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Episode 18: The Psychology of Religion with David Wulff
36 Plays5 years ago
David Wulff, author of the comprehensive "Psychology of Religion: Classic and Contemporary", talks with us today about some of the issues that psychologists grapple with in studying religion. How can a researcher take a fair and unbiased approach to a topic so fraught with issues of personal belief and faith? How important is belief anyway -- must one sacrifice the intellect to engage in religious practice? David discusses his recent research; his measure of religious tendencies, called the "Faith Q-Sort", has been used internationally to understand how religion manifests differently across individuals.
Resources:
Psychology of Religion: Classic and Contemporary
Autobiography: The Evolution of a Psychologist of Religion
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction of David Wolf
00:00:08
Speaker
Welcome to the Cognition podcast for this week. I'm your host, Rolf Nelson, along with Joe Hardy here. Hello. And today we have a special guest, David Wolf, an emeritus professor from Wheaton College, which is where I work and teach. David Wolf is a researcher into the psychology of religion. He's written one of the foundational textbooks on the psychology of religion called Psychology of Religion, Classic and Contemporary.
00:00:38
Speaker
David got his bachelor's degree at Wittenberg University and then got his PhD at University of Michigan where he taught an extremely popular psychology of religion course that when it started out I think enrolled about 60 students and by the time he got done teaching it a few times went up to over 350 students. So he brought a lot of interest to the area.
Faith Q Sort Development
00:01:00
Speaker
He was the president of Division 36 in the American Psychological Association, and in more recent years he's been developing a methodology called the Faith Q Sort, which is a way of determining religious inclinations that I'm sure he'll talk a little bit about, and something that's been used in 14 different countries and contrasting religious tendencies across different people.
00:01:24
Speaker
I could talk on and on about his qualifications and all the great things that he has done, but I think maybe we should just start getting into the conversation here. So David, welcome, and thanks a lot for being with us. It's a real pleasure to go. Thanks, David. So maybe we can start out by just asking the question, what were the motivations for you getting into the psychology of religion?
Personal Struggles and Teaching Journey
00:01:47
Speaker
Well, when I started graduate study at Michigan, I was still struggling with my religious point of view that I had grown up with. I was finding myself increasingly distance from it. I was experiencing conflict between a religious point of view and a psychological point of view. And, you know, in the midst of this struggle, the opportunity came along. This was my second year to volunteer to teach in psychology
00:02:16
Speaker
It was called psychology and religion at Michigan teach that course along with several other graduate students. It was a strange course in that it was not funded. So none of us was paid for our volunteer work. It was only two credits when the standard course was three and psychology majors could not count it toward their major.
00:02:40
Speaker
That first year, as you suggested, there were about 60 students. There was a social psychologist who was sort of in charge of the course, but under his leadership, it really was a sort of a second rate sociology and religion course. The students in my section, we divided the 60 into four sections, were quite frustrated. So I introduced the sort of the classics of the psychology of religion and William James and
00:03:08
Speaker
Jung and Alport and Tron and others to their great happiness and then the subsequent year I was invited by the chair of the department who was champion of the course to take it over and so then for several years I developed that course and as you've already indicated this student interest soared and
00:03:32
Speaker
That of course was deeply gratifying. The course was switched to three credits. You could get credit for major.
Psychology and Religion Reconciliation
00:03:42
Speaker
And finally we were paid. That's great. What do you think was the key in terms of making it more appealing or interesting to the students? Well, it genuinely addressed psychological understandings of religion.
00:03:58
Speaker
There was at Michigan, no department of religion. So taking courses on religion was not easy. And I think a number of students came to this course to study religion, or many of them, I think, for personal reasons, trying to decide where they stood. And it just caught on, students recommending it to each other.
00:04:24
Speaker
This might be a subject that not everybody is familiar with and might even sound contradictory to some people, the psychology of religion. So how do you go about framing something like the psychology of religion when there may be contradictory viewpoints represented that religion might
00:04:47
Speaker
be larger than psychology or consume psychology and psychology might think the other way around. How do you reconcile these two different points of view as being equal and each given enough respect? They have struggled with each other over the decades. Psychology of religion means that religion is the object of analysis and psychology is the subject
00:05:17
Speaker
Psychology is used to to illuminate religion and religion is not always happy to. When I say religion, I'm thinking of say scholars of religion or simply proponents of religion. Religious people are not always happy about the intrusion of psychology into their lives.
00:05:38
Speaker
I think at least some popular press on the subject and certainly some philosophers and psychologists thinking about why it is that we believe something as being the primary goal. So we should say, why is it, evolutionarily speaking, that we believe in God or some sort of abstract deity? Of course, you'd be insulted if you did believe in God to suggest that it was just something in your head.
00:06:03
Speaker
or that their understanding is strictly something in their head. Strictly speaking, psychology of religion should be neutral about the existence of its transcendent objects. But that's not always what happens. I mean, what it amounts to today is what we would call methodological agnosticism. One, as a psychologist,
00:06:30
Speaker
working methodologically, one simply remains agnostic, neither affirming or denying the existence of the transcendent. But a lot of the researchers in America are themselves Christians and even evangelical Christians, even conservative evangelical Christians. So they are not interested in evaluating how religion may have come out, but I rather interested in
00:06:59
Speaker
demonstrating that to be religious is a good thing, that it yields various forms of well-being. It's a constructive thing. There was a time when, and this is in the middle of the 20th century, when the main concern was the apparent correlation between religiosity and negative social attitudes, such as authoritarianism, dogmatism, ethnocentrism, and so on.
00:07:27
Speaker
And trying to deal with that sort of embarrassing correlation, they tried to distinguish different kinds of religiosity, suggesting one kind may be subject to these negative social attitudes, but the other kind is not. And to a degree that has worked out, but the main instrument, which is a religious orientation,
00:07:53
Speaker
scale, the main instrument is seriously flawed, but still widely used. What would be those differences then in terms of the types of religiosity? Yeah, the classic one is, which was put forward by, well, actually put forward by Theodore Orgarno, one of the authors of the authoritarian personality,
Faith Q Sort Methodology
00:08:15
Speaker
was picked up by Gordon Allport. And it's a distinction between
00:08:19
Speaker
treating religion as an end in itself, which they call intrinsic religion, and treating religion as a means toward other ends. And the other ends have sort of been divided through factor analysis, divided into personal ends and social ends. So a personal end would be that it makes you feel better. And a social end would be that it helps your business contacts and social relations.
00:08:48
Speaker
Well, one of the problems is that the measure of intrinsic religiosity or religious orientation, you know, sort of derives from mid 20th century, Midwestern Protestant piety. And it really measures the degree to which persons attend church, read the Bible and pray. And it is, as you might anticipate, correlates highly with fundamentalism.
00:09:18
Speaker
So to call it an intrinsic scale is really misleading. It has been highly criticized, but boy, it's still popular. So is that popularity due in part to the dominance in the field in the US from Christian researchers or where does that come from? Yeah, I would say so. So then there aren't that many people from other faiths that are doing research in the area.
00:09:47
Speaker
Well, there's an increasing number of Muslims, mainly through association with American researchers. I can't say that I've seen much success on that side. Well, there is a multitude of questionnaires intended to measure religiosity, but they all tend to reflect Protestant, evangelical Protestant Christianity.
00:10:14
Speaker
Maybe this is a good time to discuss the methodology that you developed, the Faith Q Sort methodology. I had for some years been criticizing in my book and subsequent publications criticizing measures that were being used and how one-sided they were and how that distorted the research process. So the Faith Q Sort is my answer to that problem.
00:10:43
Speaker
Cue methodology is intended to assess some area of subjectivity. So it can be used in the multitude of topics. And that's widely used these days in various fields, although methodologists within psychology, I think, are not well versed in it. But cue methodology itself, in terms of the method, involves having
00:11:08
Speaker
A number of usually statements that could be single words. It could be even images of on cards and they the number can vary from 30 or 40 up to. Well, my cue sword is 101 items and and the task for the person who is completing the sword is to distribute these statements over a continuum with nine categories.
00:11:37
Speaker
uh, from one, one extreme is, you know, this is definitely, this definitely describes me and the other kind of go or definitely it does not describe me at the other end. And then the distribution is to be a roughly normal distribution with instructions of putting, you know, five statements in the most extreme categories and then eight statements, then 12, then 16 and in the middle 19. And then when you have a number of people who've completed,
00:12:07
Speaker
you can then do a special factor analysis that correlates sorts and not items. And what comes out of that factor analysis will be a set of what are called prototypes, sort of prototypical ways of sorting these statements, prototypical ways of sort of making sense of the world and of one's own experience.
Prototypes and Cultural Variations
00:12:34
Speaker
Three major prototypes that have come out of research with Americans and also some Europeans include, first of all, secular humanism, which is a familiar notion, a totally sort of anti-religious thing, though some secular humanists are more open than others to what religion might have to teach them.
00:13:04
Speaker
Then a second one is traditionally theistic, and that's, you know, that's your traditional way of thinking about things. I might mention that in a study with Catholic students, college students, that this traditionally theistic correlated very highly with all ports, intrinsic religiosity. And then the third major prototype, and this is the one that interests me the most,
00:13:30
Speaker
is what I call the spiritually attuned prototype. Now, this isn't a particularly theistic prototype. Theism is kind of relatively low in the sorting process. More common orientation toward nature or a kind of spirituality of the earth, more openness to multiple meanings, and a report of feeling enchanted by
00:13:58
Speaker
mystery and uncertainty. I'm rather mystery and paradox. And this may be sort of what people call being spiritual today, but it doesn't really fully accord with other people claim or psychologists claim spirituality is about.
00:14:20
Speaker
Do you have any examples of the kind of statements that these three types might rate high? So an atheist, theistic, or spiritually attuned, what sorts of statements might? The atheist rejects any religious claims that are in conflict with rational or scientific thinking. So that kind of thinking is given prominence.
00:14:47
Speaker
The theistic, traditionally theistic, perhaps the most, one of the highest ratings is to the statement, believes in a divine being with whom one can have personal relations and spiritually attuned. Well, let's see what would be one of the highest feels most spiritual in the context of nature. And then the item about is enchanted by mystery and paradox.
00:15:17
Speaker
They are also, whereas the traditionally theistic are likely to affirm the Bible as a literal word of God, the spiritually attuned, more likely to see it as a human document, perhaps inspired, but not divine. Then there are the minor prototypes of which there were five in the initial group.
00:15:46
Speaker
Many few are representing these types, but I think still important. One of them that I find particularly interesting is a reluctantly skeptical person who is really sad to have lost a religious point of view, who is probably reluctant to share that change, may feel all they have left is a certain set of moral principles
00:16:15
Speaker
and so on. Another one institutionally anchored this as a person who feels a bit at sea in terms of their personal faith. And the way they find some kind of position in the world is to commit themselves to some institution, probably some congregation where they spend a lot of time.
00:16:40
Speaker
You know, for them, church attendance is not about making contacts or having social relations, but is a context in which they can try to feel closer to God. And then there's the religiously extroverted persons whose religiosity or spirituality, whatever you ever want to call it, mainly manifests itself through external behaviors, so attending church and so on.
00:17:09
Speaker
They are not people who spend time alone praying or meditating. And well, there are a number of others. The minor dispositions, I'm sorry, the minor prototypes vary fairly a lot from one group of participants to another. And I've had
00:17:36
Speaker
Unitarian Universalists complete the sort of, as you might guess, knowing how liberal that organization is that there are almost virtually no traditionally theistic persons there, but there can be a residual kind of minor prototype of kind of wishful wishing for a theistic faith.
00:18:04
Speaker
The secular humanistic split in two with one, one of them well established, confident in their point of view of committed to making the world a better place.
00:18:19
Speaker
and so on. The other secular humanistic, much less confident in their point of view, not sure about what they embrace. And they also report being more anxious than the other. And they seem less committed to carrying out some kind of social justice.
Religion's Social and Moral Impact
00:18:40
Speaker
Now in a Polish group, the traditionally theistic, these are people in Poland,
00:18:46
Speaker
traditionally theistic prototype split into quite cleanly, one of them being a traditionally theistic on the basis of authority, starting with what their parents taught them up to the present where they turned to authorities for their orientation. Whereas the other traditionally theistic prototype grounds their
00:19:14
Speaker
views in their own personal experience. So when you talk about some subtypes, like reluctantly skeptical, sounds like a sad kind of life to live, I guess, if you've lost your faith and feel bad about that. When I worked up the description, how a cue sword culminates is in the creation of a summary sort of paragraph.
00:19:43
Speaker
that describes what this prototype is about. And once I had worked out that description for the reluctantly skeptical, I sent it to the student who was sort of what's called a defining variable. That is, they are exemplars of a particular prototype. So I sent this to an exemplar of that prototype. This was a couple of years after he took the Q sort and had graduated.
00:20:13
Speaker
he was struck by how well it summed him up. There was a certain sadness to that. You're exactly right. I guess I ask because it seems like the reluctantly skeptical, and then the other group of secular atheists that's maybe less sure about a commitment to a social cause seem like the kinds of groups that
00:20:39
Speaker
may be interested in finding a substitute for religion in some sort of sense that feel like religion has a useful role and provides something to people's lives but can't convince themselves to believe. Well, another minor prototype was what I call a religious humanist, and it does correlate with a secular humanist, about 0.5, but the religious humanist is much more open to
00:21:09
Speaker
much more interested, say, in the lives of people like Gandhi, you might say, much more open to sort of learning from the religious traditions without feeling they have to somehow believe in them. So they make use of, or they're certainly open to,
00:21:29
Speaker
So they can be more eclectic about the set of beliefs that they adopt. That's very interesting. One of the things that I was thinking about as you were describing these different prototypes was what is the purpose from a psychological perspective of religion? So, you know, in cognitive psychology, we often talk about the utility of a certain function or ability. And, you know, from this perspective,
00:21:56
Speaker
it seems that religion certainly does play a role in our psychological lives. David, from your perspective, do you have a view on that, what the psychological utility or purpose of religion is? Oh, there are multiple purposes, as you might imagine. And this intrinsic extrinsic distinction is one not so successful effort to sum up how that can be. I mean, there's no question that people
00:22:27
Speaker
find great consolation and comfort in religious ideas and recently critiquing a paper on the Bible as a coping tool and how this among people with cancer and how they turn to various passages in the Bible for consolation. And of course, prayer plays a major role in their lives as they
00:22:55
Speaker
try to make peace with what's happening to them. Well, you know, particularly the notion of an afterlife is enormously appealing to many people. That's a consolation. But you know, from the thinking of it, from another point of view, the teachings about an afterlife, and particularly a threat of hell, is a way of manipulating people and trying to get them to embrace certain ideas.
00:23:25
Speaker
So there's, I mean, it varies a lot, you know, depending on how mature, sophisticated a person might be and how they, in effect, use their religion. For some, it leads to a kind of depth personality, I would say. For others, it can lead to unfortunate
00:23:54
Speaker
social and political effects such as we are seeing today. It strikes me that one of the purposes that you could imagine for religion, particularly from an evolutionary standpoint, is the idea of values. So societal structural framework that prevents us from just going off and killing each other randomly. So some sort of like ethical and moral framework
00:24:23
Speaker
There is a tradition in the psychology of religion that goes way back to the beginning of the 20th century of thinking of religion as the preservation of values. Values here being, of course, what someone considers most important. You know, there's the question, you know, conservative religious people tend to think that one has to be religious in order to be a moral and compassionate person.
00:24:50
Speaker
And in fact, one of the Q sort items is to that effect, it states it negatively. It is not necessary to be religious, to be a compassionate and caring person. But that is, you know, that's a point of contention that people who say you don't have to be religious. I mean, some of the most impressive people in terms of their values are not particularly religious.
00:25:18
Speaker
I always do find it strange that that point of view gets taken up so much and especially of say the Bible as a source of morality too. Oh yes. I mean from what you know what I was thinking there was you know it's a very difficult problem in psychology right because psychology and its you know affiliate fields like for example
00:25:40
Speaker
behavioral economics. We'll talk about utility. So what is providing usefulness to the individual? Most typically it's the individual and often not the group and how people make decisions based on their own utility. And I find it often is challenging to discuss some of the more interesting elements of psychology and the more interesting elements of life in that framework because it is devoid of values.
00:26:10
Speaker
I think if you take values out of the conversation, it's just a much less rich conversation about our psychological lives. I think this is where it's challenging for people to agree upon a framework for discussing values that doesn't include religion because where does the authority
00:26:34
Speaker
come from for asserting a certain set of values?
Speculative Modern Religion
00:26:38
Speaker
Why do we believe those values, if not for some external source of truth for that? Values are critical in thinking about religion. And of course, different traditions have different views about how these values come about.
00:26:54
Speaker
Again, particularly within the Christian tradition, the Bible was thought to, or at least the conservative Christian traditions. The Bible is thought to be the source of values, but it's very selective in what they'll choose from the Bible to promote certain values. Others will say, but notice this over here in this adjoining chapter. So it's a difficult question of how
00:27:24
Speaker
how to establish the fundamental values without, you know, affirming that particular religious point of view. Well, now, okay, so here's a more speculative question. But following along the lines here, if you were to, if you were to start your own religion today, what would be the fundamental principles that you would put together? So, you know, think L. Ron Hubbard, or, you know, what are the what are other recent religions, I guess, if you could,
00:27:53
Speaker
Take out the best of them. You know, we've made a few mistakes from all of these other ones, but maybe we can put together a better one now. Well, it was published a few years ago. It's a consumer's guide to world's religions. Oh, something to that effect. And you know, it, it imitates the consumer's report format. And there are 99 traditions represented in this book. So each, each tradition has a page
00:28:24
Speaker
And, and then actually, I think it's rather brilliantly done. And, and I actually, as book review editor for the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, I actually reviewed the book. And it, you know, it indicates what the core principles are of each tradition, gives you some notion of how many people you'll find embracing that same tradition, you know, what kind of community you will become part of.
00:28:50
Speaker
how costly it is. Scientology comes out on top of that one. Oh, yeah, I bet. And how does the ratings fall? What is the top rated religion? Oh, I don't think we can say. It doesn't have a rating. Well, I guess that's one of the things we want to know is what's the best religion. Well, let me just conclude the description of this book by saying that there's a final chapter.
Persistence of Religion
00:29:15
Speaker
If you don't like any of the religions that had been reviewed earlier in the book,
00:29:19
Speaker
Here are principles you can use to establish your own. And it's a fairly serious chapter. Now, what kinds of things would you bring along? Well, certainly some kind of community. I mean, I don't remember how they represented it, but you can embrace a religion in which there's a community of one, you,
00:29:47
Speaker
But I've seen, particularly in my brother and sister-in-law, I've seen how their lives are enriched by their association with a particular religious community. And it's a very liberal group. I would think that would be very important. I think so. I think that seems to be one of the primary things that people lament when they say that they don't have something to replace religion with. In an alternate form.
00:30:16
Speaker
of religion. Well, some people do find alternatives. You know, I'm thinking particularly of gay persons who feel, you know, particularly if you've grown up, say, in a Southern Methodist tradition. I'm sorry, Southern Baptist tradition. I certainly don't feel welcome there. And some of them bail out completely from religion. Others search for a more hospitable religious tradition.
00:30:46
Speaker
you know, like the United Church of Christ, and certainly Unitarian Universalists, and so on. But some of these traditions have been very slow in overcoming their prejudices, their judgmental points of view, and so on. Is this something that you think has been to their detriment recently? Or is it something that doesn't really have much of an effect?
00:31:14
Speaker
Well, there was a book published back in 1972 by a researcher named Kelly, who documented the decline in mainline churches at a corresponding increase among fundamentalist or at least conservative religious groups. He was pondering why would that be the case when these
00:31:38
Speaker
these conservative groups embrace views that are so intellectually offensive and indefensible and so on. And he thinks, or his conclusion was that people are drawn to traditions where the cost is fairly high. And it's a tradition in which people are truly committed, not lukewarm like so many sort of liberal
00:32:07
Speaker
religions seem to them. That could be a slow death for a religion, I guess. Yes, that's certainly true. Early in the 20th century, some psychologists of religion, and I'm thinking also just of scholars of religion in general, assume that religion is going to fade out over the course of the 20th century, and that certainly has not happened. What we have seen is, first of all, resurgence in fundamentalism,
00:32:35
Speaker
And then in contrast, an embracing of various forms of what is called spirituality. And the spirituality views are highly, highly diverse, some very idiosyncratic, much less likely to be summed up in terms of an institution. Who knows where religion is going?
00:33:04
Speaker
It is not disappearing, and it is astonishing how particularly conservative religion has survived in an age which is so dominated by science and rationality. I thought the comment you made about community was interesting in that context, and maybe also in conjunction with what you were saying about the cost. If you think about it from the perspective of
00:33:35
Speaker
how much you're going to identify with a certain group. It makes sense to me that the challenge or cost of being a part of that group would correlate with the amount of intensity that you bring to your membership or the identification that you have with the membership. Reminds me of studies long ago of fraternity members and how the more severe the initiation, the more convinced the initiates are that it was worthwhile.
00:34:04
Speaker
you know, kind of trying to reduce cognitive dissonance there that there must be something good in this organization if I am willing to go through this. And I think, I think related, I think there is some research on cult groups. So doomsday groups that when the end of the world doesn't come at the predicted time, members still double down and they find some, some explanations. Some, you know, they'll say, well, it didn't come to an end because we were so faithful and
00:34:34
Speaker
and prayed and God gave us a reprieve, it is striking how religious points of view can really defend themselves in ways that are convincing to a lot of people.
00:34:56
Speaker
steady state of religiosity in America over the 20th century when it seemed like things might be disappearing. Does it seem also like there is more space or place for atheists also, that it's no longer quite as prohibitive to be an atheist publicly? Well, of course, over and over again, it's noted that the number of people who claim no religious identity
00:35:25
Speaker
has been growing, I don't know, somewhere like 21% at this point. Now the percentage is comparable to, say, the Southern Baptists or other religious organizations. But atheism is still, in many people's eyes, anathema. It's really, you know, in studies, they've asked
00:35:49
Speaker
people if they would vote for a presidential candidate who was black or who was Muslim or who was gay or who was atheist.
Religious Identity and Personal Beliefs
00:36:00
Speaker
And atheists come out the worst. People assume that an atheist is someone you can't trust. Now, why is that? Do you have any ideas about why there might be such dislike for atheists?
00:36:16
Speaker
Well, I'm tempted to think that it's partly defensive that they don't want to risk entertaining that possibility themselves. They have to convince themselves that it's a dangerous alternative. You know, believing in God is so critical. I mean, it's at the heart of Christian identity. If you want to find out if someone is religious, you ask, do you believe in God?
00:36:45
Speaker
And that also suggests to me the whole problem of equating being religious to having certain beliefs. Belief as a prerequisite is a relatively recent phenomenon and is mainly a result of Christian and Muslim faiths. There are certainly other traditions that have never thought of belief as a test of one's religiousness. And the thing that
00:37:15
Speaker
strikes me with my Faith Q Sword is that people like the secular humanists, there is a faith there. That's why I call it a Faith Q Sword. There is a commitment. There are hopes and there are actions that they're taking to make the world a better place, and so on.
00:37:37
Speaker
It's easy to say you believe something, but the word belief and the verb believe are so elusive, and it's hard to find words to translate them in other languages. Belief can occur in varying degrees and have varying degrees of implication for one person over to the next. Absolutely.
00:38:06
Speaker
And I think beliefs are I'm glad we got to the idea of belief to because beliefs are certainly something that we study in cognitive psychology and the things that.
00:38:16
Speaker
is I think maybe sort of curious to me in the religious context is the way that someone might accept a belief. So in general, you might encounter some phenomena and take it on its own merits and decide whether or not you believe in it. In a religious context, sometimes a lot of beliefs are clustered together. So the phrase, do you believe in God?
00:38:42
Speaker
has a lot of implications about other beliefs that may be not originally held. I'm thinking of the Christian creeds, the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed.
00:38:55
Speaker
which enumerate all these various factors. The idea that saying that you believe in God also implies that maybe you believe in an afterlife, that you believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible, or some truth in the Bible, that there's this cluster of beliefs that you may not necessarily have examined in detail, but that you're taking over as your own when you take on the belief in a God in a particular faith.
00:39:24
Speaker
maybe that's an easy thing for people to do and maybe that's a convenient way to acquire a set of beliefs. Just to buy into it wholesale. Yeah, I mean, if you go into the Catholic Church, then you believe in original sin and you've committed to a whole set of beliefs in a way that you might not pick them all up if they were individual beliefs. One of the interesting things in the literature is the distance between
00:39:54
Speaker
what, say, is taught in schools of theology and what ministers convey to their congregants. You know, the schools of theology, well, many times, will have a much more, one hopes, educated point of view and can go on at length about, you know, how to conceive of God or
00:40:21
Speaker
Now, is God conceivable? Is God a being or is God something that pervades the universe or something that lies within and so on? These variations, I don't think ever occurred to a lot of just regular, quote, believers, and it would be hard for them, I think, to entertain
00:40:46
Speaker
that possibility. God is so anthropomorphized by most people. He is a person. I use a pronoun. I assign him a sex. Of course, many people try to avoid that or sometimes will just refer to God as she and startle some people. But the notion that one can't be religious without believing, I think is unfortunate. Asking people to
00:41:16
Speaker
to sacrifice their intellects if they want to find a place in the world of religion. I think that's really unfortunate. Again, I'm thinking of a colleague. He's a social psychologist who has a continuing presence on Facebook. He's a former Mormon, and his switch from Mormonism to Unitarian Universalism is relatively
00:41:46
Speaker
recent, he was just, you know, I think he spent his first 50 years as a Mormon. And, you know, he was deeply involved in the tradition, but he was particularly bent out of shape by the Mormon Church's treatment and views of gay persons, and he could no longer support that tradition. So almost every Sunday afternoon, he'll post something about
00:42:15
Speaker
what happened or what was said in his Unitarian Universalist congregation and how wonderful it is to be a member of that group and so on. He certainly has found a home where there are no obligatory beliefs among Unitarians. Yeah, it's interesting from that perspective that so many things there that I found interesting.
00:42:41
Speaker
idea of what you mentioned before in the traditionally theistic prototype of the personal relations. I found that to be so telling and just thought-provoking because I don't believe I'd ever really thought about it from that perspective, but it really does seem that the notion that God is somehow a someone who you can directly
00:43:09
Speaker
personally connect with does seem like such an important part of at least Christian, especially Christian fundamental theology. But also, I think, you know, just really does like define what I think of as like a really religious person. Yes, and it also strikes me as incredibly presumptuous that God is so interested in you. Of course, this has been made
00:43:37
Speaker
fun of various contexts of movies and so on of God trying to keep track of all the petitions that come flying his way. Sounds like a Woody Allen movie. Yeah. I'm trying to think of the film that this is particularly prominent. But anyway, you know, cozying up to God or cozying up to Jesus is such a common
00:44:05
Speaker
thing. And if you conceive of God as the creator of the world, I mean, that's such a powerful force or whatever. And how you can just sort of say, Dear God, help me with my final exam or something like that. Well, for one thing, it seems really naive.
00:44:33
Speaker
Yeah, I think when you were saying that, what struck me is, and again, I was thinking about it from the perspective of like, the evolution of psychology and religion, and thinking about religions that that came before, you know, the big four or five that we have that dominate the world today, if you think about these religions, maybe of, say, for example, the Incas, where you would have a very strong, you know, ancestor worship, and really
William James' Influence
00:45:03
Speaker
bring out the mummy of your dead grandmother for events and really feel like this person was participating in that event. And in that way, that personal relationship with the spiritual or the supernatural, it seems less presumptuous in a way, but it could also be seen as antecedent to this perspective of relating personally to deity. Yes.
00:45:33
Speaker
less disconcerting than digging up a corpse. Well, I know I want to be mindful of time here too. And I want to make sure we get to another couple issues. One of these is, I know that one of the main inspirations that you've had for your career is
00:45:55
Speaker
William James is the varieties of religious experience, and I know that you have collected a number of editions of this, and it's been particularly meaningful to you. So I wonder if you wanted to describe why that is and why it holds up after 117 years now. Well, as I point out in my book,
00:46:18
Speaker
James effectively introduces the three main tasks of a psychology or religion, first of them being the descriptive task. And this can be, you know, religion should be understood in the psychology of religion as both a psychology of religious persons, which overwhelmingly dominates the American scene. And the psychology of religious objects
00:46:46
Speaker
So in the religious objects would be all the, it could be the concepts, you know, like the notion of God, would there be a religious object? It can be an actual physical object, and so on. So, but James was mainly interested in describing the varieties, well, as the title said, of religious experience, and
00:47:11
Speaker
gathers together some 200 quotations throughout the book describing different kinds of experience, most famously his distinction between the healthy-minded or the very optimistic, cheerful form of religiosity versus the sick soul.
00:47:29
Speaker
which has a sense of evil in the world, and including maybe a sense of evil within oneself. So that part of his book, which pervades much of it, is, I just think, very interesting. And with each of these quotes, he prepares the reader for what lies ahead in the quote, and then following the quotation, he analyzes it and points out what it represents. The second topic is what he calls
00:47:59
Speaker
the existential aspect of religion by which he means the history. How did this come to be? What are the origins? What are the causal factors? Mainly, he's interested again in the individual, what made this individual the person that he or she is religiously.
Methodological Updates in Psychology of Religion
00:48:24
Speaker
Then finally, the third topic, which is what
00:48:27
Speaker
most psychologists of religion in the US pursue. That is what James called the fruits of religion, the outcome of being religious one way or another. And he finally concludes that in spite of negative fruits of one kind or another, on the whole, religion is an invaluable function in the lives of human beings.
00:48:56
Speaker
I'm neutral agnostic about that conclusion. But I mean the book is so brilliantly written. James so interesting as a person that I really have found found that book enchanting.
00:49:14
Speaker
One other thing that I wanted to bring up is a few years ago, you pursued an argument that the psychology of religion may just maybe in for an update and may need to scrap current ideas and just start over. So what's the reason behind that? And is this something that you still believe in? Yes, I do. And I represent
00:49:39
Speaker
My faith keeps or as an example of or as a major way of starting over. It's, you know, it's an assessment device that is designed for virtually anyone to complete and it's non judgmental.
00:49:54
Speaker
The critical thing about the faith cue sword, which I really want to underscore, is that instead of the researcher defining what the dimensions are, the participant chooses among all these many alternatives to define what religion is or what faith is for him or for her. One of my
00:50:18
Speaker
concerns about the psychology of religion is that so many who pursue it under that rubric are really not doing psychology of religion. They are doing something, their psychology as religion, their psychology and religion, different kinds of ways of interacting with each other. There's even proposals for a theistic psychology. There are persons who
00:50:47
Speaker
I mean, Division 36 of psychology and religion and spirituality is mainly clinicians and their interest is many of them integrating spirituality into psychotherapy. Now, if they want to do that, that's their prerogative, but I don't call that psychology or religion. So there's much that goes under that name that really isn't that. I remember sitting in on an executive
00:51:15
Speaker
Committee of Division 36 and there were 12 people there and as I went around the room, I thought only two of us are really psychologists of religion and I had doubts about the other besides myself. There are handbooks that have been published again. There's a disposition to
00:51:38
Speaker
to defend religion and to focus on the clinical side of the implications of religion. I think this is less true in Europe, more oriented toward multiple religious traditions, more in tune with the classic sense of the psychology of religion, which is disinterested, that is neutral investigation of
00:52:07
Speaker
the world of religion, the complex world of religion. Well, okay, as we wrap up, I wanted to see if there's anything else that you might have wanted to include that you haven't had a chance to talk about yet. Well, that last point was one that I particularly wanted to put forward. So I'm glad for the opportunity to do that. I would really, truly like to see more psychologists
00:52:34
Speaker
interested in the psychology of religion in this kind of basic inquiry and not defending religion by showing how religion somehow promotes well-being. For some people, yes, it does promote well-being. No question about it, but for many people, it's quite the opposite. And I also, thinking of well-being, I think you also have to think about
00:53:04
Speaker
the well-being of society in terms of what religion contributes or detracts from. And then finally, and especially the well-being of the Earth. And that, you know, back in 97 when I wrote the second, or repaired the second edition of my book, was certainly thematic there, but I don't see that picked up by anyone today. It's like it's just not in their domain.
00:53:35
Speaker
That sounds like a great place to wrap it up and a great point, I think, about the value of the study of psychology of religion. And David, I really appreciate your taking the time with us today, and I really enjoyed the conversation. David, thank you so much. This is a real pleasure having you on the show. Well, it's been a real pleasure for me as well. Thank you for the invitation and for the opportunity.