology).
By c. 1970, interest in the psychological study of religion had revived,
and an impressive volume of research has accumulated in recent decades
that sheds interesting light on almost every aspect of religion. However,
this revived psychology of religion has had its limitations. It has never
regained a position of importance within psychology as a whole. It has
also tended to be rather atheoretical, and to concentrate on collecting
detailed information rather than answering big questions.
Psychology is, in part, a human science seeking reasons and interpreta-
tions, but it is also a natural science seeking causal explanations. This
raises the fundamental issue of how best to understand people; that
question arises whether the focus is on their religion or anything else.
Experimental psychology has aspired to be a natural science and has tried
to apply to people the same scientic approach as would be used with
anything else, looking for the laws or universal processes that will
enable us to understand why humans function in the way they do.
An alternative approach (e.g., Harr and Secord, 1972), albeit
a minority one, has suggested that a different explanatory style is needed
for people than is appropriate in the natural sciences. The claim is that
people have intentions that govern their actions, and indeed that how we
describe actions often implicitly includes assumptions about intentions.
The task in understanding the actions of people is to understand their
reasons for their actions, rather than the causes of their observable beha-
vior. It takes a rst-person rather than a third-person approach to under-
standing people. Peoples accounts of why they acted as they did are highly
relevant, if not the last word.
This debate has sometimes been very erce, but my approach to it is
peaceable. I see value in both approaches and do not want to discard

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 6 Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality

either, but I also see limitations in both approaches. Each can be enriched
by taking the other into account, and each benets from checking its
claims against those of the other. Applying this to religion, I suggest that
what religious people have to say about their religious life (i.e., why they
do what they do, and how they experience it) is far too rich and interesting
to be ignored. However, given the limitations of human awareness, and
given the extraordinary human capacity for self-deception, augmenting it
with the more rigorous, albeit restricted, approach of the natural sciences
has great benets, as far as that is possible. A psychology of religion that
takes this binocular approach will have more to offer than a monocular
approach based solely on either the natural or human sciences.
It is important to distinguish two very different enterprises in the
psychology of religion. One is concerned with why humans in general
tend to be religious, with what makes humans the religious primate.
The other is concerned with differences between people, with why some
people are religious and others are not, and with why religion takes
different forms in different people.
The question of why humans tend to be religious has probably had
particular urgency and fascination for psychologists who are not them-
selves religious, and who nd religion deeply puzzling. Why should so
many people be engaged in something that seems to them to be so mani-
festly false? Answers to that question fall into three groups. First is
a sociological answer, which falls outside the scope of this book.
For Durkheim, for example, religion provided society with the symbolic
language by which society could understand itself. A second set of answers
has focused on what religion does for the individual. Freud, for example, in
The Future of an Illusion (Freud, 1961/1927) argued that religion assuages
the sense of helplessness that people would otherwise feel by providing
them with belief in an all-loving and all-powerful God. We will return to
that in the next chapter. Both of those explanations have focused on the
social or personal benets that religion may conrm, despite religion being
presumed to be false.
The third approach to explaining why humans are religious has taken
a different tack and has suggested that religion is an inevitable by-product
of how humans have evolved. The idea is basically that we are religious
because our brains are hardwired in such a way that religion comes
naturally to us. As we will see, a minority position holds that religion has
evolved because it has adaptive value, but most people think that it is a by-
product of other evolutionary developments. We will return to that in
Chapter 3.

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 Concepts and Approaches 7

It is important to emphasize that psychology is a multi-faceted disci-

pline that holds together various perspectives and methodologies. It is
really a family of disciplines, each with its own subject matter, questions,
and methodology. In principle, almost every subdiscipline of psychology
can be used to study religion from its own distinctive perspective, though
some of these psychologies of religion are much better developed than
others. Many are covered in this book, and it will be helpful now to
introduce briey some of these subdisciplines.
Psychoanalysis is rather on the fringe of psychology and is in fact
largely ignored in academic departments of psychology. That is largely
because there is widespread doubt about whether psychoanalysis is suf-
ciently scientic to be admitted to mainstream psychology. On the skep-
tical view, there is so much speculation in psychoanalysis, mixed in with
whatever empirical element there may be, that it is thought to be wholly
unreliable. Another complication when psychoanalysis is applied to
religion is Freuds own personal hostility to religion, though it has become
increasingly clear that psychoanalysis does not need to share Freuds own
negative view of religion. Though the psychoanalysis of religion needs to
be handled with care and can never be accepted uncritically, it has a depth
and range that are not easily matched by other approaches to the psychol-
ogy of religion and, in my view, should not be ignored.
The biological wing of psychology has come into prominence in recent
decades, and both evolutionary psychology and neuropsychology have
made signicant contributions to understanding religion. Relating
psychological functioning to brain processes has proved enormously fruit-
ful in many areas of psychology, especially in understanding cognitive
processes such as memory. It has also proved useful in the study of
religion, though it has sometimes been associated with the simplistic
idea that once you know which areas of the brain are involved in parti-
cular aspects of religion, you have explained religion away completely.
It has undoubtedly proved useful to place religion in an evolutionary
context, and to try to understand how and why humans became religious.
The problem with evolutionary psychology, as we will see in Chapter 3, is
that it has limited evolutionary data to work with. That leaves the way open
for rather speculative evolutionary theories to be presented in an over-
dogmatic way, and for what are really only presuppositions to be presented
as research ndings. One thing that the three areas of psychology we have
considered so far (psychoanalysis, evolutionary psychology, and neuropsy-
chology) have in common is that, when applied to religion, they have tried
to answer the most general question why are humans religious?

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 8 Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality

The question of why humanity is religious is intriguing and currently the

focus of much controversy, but it is also a frustratingly general question.
It glosses over important details in signicant ways. First, it neglects differ-
ences between people. People differ in how religious they are, and those
who are religious differ massively in what form that religiousness takes.
The psychology of religion tries to understand how those differences
between people arise.
Psychology is partly concerned with the psychological processes that
normal, healthy humans have in common, but it is also concerned with
how people differ and with why some people do one thing and some
another. A well-established approach to psychology, and one that has
been extensively applied to religion, is concerned with individual differ-
ences. It is an approach to psychology that has made extensive use of the
psychological questionnaire as a research tool, and a huge number of such
questionnaires are now available in the psychology of religion. Some
provide general, overall measures of religiousness; others focus down on
particular aspects of religion. I will suggest in Chapter 9 that it has proved
more fruitful to look at why different kinds of people are religious in
different ways than to look at why some people are religious and
others not.
Another important strand in psychology has been to focus on devel-
opmental processes, with how people change over time. It has certainly
been fruitful to chart how children change in their religiousness as they
grow up. In some areas of religion, particularly the ability to understand
religious ideas, that seems to follow a standard path, and to reect
maturational development. Other aspects of religion change in a less
predictable way through childhood, and the same is true of changes of
religiousness in adults. It is less clear that such changes should be
regarded as development in a strict sense of the term. Another strand
in developmental psychology has tried to use aspects of peoples child-
hood to predict how they function as adults. Some fruitful research of
that kind has occurred recently, using childhood patterns of attachment
to predict what form religion will take in adulthood (Granqvist and
Kirkpatrick, 2008).
A prominent strand of psychology has been concerned with problems
or abnormalities and their treatment. The main focus has been on mental
and physical health, but a wide range of personal and behavioral abnorm-
alities can also be considered. Psychological factors have been found to
play an important role in many personal problems and disorders, and an
interesting strand of the psychology of religion is concerned with the role

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 Concepts and Approaches 9

of religion, for example, with how religion helps people cope with
problems.
This is not an exhaustive list of the range of subdisciplines within
psychology, but it covers the main ones and gives an indication of the
scope of psychology.

Relating Psychology and Religion

The nal issue to be considered in this chapter is how psychology in
general and the psychology of religion in particular relate to religious
life and commitment. This can be seen as a special case of the more general
question of the relationship between science and religion, about which
there is much controversy.
It is best to begin with the question of whether psychology explains
religion so completely that it explains it away and leaves no room for any
other kind of explanation in terms of God or the spiritual world. Note rst
that it is only some aspects of the psychology of religion that are offering
sufciently general explanations of religion that they could possibly be
seen as explaining it away; those are the areas of psychology to be
considered in the next three chapters, psychoanalysis, evolutionary
psychology, and neuropsychology and the cognitive science of religion.
I will argue that none of these can be assumed to offer complete
explanations of religion. That can only be asserted if it can be shown
that no other explanatory factors could possibly be relevant. In fact, of
course, that is never the case, and it is hard to see how it could possibly be
proved. What can sometimes be claimed is that the psychology of religion
provides a sufcient explanation of religious life, so that it is unnecessary
to invoke other factors to make sense of it. However, that leaves open
whether non-psychological factors are relevant. In the nature of things, it
is not something that psychology can settle. I see no basis for claiming that
psychology can explain religion completely, or explain it away, in
a fashion that leaves no room for any distinctively religious factors.
Another argument is sometimes advanced here, based on the
assumption that simple explanations are always to be preferred.
If psychology provides an adequate explanation of religion, it is argued
that it is simplest and therefore best to accept that, and not to invoke
any other explanatory factors to do with God. I would suggest, in
response, that whether simple explanations are to be preferred depends
on context. In physics, the search for simple and elegant explanations
seems a guide to the truth. However, most things to do with humans

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 10 Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality

seem to have multiple causes (e.g., both biological and social ones), so
I see no general case for claiming that simple, mono-causal explana-
tions, such as psychological explanations of religion, are always to be
preferred.
However, that leaves many questions about how to bring psychological
explanations of religion into relationship with the accounts given of
religion by religious adherents. If we are willing to consider both kinds
of accounts, what is the relationship between them? In most books on the
psychology of religion, religion is treated just as a phenomenon to be
studied. However, it also itself offers an interpretative perspective, that is,
a religious perspective on religious phenomena can be brought into dia-
logue with the perspective of psychology.
Psychology offers an explanation of religion from an outsiders
perspective, but it can also contribute to religious interpretation from
the inside, interpreting the psychological signicance of the scriptural
texts and doctrinal beliefs. This interpretative role has been relatively
neglected. This book will also give more attention than usual to the to-
and-fro between the outsiders perspective of the psychologist and the
insiders perspective of the faith community.
Some might say that though psychology cannot rule religious accounts
out, psychological and religious accounts are answering such completely
different questions that no useful engagement between them is possible.
That would be the counterpart of the position, argued more generally
for science by Stephen Jay Gould, that science and religion are non-
overlapping magisteria (Gould, 2002).
Against that view, I want to maintain that there can be fruitful contact
between psychology and the perspective of religious people themselves.
I claimed earlier in this chapter that it is helpful to consider both the kind
of external causal explanations that the natural sciences try to offer and
the rst-person accounts in terms of reasons and intentions that partici-
pants offer. In the case of religion, rst-person accounts will normally
come from people who are themselves religious and who see things in
religious terms. Psychology is normally offering an outsiders perspective,
whereas religious people are offering an insiders perspective. I suggest
that these are best seen as complementary perspectives, not as mutually
exclusive.
Most books on the psychology of religion make no mention of the
insiders perspective of religious people themselves, though their perspec-
tive cannot be entirely excluded from the study of religious experience.
I shall refer to how religious people see things, where that is relevant and

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 Concepts and Approaches 11

of interest. My general stance is that, on occasions, cross-talk between the

two perspectives can be useful.
I dont think that psychology can rule a religious perspective in or out,
but I do think it can inuence how an insiders perspective can most
plausibly be framed. For example, when considering glossolalia (speaking
in tongues), I will suggest that psychology makes it very unlikely that
people are miraculously speaking languages with which they have had no
previous acquaintance. However, it does leave open the possibility that
this is spiritually inspired utterance, serving spiritual purposes.
Science generally has more inuence on the religious viewpoint than vice
versa. However, with psychology, I think there can be constructive mutual
inuence in both directions. That arises from the fact that religion has a long
history of reective and practical engagement with what are, in effect,
psychological phenomena. Though psychology has advanced our under-
standing in many ways, I shall suggest that there are points at which religion
can offer psychology some broader perspective and conceptual enrichment
out of its rich tradition, for example, in its understanding of forgiveness.
Finally, there is the question of the practical application of the psychology
of religion. Psychologists generally study religion just to understand it, not
with any practical objectives in mind. However, I will suggest that the
psychology of religion actually has considerable practical application.
It makes no difference to that whether or not the psychologists concerned
are themselves religious. Another way in which this book departs from
many introductions to the psychology of religion is that it will include
more emphasis on the practical application of the psychology of religion,
focusing mainly on the Christian church.

Plan of the Book

The chapters of this book fall into four main groups. First are chapters on
those areas of psychology (psychoanalysis, evolutionary psychology, neu-
roscience, and cognitive science) that at least sometimes offer general
explanations of why humans are religious. Next are chapters on what
I have suggested are the three main facets of religion: experience, practice,
and belief, and then a further chapter on spirituality. That will be
followed by a group of chapters dealing with how people differ, including
religious development, different ways of being religious, and how religion
relates to health and adjustment. The last few chapters will deal with
practical and theological applications of psychology to religion, particularly
from a Christian point of view.

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 12 Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality

Summary
Religion has various components, including religious experience, prac-
tices, and beliefs. People can be more religious in one of these ways than
in the others. No one component of religion should be seen as the
primary one, from which others are derived. Different facets of religion
may have a different causal basis, and cultural assumptions about their
relative importance can change.
Psychology is a complex discipline, with various subdisciplines, such as
developmental psychology, each of which can focus on religion in its
own distinct way. Though the primary focus of psychology is on the
individual, it is also both a biological and a social science.
Psychology has generally tried to study religion with objectivity. It can
discover much of interest about religion, including the effects of reli-
gion, but it has no basis for reaching conclusions about the truth or
falsehood of religious beliefs. There is value in bringing the outsiders
perspective of psychology into dialogue with the insiders perspective of
religious people themselves.

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