Abstract
Serious historical studies of the relationships between Psychology and Christianity are oddly scarce. Given the topic’s centrality to any understanding of how ideas about ‘human nature’ have altered since the late nineteenth century, and their various Psychological causes, effects and reflections, one might expect it to have received intense attention. Yet it rarely enters the limelight in the copious literatures on ‘modernist modes of subjectivity’, ‘secularisation’ and cultural history, or in the specialist histories of either Psychology or religion. It is worth considering possible reasons for this apparent lacuna before proceeding further:
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(a)
The story seems too obvious and simple to need spelling out.
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(b)
Lack of interest in religion by post-modernist scholars.
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(c)
Marginalisation of the topic within histories of both Psychology and religion because of their received agendas.
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(d)
The issue has been subsumed in the concept of ‘secularisation’.
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Notes
- 1.
Two comprehensive texts do exist: David M. Wulff (1997) Psychology of Religion. Classic and Contemporary and James M. Nelson (2009) Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality. The first is an invaluable reference source but it should be stressed that his agenda is to review, as the title states, the sub-discipline ‘The Psychology of Religion’ from the perspective of one committed to that cause. While this inevitably takes him into broader areas, it is thus radically different in aim from the current work which seeks to address the nature of the historical relationship between Psychology and religion as alternative orientations towards construing the human condition. The second appeared too late for me to take into consideration in what follows; while impressively wide-ranging it is again basically a ‘Psychology of Religion’ text, explicitly aimed at promoting dialogue between Psychology and the religious. David Fontana’s Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality (2003) provides an extremely useful overview of the current state of play in ‘Psychology of Religion’, and in itself signifies a revival of interest in this field—and it is not insignificant that it is co-published by the British Psychological Society. Again, however, it is not historical in orientation. Hendrika Vande Kemp has, however, published numerous historical journal papers on specific aspects of the relationship as well as the invaluable Psychology and Theology in Western Thought 1672–1965. A Historical and Annotated Bibliography (1984a), compiled in collaboration with H. Newton Maloney (entries in this are occasionally footnoted subsequently as P&T followed by the entry number). Meissner (1961) is a more extensive bibliography than Vande Kemp’s, but less user-friendly. The difference in content size is primarily due to Meissner’s inclusion of journal papers. Robert C. Fuller (1986) Americans and the Unconscious is somewhat closer to the approach adopted in the present work, but one book does not a genre make and, indeed, in a recent paper (Fuller, 2006) he notes that of 870 articles in the first 158 issues of the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (virtually the only journal outlet for history of Psychology until the mid-1980s, and still the most prestigious) a mere 18 (c. 2%) ‘examined religious influences upon the origin and function of the social sciences’ (p. 222).
- 2.
This view of traditional histories of Psychology has become widely accepted among academics in the field since the 1980s. A particularly trenchant and influential paper was R. Smith (1988) ‘Does the History of Psychology Have a Subject?’, History of the Human Science Vol.1(2), 147–177.
- 3.
As one example, in Vivian Green’s very comprehensive A New History of Christianity (1996, rev. 1998), with a Foreword by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Runcie, the word ‘psychology’ appears nowhere in the index or in the extensive section sub-headings to the two chapters on the post-1880 period.
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Richards, G. (2011). The Nature of the Problem. In: Psychology, Religion, and the Nature of the Soul. Library of the History of Psychological Theories. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7173-9_1
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