Abstract
After reminding some of the historical relationships between psychology and religion, this chapter explains what is usually understood by psychology of religion in a proper sense, differentiating it from neighboring fields such as ‘psychology and religion’ and ‘pastoral psychology.’ The chapter continues to point out why it is more appropriate to speak of ‘psychologies of religions’ than of ‘psychology of religion,’ discussing in which sense one could speak about progress in psychological reasoning about religion. A typology for the diverse kinds of research in the psychology of religion is proposed, and cultural psychological approaches to the study of religion are shown to be indispensable for any comprehensive psychological analysis of religious phenomena and states of affairs.
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Notes
- 1.
The distinction between religion and religiosity introduced only in passing here is quite important. Religion refers to an entity on the level of culture, any religion having properties such as doctrines, ethics, organization (of clergy and otherwise), architecture, and symbols. The term religiosity refers to the correlate of these on the level of the human being: whereas a religion has a doctrine, a human being has religious thoughts and experiences; therefore, a theological treatise about prayer belongs to a religion, a person praying displays religiosity. An ecclesiastical or otherwise religious doctrine belongs to the respective religion, a person believing, doubting, rejecting that given doctrine is committing an act of religiosity. A temple may signify the presence of a certain type of religion, a person visiting that temple can display religiosity. (Note, I write ‘can’ display: as one can also visit a temple for non-religious reasons, for instance, as a tourist. The individual meaning of any act is never available without having consulted the subject involved, which is the reason why meaning is usually investigated by experience-near empirical methods.) Moreover, to anticipate some of the reasoning of this chapter, as will come as no surprise to fellow cultural psychologists: the primate is with the cultural entity of ‘religion’; ‘religiosity’ can only exist as the result of instigation and regulation by ‘religion’; there is no way to derive a complex cultural phenomenon like religion from individual psychic processes or functions. (The latter type of reasoning usually leads to an ontological reductionistic fallacy.)
- 2.
From now on I will mostly just employ the terms psychology and religion, leaving behind the somewhat clumsy use of quotation marks; the reader should remember, however, that ‘such scholarly approaches that have been called psychology,’ respectively, ‘such cultural entities including the human experiences and conduct they instigate, facilitate, and regulate, as have been called religious’ is what is being meant.
- 3.
It goes without saying that a neutral stand is not easy to achieve when it comes to something like religion. It takes considerable (and long) training to be able to analyze one’s own and other people’s types of religion without prejudice and apriori valuations, or to at least leave such aside during professional research.
- 4.
Mind, however, that to this idea—like to almost any relevant idea in psychology—objections have been raised: The so-called anthropological school (in medicine, also including psychiatry) and the phenomenological movement (which had strong offshoots in psychology) have pointed out that in the case of the human being even the lower levels of structurization are affected by the higher levels, there would be no simple ‘stimulus–response–situation’ in the world of the human being; trying to abstract from the higher levels would be a distortion, resulting in invalid ‘knowledge.’
- 5.
To mention just some examples: Wulff (1997) organized his classic book along the mainstreams in theories within psychology like biology-oriented psychology, behaviorism, psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology, and others; Paloutzian and Park (2013) drew on ‘basic psychology disciplines,’ like developmental, social, personality, and cognitive psychology, and tried to line up with current wings like neuropsychology, cross-cultural psychology, evolutionary psychology; Miller (2012) added attention to movements like positive psychology, feminism, esotericism, and parapsychology, while Pargament (2013), himself a clinical psychologist, gave ample attention to applied versions of psychology of religion like in psychotherapy and counseling, and in clinical and otherwise health-related situations. In modern journals like The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion or the APA-published Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, editors and authors do their best to line up with current developments within psychology at large. The conclusion remains the same: from any psychological perspective one can make contributions to ‘the’ psychology of religion.
- 6.
Note that reductionism as such is a kind of error in logic found in all kinds of domains. Methodological reduction of complexity in order to focus on some selected factor is as such a valid element in many procedures, both outside and inside science. (As soon as one leaves the research situation, this type of reduction should be left behind.) However, acknowledging only the factor one wishes to concentrate on, not just during a certain investigation but in general, denying the presence of other factors in the more complex whole counts as ontological reductionism. (A salesman, a chemist, and an art historian will each focus on different aspects of, e.g., Rembrandt’s work, but without necessarily denying the relevance of other aspects. Neglecting the artistic value altogether, considering the market value of a painting only would be a form of reductionism; to focus only on the chemical materials used in painting in dealing with a piece of art would be just as much a form of reductionism.) With regard to the scientific study of religion, Freud’s saying that ‘God would be nothing but an elevated father’ counted as an infamous example of psychological reductionism. One should bear in mind, however, that treatises of religion that seemed to be defensive (like Jung’s) often are just as reductionistic in explaining (almost) everything by means of only his own ‘analytical psychology,’ and that many theological treatises (especially of Christianity) are reductionistic too when allowing only for the religious viewpoint itself (e.g., when allowing only supposed divine or otherwise supernatural agents as ‘explanation’ for anything religious, whether an individual conversion, the emergence of Christianity, the origin of the Bible, or what have you).
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Belzen, J.A. (2016). Religion and Religiosity as Cultural Phenomena: From Ontological Reductionism to Acknowledgment of Plurality. In: Valsiner, J., Marsico, G., Chaudhary, N., Sato, T., Dazzani, V. (eds) Psychology as the Science of Human Being. Annals of Theoretical Psychology, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21094-0_11
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