PSYCHOLOGISTS DEFINE RELIGION PATTERNS AND PROSPECTS OF A CENTURY-LONG QUEST

David M. Wulff

The psychology of religion, like the broader field of psychology out of which it emerged late in the nineteenth century, has from the beginning consisted of diverse and often conflicting points of view. Like psychologists specializing in other areas, psychologists of reli• gion differ in the theoretical perspectives they take, the research methods they use, and the goals they pursue. Inevitably, they also differ in their conceptions of religion, for as Horatio Dresserl early pointed out, our definitions of religion depend in large part on how we approach it and the ways in which we intend to treat it.

Representative Difinitions From the Inaugural Period

As relative latecomers to the study of human piety, psychologists of religion knew from the outset how hazardous defining religion would be. Although a few, like james Leuba,2 Charles josey,3 and Hedley Dimock,4 sorted through the definitional products of earlier scholars and then distilled from them new, putatively more adequate ver• sions, most of those writing during the early decades of the twen• tieth century shared james Pratt's sentiment that 'all definitions of religion are more or less arbitrary'.5 Define religion most of them eventually did, however, and usually with evident thoughtfulness. The outcome was a variety of mainly nominal definitions, some sub• stantive but most of them functional, all to be evaluated not in terms of their truth value, as real definitions are, but according to their applicability and usefulness. 6

I Dresser 1929. 2 Leuba 1912. 3 Josey 1927. 4 Dimock 1928. 5 Pratt 1920: 1. 6 Baird 1971: 7; Machalek 1977. Two overlapping definitional typologies are used in this paper. The first and more general one distinguishes three types of definitions: 208 DAVID M. WULFF

Perhaps the most famous of these definitions is the one offered by the American psychologist William James in his classic work The Varieties if Religious Experience. In a long prefatory comment, James rejects as foolhardy any effort to establish a final and indisputable definition of religion's essence-that is, a real definition. What he will do instead, he says, is arbitrarily choose from out of 'the many meanings of the word' the one that he wishes to emphasize for the purposes of his lectures. Thus, religion 'as I now ask you arbitrar• ily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences if indi• vidual men in their solitude, so far as thty apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever thty may consider the divine'.7 James's emphasis on private religious experience reflects not only his disdain for institu• tional religion-what he called 'the chronic religion of the many' and dismissed as sheer habitS-but also his conviction that real facts in the making are to be found only in the private recesses of indi• vidual feeling. Using a type of vicarious phenomenology, James pro• ceeded to explore the inner world of exceptional religious experience as a means toward his larger goal: the vindication of religion in terms of its capacity to provide creative energy and to promote human excellence.9 The definition offered by the British psychologist Robert Thouless• 'Religion is a felt practical relationship with what is believed in as a superhuman being or beings'JO-may seem on the face of it to be similar to James's. Likewise acknowledged to have been arbitrarily chosen for the purposes of the book at hand, Thouless's definition yet differs from James's in two important respects. First, in contrast to James, who considers belief-what he calls 'over-belief'-a sec• ondary phenomenon at best, Thouless argues that 'intellectual beliefs' are as essential to religion as feelings and acts. Second, whereas

(I) conventional (or lexical) definitions, which indicate actual historical usage; (2) nom• inal definitions, which are assigned to objects for certain instrumental purposes and in particular contexts; and (3) real definitions, which claim to specifY the unchang• ing nature of entities, typically by listing their essential features (Winston 1986). The second typology comprises two types of definitions: (I) functional, which defines an entity in terms of what it does-in this context, its social or psychological func• tions; and (2) substantive, which defines an object in terms of its meaning content, thus specifYing what it is, in itself (Berger 1974). Either of these types of definition can be nominal or real. 7 James 190211985: 32, 34. 8 James 1902: 98. 9 Wulff 1997. 10 Thouless 1923: 4.