Concept

Psychology of religion

Overview

Psychology of religion consists of the application of psychological methods and interpretive frameworks to the diverse contents of religious traditions as well as to both religious and irreligious individuals. The various methods and frameworks can be summarized according to the classic distinction between the natural-scientific and human-scientific approaches. The first cluster amounts to objective, quantitative, and preferably experimental procedures for testing hypotheses about causal connections among the objects of one's study. In contrast, the human-scientific approach accesses the human world of experience using qualitative, phenomenological, and interpretive methods. This approach aims to discern meaningful, rather than causal, connections among the phenomena one seeks to understand.

Psychologists of religion pursue three major projects:

systematic description, especially of religious contents, attitudes, experiences, and expressions

explanation of the origins of religion, both in the history of the human race and in individual lives, taking into account a diversity of influences

mapping out the consequences of religious attitudes and conduct, both for the individual and for society at large.

The psychology of religion first arose as a self-conscious discipline in the late 19th century, but all three of these tasks have a history going back many centuries before that.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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In his recent work on the Psychology of Religion, Professor Starbuck of California has shown by a statistical inquiry how closely parallel in its manifestations the ordinary “conversion” which occurs in young people brought up in evangelical circles is to that growth into a larger spiritual life which is a normal phase of adolescence in every class of human beings. The age is the same, falling usually between…
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
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This—the relation of psychology to fundamental philosophy—is a question which also turns up in dealing with Ethics. There is on the part of those engaged in either of these inquiries a certain impatience against the intermeddling (which is held to be only muddling) of metaphysics with them. It is clear that in a very decided way both psychology and ethics can, up to some extent at least, be treated as what is called…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
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Religion has not only universal thought as inward content _implicite_ contained in its myths, ideas, imaginations and in its exact and positive histories, so that we require first of all to dig this content out of such myths in the form of theorems, but it often has its content _explicite_ in the form of thought. In the Persian and Indian Religions very deep, sublime and speculative thoughts are even expressed…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
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Philosophers who discussed Psychology of religion

Related ideas

Opposing perspectives

Neuroscience of religion

Place in the tradition

Part of Agnosticism.

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