the future of psychology of religion

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Pastoral Psychology [pspy] HS089-42 May 23, 2000 12:2 Style file version Nov. 19th, 1999

Pastoral Psychology, Vol. 49, No. 1, 2000

The Future of Psychology of Religion

Jacob A. Belzen1

Speaking about the future inevitably reveals fantasies, hopes, and desires. Itmay be honest, therefore, not to try to suppress (too much) the personal characterof any thoughts on the future of psychology of religion. It may also be fair toadd that these thoughts are being formulated by someone devoted to this field ofscholarship for reasons of intrinsic interest, but also because he makes a livingfrom it. When thinking about the future of our field, I often feel like Goethe’sFaust, who sighed that “zwei Seelen leben, ach, in meiner Brust”. I realize thatwith regard to the future of this field, I too have quite a number of souls or ofvoices within me. There is no need to worry about this: as recent developments inpersonality theory and different kinds of self psychologies easily grant us nowadays(at last!) the right to be “multiple”, and complex, and multi-voiced, I do not thinkI run the risk of being diagnosed as suffering from a multi-personality disorder.However, taking advantage of the freedom to have different opinions does notmake it easier to write about psychology of religion and its future. In order tomake the different possible arguments, thoughts and associations on the future ofpsychology of religion understandable, I propose to make a kind of dialectic tourthrough five different positions, each of which I will present with only a few wordsand sentences. Although this will evidently not yield thedeutsche Grundlichkeitfor which a European may long, my presentation will nevertheless not be withoutHegelian (and even some personal) passion. After a brieftour d’horizonwe willarrive at a position that will show up to be a transformed version of the firstposition.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at a session on the future of psychology of religion at theAnnual Convention 1998 of the American Academy of Religion, organized by the Section ‘Religionand Social Sciences’.

1Jacob A. Belzen is a professor of psychology of religion at the University of Amsterdam, OudeTurfmarkt 147, NL-1012 GC Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

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C© 2000 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

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POSITION ONE: WE CANNOT SPEAK ABOUT OF PSYCHOLOGYOF RELIGION AND ITS FUTURE—AS THERE IS NO

PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION

When looking back at a century of work under the wishful title of psychologyof religion, with what are we left? There have been some inspiring books andessays, by people like Freud (1913/1964, 1927/1961), Jung (1938/1969), Allport(1950), and James (1902/1982), that are being quoted over and over again, but thathave been proved wrong or lacking in many ways. Many courses in psychology ofreligion still do not do anything else or better than retell these old fashioned andinvalidated theories—if they have been theories at all. (Remember that Freud saidabout one of his essays on religion that it was just a Saturday afternoon fantasy.)When one compares an introduction to psychology of religion with introductionsto any other psychological discipline one is struck by the lack of progress and thefailure to develop specific concepts and specific theories. There is no continuity inthe field: as soon a new fashion appears in branches of more general psychology,like social or developmental psychology, there are people who apply these currentthoughts, or sometimes even the research instruments, to religion. However, doessuch a procedure yield a subdiscipline, a scientific “field”? More often than notthis “application” of psychology to religion has dealt with an artifact, not withreligion in all its richness and aberrations but with a limited understanding of whatreligion might be.

When we notice how very few people are involved in the enterprise calledpsychology of religion, one must conclude that there exists no field worthy of thatname. Take for example the largest organization in the field: the Division 36 of theAmerican Psychological Association. Talk to any insider in that division, and youwill readily get the answer that hardly any of its members is really interested in anacademic, rather detached, scholarly analysis of religion. The majority are inter-ested in religion either for reasons of personal piety, or they want to combine theirwork as a psychologist with their faith, or they even prefer religious psychologyto psychology of religion.

When we regard this state of affairs honestly and self-critically, one seems tobe forced to affirm position one: since there is no psychology of religion thereforewe can not talk about its future. This first position is certainly a possible one, and itcan be defended full of sound and fury. But it is not all there is to say. It is possibleto formulate other, less critical positions.

POSITION 2: WE CAN SPEAK ABOUT THE FUTURE OFPSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION—BUT ONLY IN

A PESSIMISTIC VOICE

A second possible position is not optimistic either, and although it is lessnegative in its assessment of the existence of the psychology of religion it has only

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The Future of Psychology of Religion 5

slightly more confidence in its future. Yet it points out that many of the complaintsof the first position are not specific to the psychology of religion, but rather pertainto the whole of psychology. One is certainly entitled to ask the following question:what kind of enterprise is this, what good has it yielded? In psychology at large,there seems to be little progress, one fashion hunts the other, but whether we reallyknow the human being better, and especially whether the human being has becomea better person during the more than a century of psychology’s so-called history,remains very doubtful.

With respect to the psychology of religion, however, the second positionhas to be more critical than with regard to psychology as a whole. Consider thenumber, or even better the percentage, of people involved. Whereas in the begin-ning of the century almost all “great” psychologists also published on religion,this theme seems to have faded away completely from “main stream” psychology(Beit-Hallahmi, 1974). The major handbooks do not even mention that there issomething, whatever it may be, called the psychology of religion. Since the begin-ning of the century, we have witnessed a retreat of psychology of religion. In France,with its great names of Ribot, Janet, Flournoy and Bovet, nothing is found today. InGermany, where at first there seemed to be an explosion of psychology of religion,its demise was almost complete after the Second World War (Belzen, 1998).

And even at those places where the psychology of religion survived—usuallythanks to pastoral psychology, or to church leaders or directors of studies whoexpected benefits of the inclusion of psychology into the curricula of theology orreligious studies—the number of faculty positions assigned to psychology of reli-gion is decreasing. At a corresponding session at the AAR’s 1997 Convention, theexample was given of the situation at the University of Chicago, which has beeninternationally renown for its program in psychology of religion; at the momenteven well known scholars like Don Browning and James Dittes remain withoutsuccessors. On a more modest scale, the same happened in The Netherlands whereat precisely those universities where in the sixties and seventies the strongest po-sitions existed in psychology of religion the professorial chairs (strategically veryimportant positions) have been cancelled or downgraded into docent, or assistantprofessor, positions (Belzen, 1994).

Looking back at history, one might also ask what psychology has done orbrought to religion. Although some may have expected so, psychology has broughtno benefit to religion or the church. On the contrary, vulgarized psychologicalnotions have been influential in the process of secularization and profanization,even if they were used only as legitimation of these trends (Belzen 1999). Thefollowing quotation from a thorough superb dissertation on the very early yearsof the American psychology of religion, reads now, 90 years later, almost like aprophesy. (I have translated the quote directly from Dutch.)

Once the views and results of the empirical psychology of religion will have trickled downfrom the narrow circle of specialists into the broader and lower spheres of the unletteredor less-educated masses, they will not generate or nurture religion among them, but theirpsychologistic, monistic, idealistic, and pragmatic character will simply prompt public

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opinion—be it against the intentions of the best of the psychologists of religion—to say: Ithas been scientifically proven that religion is nothing but a natural human pursuit that hasnothing to do with the existence and the operations of a God. (Geelkerken, 1909, p. 391).

This passage was written before Freud published a single line on religion,and we may well say that where empirical psychology slaundered thousands,psychoanalysis defeated its tens of thousands.

Taking stock confronts us with the question what the psychology of religionactually amounts to and what it is able to accomplish. Has it produced what peopleexpected or feared from it? Is its present form indeed the one we should want? Itcertainly gives one plenty of food for critical thought that at universities and incountries where the subject was well represented people in later years tended toturn away from it. This decrease of interest in the psychology of religion raisescritical questions: does the psychology of religion actually do what one mightexpect? What has it really taught us about religion and religiosity? Do we nowhave a better grasp of what it means to be a believer? Has this discipline deepenedour insight into the religious person? And is the hesitating growth it now seemsto be enjoying—and on which the third position will certainly focus—one whichwill be able to withstand such critical questions? These are questions to which it isdifficult to give positive answers. Looking at theories and positions, and especiallywhen comparing with the situation in the mother discipline, there is no reason foroptimism about the future of the psychology of religion.

With listening to this second position, we should have had our share of pes-simism. Although this essay will not end in optimism, its melody can at least bemodulated: we can go on in a different key now.

POSITION 3: WE CAN SPEAK ABOUT THE FUTUREOF PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION—AND EVEN POSITIVELY

From the perspective of the third position, the points made by position two arenot wrong, but they are not up to date: they do not take into consideration the verylatest developments. Let us look at two very important clusters of recent “facts”. Inthe first place, there are important changes going on in psychology at large. On theone hand, there is a rapidly growing number of psychologists and psychologicalsubdisciplines that are pleading for and working on the development of a newpsychology that is different from the experimental and mechanicistic orientationthat dominates much of present mainstream psychology and that has, unfortu-nately, been a rather unfruitful tool for the understanding and analysis of religion.Increasingly, there is an awareness nowadays that the academic psychology is leav-ing out of consideration whole areas important for and characteristic of the humanbeing. Alternative approaches are being developed under such diverse names asexistential-humanistic, hermeneutic, narrative, semiotic, critical, feministic, rela-tional, transpersonal, and ecological psychology—approaches that promise to be

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more adept at dealing with religion than permitted by methodological behaviorism,laboratory studies, and cognitive science. There is a large and renewed increaseof interest in qualitative-descriptive research methodologies, like phenomenology,hermeneutics, grounded theory, ethnomethodology, field studies, case studies, andso on. Frank Farley, president of the APA in 1993–94, publicly expressed his con-cern that psychology is coming “very close to being a discipline concerned withsuperficial problems.” He expressed the hope that spirituality, “deep feelings aboutsoul and eternity [and] a psychology of meaning in the broadest sense [. .] placingthe mystery of life in context, and most importantly, showing the road to generosityand love [. .] will become increasingly important” (quoted in Martin, 1994, p. 12).

In addition, there is clearly an increasing interest in religion and spirituality.One can witness this thoughout the field of psychology. For example, at the annualconventions of the APA, I am really surprised how many sessions and papersthere are that deal with religion and spirituality, especially outside the program ofDiv. 36, the division for the psychology of religion. But I also witness it in TheNetherlands, where students whose youth has not been spoiled by religion beginto ask questions about religion and what their discipline has to share about it.Different from the generation that opposed or even combated religion in the sixties,and made it a taboo theme for the psychology in the seventies and the eighties, theseyoung people attend courses on the psychology of religion out of pure interest.At different places my colleagues and I are being asked to give courses or atleast lectures on subthemes in the psychology of religion e.g., religion and mentalhealth, psychology of mysticism, spirituality. The great antipathy against religionseems to be over in psychology, or it will just retire and die with its supporters.

These two clusters, the development of appropriate conceptual and method-ological tools, and the increasing interest in religion, certainly allow for optimismwith regard to the future of the psychology of religion. And it is not just the fu-ture, that I am talking about here. In the last two years we have seen a numberof strategically important publications on the psychology of religion. Books suchasThe Empirical Approachby Hood, Spilka, Hunsberger, and Gorsuch (1996),theReview of Classic and Contemporary Viewsby Wulff (1996), theInvitation tothe Psychology of Religionby Paloutzian (1996), and a number of others all wentthrough their second publication. Jones published a sequel (1996) to his earlierContemporary Psychoanalysis and Religion(1991), Argyle & Beit-Hallahmi hadtheir earlierThe Social Psychology of Religion(1975) enlarged and updated, andthe number of publications on religion, mental health, and psychotherapy is grow-ing faster than people can read (e.g., Bhugra, 1996; Koenig, 1998; Loewenthal,1995; Pargament, 1997; Randour, 1993; Rubin, 1996; Spezzano & Gargiulo, 1997;Thomas & Eisenhandler, 1999; Wong & Fry, 1998). No one needs to be enthusi-astic about these books, and some of them have clear weaknesses, but it cannot bedenied that their publication stand for a clear increase in the interest in the psychol-ogy of religion. In a capitalist society such as the USA, publishers certainly wouldnot launch second editions and sequels if they did not believe there was a market.

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That market exists not only in the larger population but also in professional circles.Even the APA itself noticed that and decided to publish Shafranske’sReligion andThe Clinical Practice of Psychology(1996). At the APA’s convention in 1996 itwas a bestseller, and was followed immediately the next year by Richards andBerginsA Spiritual Strategy for Counseling and Psychotherapy(1997)—also anAPA publication. A brief list of journals attests to the increased attention paid to thepsychology of religion: theInternational Journal for the Psychology of Religionexists over a century now, aJournal for Psychology of Religionhas been launchedin Canada, the prestigeousJournal for the Scientific Study of Religionreorganizeditself in order to devote more attention to the psychology of religion. In addition,there has been an increase in academic tenured positions in the psychology ofreligion in Europe; in Germany, out of the blue, there are suddenly sessions onthe psychology of religion again at the conventions of the German PsychologicalSociety, at several universities empirical investigations have been started or evenalready reported in the form of dissertations; in Norway and Italy national organi-sations for the psychology of religion have been founded; and in The Netherlandswe had during the last decade a spectacular increase in the number of professorialchairs for the psychology of religion. Also in Great Britain and in the Baltic statesinterest in the field is growing again.

One could hardly think of a better reason for having confidence in the futureof the psychology of religion! But let us leave this all too optimistic position andrush on to the fourth.

POSITION 4: ONE SHOULD NOT SPEAK ABOUT THE FUTURE OFTHE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION—AT LEAST NOT WITHOUT

EXPRESSING WISHES, HOPES, AND CONCERNS

If it is true that interest in the psychology of religion is increasing again,then the representatives of the field will indeed be wise in trying to get activelyinvolved in newly developing paradigms instead of warming up old coffee again.It will be wise to give up some of the older psychology, as well as its applicationsto religion. Also to be given up is the fallacy of thinking that psychology couldprovide an explanation for religion, or that it would even be the most importantdiscipline for studying religion. Further, one should refrain from the all too com-mon apologetic agenda’s that have marked the work of so many past (and present?)colleagues. Since our world is getting increasingly multicultural, the one sided fo-cus on Western Christianity is a next characteristic that should be given up. To berecognized is the pluriformity of the phenomena called religious and the plurifor-mity of approaches needed to understand them. In fact, we are in need of much. Incombination with the just mentioned desiderata, we need an increasing realizationof culture’s necessity and inescapability to evoke, facilitate, and structure humansubjectivity and functioning. Having said this I should immediately stress that

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what is at stake is something other than an elaboration of the common sense no-tion that “everything is cultural” in the sense that everything has a cultural context.The point is far more radical, and has been aphoristically expressed by CliffordGeertz (who is widely quoted in cultural psychology): “There is no such thingas human nature independent of culture” (1973, p. 49). The viewpoint, therefore,is also very different from that of the older “culture and personality” school, asdeveloped, for example, by Franz Boas and Margaret Mead. In the latter school,Western psychology (at the time it was usually a simplified psychoanalysis) wasplaced at the heart of the enterprise and researchers tried to find corroborations orat least equivalents of personality traits such as were supposed to exist in the West.(In a way, this is still part of the program of so-called “cross-cultural” psychology.)Subsequent schools have developed under the names of “psychological anthropol-ogy” and “ethnopsychology” that come closer to what nowadays is increasinglybeing called “cultural psychology”.

Cultural psychology consists of, or is compatible with, a variety of schools,(sub)disciplines, and several branches of theoretical psychology striving purpo-sively for interdisciplinary collaboration. It does not search inside the human beingto investigate faith, feeling, reasoning and behavior, but rather tries to understandhow the specific (religious) “form of life” the person is embedded in constitutesand constructs (religious) feelings, thoughts, and conduct. Cultural psychologiststry to counterbalance the prevailing bias in psychology according to which psycho-logical phenomena have their origin in intra-individual processes. They stress thatpsychological phenomena—such as attitudes, emotions, motives, perceptual out-look, forms of reasoning, memory, and so on—are not just shaped by a surroundingculture, but are constituted by and rooted in particular cultural interactions. Thus,to refer to just one example, it was found that arithmetic problem-solving goes ondifferently, leading to different results, in different situations. Lave et al. (1984)found, for example, that whereas 98% of problems were correctly solved by sub-jects when engaged in grocery shopping, only 59% of an equal kind of questionswere answered correctly by the same subjects when tested in a classroom. Cultur-ally different settings require different activities, leading to different (cognitive)abilities. They argue further that problem-solving is not a disembodied mentalactivity, but belongs to, and is specific to, the kind of situation in which the subjectis involved. Likewise, emotions are not just the same constant ones, differing onlyin degree across cultures, but are different in different cultures, i.e., some emotionsexist in some cultures and not in other ones. Emotions are characterized by beliefs,judgments, and desires—the content of which is not natural but is determined by thesystems of cultural belief, values, and mores of particular communities. Emotionsare not natural responses elicited by natural features which a situation may pos-sess, but socio-culturally determined patterns of experience and expression that areacquired and subsequently feature in specifically social situations (Armon-Jones1986). Research in cross-cultural psychology has produced abundantly strikingexamples of this kind.

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Accepting that culture is a major shaping force in people’s self-definition,conduct and experience requires a different kind of research than is usual inthe mainstream of the psychology of religion. The particular religious “form oflife” the human being is embedded in can no longer be neglected in favor ofsearching for some presumably inherent and invariable psychic structure. On thecontrary, as is clear from the example of grocery shopping, it is necessary tostudy peopleengagingin their particular “form of life”, not to take them outof it by submitting them to experiments, tests, or questionnaires in the “labo-ratory”. Accordingly, researchers have to turn to participant observation, anal-ysis of personal documents, interview, and other ecologically valid techniques.Further, it becomes necessary to study not the isolated individual, but also thebeliefs, values, and rules that are prevalent in a particular situation, togetherwith the patterns of social relatedness and interaction that characterize that sit-uation. In any case, it appears erroneous to try to study the “individual mind”as such.

When psychology of religion will (try to) develop itself in this direction, thereis (legitimized hope for) a future to the field.

POSITION 5: ONE SHOULD NOT SPEAK ABOUT THE FUTURE—FORIT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO SPEAK ABOUT THE FUTURE

Position five is certainly not an unwise position. When we look back at ahistory of even only one or two decades it is clear that we can not say anythingabout the future. Who expected fifteen years ago the political changes that haverecently taken place in Europe? With regard to our field, had anyone, say ten orfifteen years ago, predicted any growth in the psychology of religion or its slowlycoming back into the picture with psychology at large, we would not have believedher. No one dared to expect that students and professionals in psychology wouldbecome interested in religion again or would start doctoral work in this field. WhenI take my own country as an example, the increase in professorial positions couldnot have been expected. And it was not expected, even to such an extent that we didnot have enough qualified persons to be appointed to recently established chairs:we had to get people from other countries to take over these positions. Stayingwith The Netherlands, as the situation that I know most intimately, on the otherhand, we have to admit that in many respects the situation is still so delicate andfragile that one could imagine several different scenario’s, among them also theone of rapid decline. We can not foresee the future, so we can not speak aboutit. In spite of all preference for the work of the so-called late Wittgenstein, thereis wisdom in the early Wittgenstein too. As the future is an unknown quantity, Iam reminded of Wittgenstein’s famous dictum: ‘woruber man nicht reden kann,daruber soll man schweigen’ 2—and I will follow his advice.

2Translation: ‘whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’.

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Argyle, M., & Beit-Hallahmi, B. (1975).The social psychology of religion. London: Routledge &Kegan Paul.

Armon-Jones, C. (1986). The thesis of constructionism. In R. Harr´e (Ed.),The social construction ofemotions(pp. 32–56). Oxford: Blackwell.

Beit-Hallahmi, B. (1974). Psychology of religion 1880–1930: The rise and fall of a psychologicalmovement.Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 10, 84–90.

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