THE EXIT AND REEMERGENCE
the emergence of graduate programs in clinical and counseling psychology being offered by some theological seminaries, and by the American Psycho- logical Association supporting awareness of religious and spiritual issues (along with ethnic, sexual orientation, and other issues) as of potential use in clinical training.
Meanwhile, an analogous split was occurring in academic depart- ments. Psychology had been part of philosophy, and most psychologists who worked as professors did so in philosophy departments. At that time, studying philosophical or religious questions was natural. However, during the 1920s and 1930s, psychologists were busy leaving philosophy depart- ments and setting up departments of their own. Psychology was gaining recognition as an independent scientific field, modeling itself after physics, and in no way did it want to be confused with “speculative” fields such as philosophy. Hence, psychologists rejected the study of things that were
“tainted” with philosophical or religious questions.
A poignant piece of evidence illustrates the force with which this split was felt. During the years just before and after 1920, psychologists were involved in the instinct-versus- behaviorism debate. William McDougall was presenting the case that human nature is governed by instincts. At the same time, the famous John B. Watson, whose influence permanently changed the course of psychology, was busy founding the doctrine of behaviorism, which claimed that all behavior is governed by the principle of condition- ing. Watson’s view that all behavior was the result of conditioning left no room for mental, religious, or otherworldly influences; by his lights, such things were not merely false, they were impossible. McDougall published a classic book entitled Outline of Psychology in which he argued the instinct view. In response, Watson published a devastating review of McDougall’s book, which makes no secret of his attitude toward religion. The title of the review was “Professor McDougall Returns to Religion” (Larson, 1979).
Today psychologists realize that even the loftiest of philosophical or reli- gious questions are at the core psychological questions. Today we study them— psychologically.
One important book had a profound effect on the field: Sigmund Freud’s The Future of an Illusion, published in 1927. Freud was by training a neurologist, not a psychologist. According to his theory, all religion was a sign of grandscale neurosis and insecurity that, one hoped, humankind would eventually outgrow. Obviously, this idea was unlikely to be well received by people in the religious community. Hearing about Freud’s book, they may have assumed that all religion was under attack by all psychology and psychiatry. Freud’s ideas may have had an undue influence because of the extent to which they permeated mainstream culture: psychoanalysis was the “face” of therapeutic intervention at the time. The fact that Freud’s theory was speculative and difficult to test by empirical methods was prob- ably not recognized by religious people. The tendency on their part was to
simply discount all psychology as contrary to religious teaching. Box 2.3 illustrates the tensions resulting from the tendency to misunderstand or misappropriate psychological knowledge in relation to a religion.
Finally, even as late as the 1970s and 1980s—when news media reported that extreme Islamic fundamentalists were killing people in the name of Allah, “cultic” and “new age” religious experimentation was on the upsurge worldwide, and Western cultural dialogue included talk of the meaning of the “post- Christian era”—there were still forces that held the field in suspension, as documented in the following comment by the for- mer editor of the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Robert Hogan:
Religion is the most important social force in the history of man: There is a legitimate field called sociology of religion. But in psychology, anyone who gets involved in or tries to talk in an analytic way about religion is immediately branded a meathead; a mystic; an intuitive, touchyfeely sort of moron, despite the fact that William James’ original book, The Variet- ies of Religious Experience, is regarded, I think, by almost everyone as both a philosophical and a psychological classic. (1979, p. 4)
How and Why the Field Came Back
As the 20th century drew to a close, there began a dramatic increase in psychology of religion research. This trend has accelerated since the turn of the millennium (Paloutzian & Park, 2013b). The current flurry of activ- ity includes even more experiments, quasi- experimental field studies,
BOX 2.3. Tensions Can Lead to and Stem from Misappropriation of Psychological Knowledge
A detail that helps to complete this picture of the psychology of religion’s holding pattern concerns the apparent religious motivations behind some research efforts in this area. Pruyser (1987) listed seven motives or aims in psychologies of religion, starting with this one: “Some psychologies of religion seek to buttress religion or to defend it apologetically by trying to describe, if not prove, its psychological necessity or inevitability.” I regard this as an inappropriate goal and believe that those few who have tried to use psychology for such a purpose have harmed rather than helped psycholo
gists of religion in their efforts to contribute the knowledge from this field to the general discipline of psychology. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, psychol
ogy can neither prove nor disprove any religion. Those who try to use it to do so only help to decrease, not increase, the contribution of legitimate, scientific psychology of religion.
theoretical papers, books, convention symposia, and stand-alone meet- ings on various specialized topics within the psychology of religion— all occurring nationally and internationally. Through these media researchers have exchanged ideas and research findings on a vast array of topics rang- ing from micro to macro levels of analysis (e.g., from neural mechanisms of religious experiences to the role of religion in international terrorism).
There has been an increase in religiously related counseling and psycho- therapy specialized for people of various beliefs and traditions (following the example of counseling and psychotherapy specialized for various ethnic and cultural populations), the presence of psychology in religious colleges and theological seminaries, psychology of religion courses being taught at colleges and universities (Hester, 2002; Hester & Paloutzian, 2006), and the contribution of psychology to the field of religious studies (e.g., Taves, 2009). The research and theoretical advances that have occurred seem suf- ficiently powerful to guide scholarship in both intradisciplinary and inter- disciplinary ways. See Oviedo (2017) for a systematic account of 75 publi- cations between 2009 and 2015 on scientific explanations of religiousness.
Of the 75, 19 were published in the first 9 years, and 56 were published in the second 8 years. This finding reflects a steep increase in research in this area.