The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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people take responsibility for themselves, ‘conjunctive faith’ in mid-life when exceptions and compromises seem most realistic, and a ‘universalizing’ faith in rare individuals, martyrs among them.

Whether psychoanalytic or cognitive in the stages that they discern in the life span, existing accounts of religious development have regularly treated liberal, church-going Christianity as normative. Their descriptions of optimal development are inconsistent with the literalism of Christian fundamentalism; they are equally inconsistent with a personal practice of mystical experiences. Spiritual awakenings typically lead to beliefs in clairvoyance, precognition, and providential miracles.

Religion as psychotherapy

Analytic psychology, which Carl G. Jung developed following his break with Freud in 1912, is the approach to the psychology of religion that has been most favored by religious devotees, both in the academy and in the public at large. It was the first of the modern systems of psychology to be premised on the question, ‘Is religiosity not inherently therapeutic?’

Jung (1969) premised analytic psychology on the assumption that the ‘collective unconscious’ or ‘objective psyche’ is universal in compass. The objective psyche is responsible, among other phenomena, for astrology, telepathy, prophecy, and fortuitous physical events – all of which Jung summarized under the term ‘synchronicity’. The objective psyche is cosmic, yet it is simultaneously a component of the personal psyche of each human individual. Dreams manifest materials that originate from both the personal and the collective unconscious.

The objective psyche is composed of archetypes. Archetypes exist in the personal psyche as inborn clusters of form and motivation that constitute ‘mentally expressed instincts’. However, the forms and behavioral urges have their source in the objective psyche and not in human genetics alone. Archetypes are personal entities that exist independently of human beings. Jung described them as ‘autonomous animalia gifted with a sort of consciousness and psychic life of their own’.

Archetypes are always unconscious. They are unable to become conscious. What manifests is not an archetype but a mental image that expresses an archetype. The major archetypal images are three: the anima, which represents the feminine; the animus, which represents the masculine; and the shadow, which represents all that is rejected as evil and projected as other. Jung counted the sage, the father, the mother, the child, the hero, and the trickster as archetypal images of lesser importance.

Jung held that the unconscious manifests to consciousness in a compensatory manner. Should an archetype’s manifestations be undervalued or repressed, or its opposite be overemphasized in consciousness, the psyche’s need for equilibrium causes the archetype to manifest a compensatory quantity of appropriate archetypal images. Because every spontaneous manifestation of an archetypal image is compensatory, archetypal manifestation is intrinsically therapeutic. Although the design of the objective psyche is intelligent and purposive, the process of compensatory manifestation is itself regulated automatically in a quantitative manner.

In Jung’s view, both dreams and religious experiences are instances of direct and unmediated manifestations of archetypal images. Although they are compensatory, dreams are irrational, while religious experiences consist of ‘passionate conflicts, panics of madness, desperate confusions and depressions which were grotesque and terrible at the same time’.

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Jung provided no criteria for distinguishing acute psychosis from a spiritual emergency; he seems to have made no such distinction.

For Jung, myths were to be seen in parallel, as culturally shared manifestations of the archetypes that give expression to the instinctual structures of the objective psyche. Like dreams, myths are compensatory. Although the archetypes that they manifest are eternal, myths are historical phenomena that provide correction for ‘the inadequacy and onesidedness of the present’ in fashions appropriate to their eras and cultures.

Therapy consists of ‘individuating’ or achieving psychic distance from archetypal images. One may then be able to experience the images without being compelled to act on their basis. Organized religion is semi-therapeutic. Through ‘a solidly organized dogma and ritual’, Jung wrote, ‘people are effectively defended and shielded against immediate religious experience’. A complete therapy moves beyond dogma and ritual into innovative, creative manipulations of archetypal images.

Jung also explained the individuation process in developmental terms. A child’s worldview consists of a naive realism, an unreflecting and uncritical assumption that the habitual has the objective status of truth and law. This stage is succeeded by a maturing worldview whose rational and critical character liberates consciousness to a measure of autonomy. In its autonomy, however, critical consciousness suffers from the relativism of its own subjectivity. With a variety of differing subjectivities equally tenable, the psyche is driven into illness. The third and final developmental stage consists of the compensatory intervention of the unconscious. The pathogenic isolation of consciousness is interrupted by the manifestation of archetypal images. The images collectively alert consciousness to its grounding in the unconscious. Stability is regained, but with the naive ontological assumptions of the first stage replaced by the self-consciously psychological considerations of the third. In the process, consciousness becomes aware of, and makes its adjustment to, the unconscious. Because the unconscious is both personal and collective, the individuation process is inherently religious. Psychological health is not possible without religiosity.

Jung considered God and the Self to be archetypes. In some passages, he acknowledged that the two were indistinguishable. His concept of Self was adapted from the Hindu atman, which is one with God (Brahman) and equivalent to the mind and substance that are the cosmos. For Jung, the Self was an archetype that represents the unity of consciousness and the unconscious, and individuation was not complete until the Self was realized and psychic integration achieved.

Because Jung insisted that the ‘God within’ was a psychological phenomenon that was not to be confused with an external spiritual being intended by theologians, the case has sometimes been made that Jung psychologized religion and was ultimately concerned only with psychology. Analytic psychology may alternatively be seen as a psychologically informed practice of religion, whose rejection of theologians’ God in favor of human self-deification is consistent with its roots in Romanticism and Western esotericism.

Academic psychology

Academics’ concern in the 1920s for a scientific psychology, engaged in quantification and independently duplicable results, led the discipline of psychology to replace mental experience with behavior as its primary datum. Mental experience is accessible only through introspection and self-reports, both of which are unavoidably subjective. Behavior can instead be measured, as it were objectively, by external observers.

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Due to its methodological concerns, the discipline of psychology largely abandoned the study of religion upon the rise of behaviorism. Behaviorism was incapable of discussing any of the aspects of religion that were of keenest interest to other schools of research. Behaviorism could not ask: what are the subjective phenomena of religion? why are people religious? what are the processes of becoming religious? what in religion is morbid, wholesome, and therapeutic?

Academic psychologists were unable to engage in the study of religion until the monopoly of behaviorism was broken in the 1950s and the methods of social psychology gained prominence. The methods of cognitive behaviorism followed soon afterward. Like psychology in general, however, the academic psychology of religion uses its research methods to determine which data will and will not be examined. It is not prepared to adapt its research methods to whatever the data may happen to be. Methodological purity, rather than practicality, remains the scientific standard. Psychology addresses data that it alone generates (via questionnaires, experiments, and so forth) and it fails to address data generated by academic students of religion. It also uses common terms in eccentric ways that are ‘operational’ methodologically. For these reasons, the academic psychology of religion has developed an extensive body of knowledge that has not contributed significantly to the academic study of religion. Psychologists nevertheless claim exclusive title to the name of ‘science’ and dismiss as unscientific and ‘unempirical’ all other approaches to the psychology of religion.

The major question that psychologists ask of religion is: ‘What aspects of religion can be quantified statistically and correlated with other religious statistics?’ This preoccupation with measurable variations means that psychologists end up addressing the implicit question, ‘When, or under what circumstances, are people more and less religious?’

Because questions concerning measurable variations take for granted the definitions of whatever is being measured, the research program conceals two methodological flaws. As Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi remarked, the psychology of religion is a historical psychology. It is a historically and culturally limited body of findings concerning social behavior in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and almost entirely in the various societies of Western culture. Its findings cannot responsibly be considered universal. Nor are the findings reliable so far as they go. Most have been skewed by amateurism as well as by ethnocentricity. When psychologists circulate a survey questionnaire, the responses are limited both by the questions asked, and by the respondents’ understanding of the questions. The scoring of experimental behavior is similarly constrained by the experimenters’ subjectivity. Although some psychologists are competent in the study of religion, the majority are not. Accordingly, many of the questions that psychologists have asked, together with almost all of the answers that they have received on questionnaires, have been naive as well as ethnocentric. When, for example, the frequency of church attendance is used as a measurable index of religiosity, the findings are not merely limited to Christianity. They are skewed, in that they have to do with church attendance and not necessarily with religiosity.

With the warning, then, that psychologists’ findings on religion are as subjective, speculative, and as little ‘scientific’ as anyone else’s, let us review some of the more interesting results. People are religious because they have been taught to be so. Parental religiosity is the most important influence. Most studies show a positive correlation between religiosity and self-esteem. Religiosity is associated with life satisfaction and subjective wellbeing. Religiosity can increase optimism and a sense of control. There is also a correlation with self-ideal conflicts and guilt feelings. Religiosity does not affect suicidal behaviors.

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In general, religiosity correlates positively with both subjective or self-rated health, and objective measures of physical health. In some cases, however, religions cause physical harm, for example, through physical punishment, asceticism, and the denial of medical help. The findings regarding religion and mental health are inconclusive.

Religion is socially cohesive. Religious people divorce less frequently, commit fewer crimes, work harder, and are more socially integrated than non-religious people. Religious people are more likely to be women, over the age of 50, and lower class. The greater religiosity of women may correlate with women’s greater ease with being dependent, or with men’s aversion to loving a masculine deity. Women report more religious experiences than men do. Parapsychological experiences are more frequent for people who are or have been unhappy and socially marginal; whereas mystical experiences correlate with positive affect and life satisfaction. Contact with the dead correlates with being widowed. On the other hand, there is a 99 percent probability that psychedelic drugs use will induce a religious experience in anyone, if the setting is engineered to promote one. Music, prayer and meditation, group worship, experiences of nature, emotional distress, and sensory deprivation are all less effective.

Freud’s claim that God is the exalted father has been examined repeatedly. Some studies have found that God is described as more similar to father, but others noted a similarity to mother. Still others noted a similarity to whichever was the preferred parent. Cultures that favor accepting, loving, and nurturing parenting styles tend to favor benevolent deities, while rejecting parenting styles correlate with malevolent deities. Catholics find God more maternal than Protestants do.

There is a decline in religiosity during adolescence. Conversion experiences are nevertheless most frequent at 15 years of age. Conversion experiences correlate with socially isolated individuals and also with a strong emotional attraction to the proselytizer whose ideas and practices are accepted. Loss of religious faith or conversion from one religion to another is frequently associated with a rejection of parents. Conversion through coercion or ‘mind control’ is a fiction.

Unmarried people are more active religiously than married people. Religious involvement declines in the third decade of life. Religious involvement increases after age 30 and continues into old age.

Clinical psychology

The 1990s saw a major shift in clinical attitudes toward religion. After decades of onesided antipathy to religion, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and clinical psychologists adopted more nuanced views, only to find themselves confronted by a new research question: how to distinguish healthy and morbid forms of religion. Psychologists established a statistically significant correspondence between religious involvement and mental health and went on to investigate with increasing specificity when and for whom religion is most healthy. The new paradigm came together, above all, in Kenneth I. Pargament’s The Psychology of Religious Coping (1997). After noting that most people routinely turn to religion in one fashion or another in coping with the challenges of events, Pargament systematically reviewed a very considerable part of the academic psychology of religion for its pertinence to the topic of coping. Pargament arrived at the unremarkable finding that ‘religious coping is more common among blacks, poor people, the elderly, women, and those who are more troubled’ (p. 143). Pargament also established in equal detail that religion is variously helpful, harmful, and

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irrelevant to coping. Having normalized the discussion through a massive presentation of empirical findings, Pargament approached the potentially explosive question: ‘What forms of religious coping are helpful, harmful, or irrelevant?’ He distinguished four ‘control-related’ coping styles. In the self-directing approach, both religious and non-religious people rely on their own efforts. In the collaborative approach, people regard God as a partner who augments their own efforts to help themselves. In the deferring approach, people rely entirely on God, making no efforts on their own behalf. Lastly, in the pleading approach, peoples’ efforts consist of petitioning God to provide. Pargament and his colleagues found that the collaborative approach is the most effective of the four, but ‘overall…studies do not show that religious copers experience more benefits than their nonreligious counterparts.’ The superior effectiveness of collaborative coping validated the conclusion, however, that ‘religion does appear to add a unique dimension to the coping process.’ Subsequent research suggests that religious copers have less stress over their failures to cope, when compared with non-religious copers; and the reduction of stress facilitates greater eventual accuracy in coping.

A score of books and hundreds of articles have since proceeded from the assumption that because people commonly resort to religious coping, and some kinds of coping are more effective than others, clinicians do well to encourage religious patients to use the more effective means of religious coping. Slippage from a phenomenological attitude to patients’ religiosity, to proactive function as a spiritual counselor or director who is expert in religious coping, is frequent in the literature, which belongs more to the practice of religion than its study. The pragmatic necessities of clinical work have nevertheless brought a new and important research question to the fore: how to distinguish healthy and morbid religiosity on criteria that are academically or scientifically responsible. Answering this question will likely occupy many contributors for decades to come.

Concluding reflections

The humanistic psychologist David Bakan (1996) noted that psychology, in all of its major schools, has conceptualized human beings on the model of machines that are regulated exclusively by causal determinism. The psychological models abolished such older categories as origination, causativity, will, virtue and vice, heroism, cowardice, and so forth. As a consequence, what is currently being presented as psychology is inconsistent with our experience of ourselves.

We today possess a variety of psychologies of people imagined as machines. They are not psychologies of people as we are, nor are they what psychology must someday become. All of our current psychologies are arbitrarily and artificially truncated. The portions omitted may very well be the most significant of all. Need we be surprised that a bridge to theology has yet to be found?

Bibliography

Arbman, Ernst. ‘Mythic and religious thought’. Dragma: Martin P. Nilsson … Dedicatum. Lund, 1939. Assagioli, R. Transpersonal Development: The Dimension Beyond Psychosynthesis. London: HarperCollins,

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Bakan, David. ‘Origination, self-determination, and psychology’. Journal of Humanistic Psychology 36(1): 9–20, 1996.

Batson, C. D., Schoenrade, P. and Ventis, W. L. Religion and the Individual: A Social Psychological Perspective. London: Oxford University Press, 1997.

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Beit-Hallahmi, B. and Argyle, M. The Psychology of Religious Behaviour, Belief and Experience. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

Fowler, III, James W. Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning.

San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981.

Freud, S. ‘Group psychology and the analysis of the ego’. Standard Edition, 18: 69–143. London: Hogarth Press, 1955 [1921].

——Â ‘Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood’. Standard Edition, 11: 63–137. London: Hogarth Press, 1957 [1910].

——‘Totem and taboo: Some points of agreement between the mental life of savages and neurotics’. Standard Edition, 13: 1–161. London: Hogarth Press, 1958 [1913].

——‘Obsessive acts and religious practices’. Standard Edition, 9: 117–27. London: Hogarth Press, 1959 [1907].

——‘The future of an illusion’. Standard Edition, 21: 5–56. London: Hogarth Press, 1961 [1927]. —— ‘Civilization and its discontents’. Standard Edition, 21: 64–145. London: Hogarth Press, 1961

[1930].

—— ‘Constructions in analysis’. Standard Edition, 23: 257–69. London: Hogarth Press, 1964 [1937]. ——‘Moses and monotheism: three essays’. Standard Edition, 23: 6–137. London: Hogarth Press, 1964

[1939].

——Â The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. Ed. James Strachey, with Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson. London: Hogarth Press, 1966 (cited elsewhere as Standard Edition).

Grof, C. and Grof, S. The Stormy Search for the Self: A Guide to Personal Growth through Transformational Crisis. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1990.

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Reprinted New York: New American Library, 1958 [1902].

Jung, C. G. Psychology and Religion: West and East, 2nd edn. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.

Maslow, A. H. Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences. 1964; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1976.

Meissner, W. W. Psychoanalysis and Religious Experience. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Merkur, D. Mystical Moments and Unitive Thinking. New York: State University of New York Press, 1999. Otto, Rudolf.‘The sensus numinis as the historical basis of religion’. Hibbert Journal 30: 283–97, 415–

30, 1932.

—— The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, 2nd edn. Trans. John W. Harvey. London: Oxford University Press, 1950 [1917].

Pargament, Kenneth I. The Psychology of Religion and Coping: Theory, Research, Practice. New York & London: Guilford Press, 1997.

Pfister, Oscar. Some Applications of Psycho-Analysis. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1923. ——ÂChristianity and Fear: A Study in History and in the Psychology and Hygiene of Religion. Trans. W. H.

Johnston. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1948.

Pruyser, P. W. Between Belief and Unbelief. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.

Rizzuto, A.-M. The Birth of the Living God: A Psychoanalytic Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Söderblom, Nathan. The Living God: Basal Forms of Personal Religion. Gifford Lectures 1931. London: Oxford University Press, 1933.

Starbuck, Edwin Diller. The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Study of the Growth of Religious Consciousness, 3rd edn. London, New York and Melbourne: Walter Scott Publishing Co., Ltd, 1911 [1899].

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Suggested reading

Bakan, David, Merkur, Dan, and Weiss, David S. (2009), Maimonides’ Cure of Souls: Medieval Precursor of Psychoanalysis. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

The posthumously completed final work of David Bakan, a major figure in the psychology of religion, is a historical study of Rabbi Moses Maimonides’ twelfth century cure of souls, as evaluated from perspectives in humanistic psychology and psychoanalysis, and highlighting the many parallels with Freud’s psychoanalysis; Freud was exposed to Maimonides during his religious education as a teenager.

Haartman, Keith. (2004), Watching and Praying: Personality Transformation in Eighteenth Century British Methodism. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi.

A historical study of John Wesley’s method and early British Methodist progress from conversion through sanctification, as evaluated from a contemporary psychoanalytic perspective, and interpreted as a historical achievement of psychotherapeutic personality change.

Jones, James W. (2002), Terror and Transformation: The Ambiguity of Religion in Psychoanalytic Perspective. Hove, UK & New York: Brunner-Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.

An application of contemporary psychoanalytic theory that explores the roles of healthy and morbid ideals and idealization processes in the formation of different religious phenomena.

Pargament, Kenneth I. (1997), The Psychology of Religion and Coping: Theory, Research, Practice. New York & London: Guilford Press.

A paradigm-shifting contribution to the academic psychology of religion, that has pioneered the empirical evaluation of health and morbidity in religion.

Rubin, Jeffrey B. (2004), The Good Life: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Love, Ethics, Creativity, and Spirituality. Albany: State University of New York Press.

A psychoanalyst and advocate of Buddhist meditation reflects candidly on the humanistic wisdom to which a ‘contemplative psychoanalysis’ may aspire.

Safran, Jeremy D. (Ed.). (2003), Psychoanalysis and Buddhism: An Unfolding Dialogue. Boston: Wisdom Publications.

One of the better recent collections that brings together psychoanalysts and Buddhists to explore the intersection of these Western and Eastern approaches to the mind and its processes of change.

Spilka, Bernard, Hood, Jr., Ralph W. Hunsberger, Bruce, and Gorsuch, Richard. (2003), The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach, 3rd ed. New York and London: Guilford Press.

A current and magisterial survey of the academic psychology of religion.

Chapter 12

Phenomenology of religion

Douglas Allen

‘The phenomenology of religion’ became one of the major twentieth-century disciplines and approaches to religion. Readers may have some sense of what is involved in other disciplines and approaches to religion, such as ‘history of religion,’ ‘anthropology of religion,’ ‘psychology of religion,’ ‘sociology of religion,’ or ‘philosophy of religion,’ even if some initial ideas are inaccurate. Few readers will have any clue as to what the term ‘phenomenology of religion’ means or what this discipline and approach describe.

An introductory exercise

The following exercise will help illustrate the rationale for phenomenology of religion and several of its major characteristics. Most societies and cultures have been described as ‘religious.’ Several billion human beings today describe themselves as ‘religious.’ Some of our most common language – emphasizing such terms as ‘God,’ ‘soul,’ ‘heaven,’ ‘salvation,’ ‘sin,’ and ‘evil’ – is ‘religious.’ Even human beings who claim that they are not ‘religious’ usually think that they know what they reject.

Scholarly approaches to religion involve critical reflection. When we reflect critically on such common terms as ‘religion’ and ‘religious,’ it becomes apparent that we usually use these terms in vague ways. This exercise is an attempt to begin such critical reflection as key to understanding phenomenology of religion.

The exercise

This exercise will work best for a class or group of participants. If there are more than 20 participants, divide into smaller groups allowing for more individual participation. This exercise will also work well through internet group communication. If you are alone, you can do the exercise by yourself, but it will work much better if you ask others for their responses. Each class or group should ask for one person to record responses and summarize results.

Phenomenology of religion starts with the view that religion is based on religious experience. Human beings have experiences that they describe as religious. These may be traditional or nontraditional. They may focus on inner feelings or outward forms and relations. They may be institutional and involve organized religion, or they may be highly personal and outside any institutional framework. They may involve prayer, worship, rituals, nature, or cosmic experiences.

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In this exercise, many participants will state that they are religious and that they have had religious experiences. Religious participants should be encouraged to describe their religious experiences. What kind of an experience was it? What did it mean to the person who had such an experience? It may take time for participants to feel comfortable sharing their experiences. It is important to be nonjudgmental and to emphasize that there is no right or wrong answer. It is important to maintain an atmosphere in which others, even when they personally disagree, are respectful and attempt to empathize with and understand what religious participants are expressing.

As a variation, after all participants have had the opportunity to describe their religious experiences, the group may focus on respondents whose expressions refer to ‘God.’ These religious participants may be asked to describe at greater length the nature of such an experience of God and what is intended by their use of the term God.

After eliciting as many responses as possible, compile the results. Do not include or exclude responses based on agreement or disagreement. Summarize the major ways of describing religious experience and possibly the more restrictive descriptions in terms of experiences of God.

Results of the exercise

After compiling the results, reflect critically on them and analyze the data. Phenomenology of religion involves certain kinds of analysis.

When considering the major features expressed by religious participants, are there common characteristics in all or most of the descriptions? What are they? In reflecting on the tremendous variety of religious expressions, phenomenologists of religion claim that there are common general characteristics, structures, and patterns revealed only in religious experiences.

Religious people do not believe that their religious experiences are nothing more than subjective psychological feelings. They believe that they have experienced some religious reality: the experience of X. Based on your descriptions, what is the content or nature of X? How have participants described X? As God? In other terms? This points to the phenomenological doctrine of ‘intentionality’ emphasizing that all consciousness or experience is experience of something. Is there a common religious object or referent in your descriptions? If not one, are there several essential patterns and variations?

Phenomenologists of religion focus on language. We never have direct access to experiences of others. Instead we have expressions of others as they try to describe their religious experiences and realities. How do religious participants use language to describe experiences? Is there a specific or unique religious language? If the intended religious referent or reality transcends human attempts at definition and conceptual analysis, does this mean that religion cannot be studied in a critical, reflective, scholarly way?

In reflecting on the assembled data, here are several likely questions and concerns. On the one hand, are descriptions of ‘religion,’ ‘religious,’ and ‘religious experience’ too narrow? Some religious participants will be uncomfortable with other descriptions. For example, Buddhists may be uncomfortable identifying with certain God expressions. Even some participants using God expressions may feel that other God formulations, expressing personal anthropomorphic views or traditional exclusivistic views, have little to do with their experiences. To the extent that participants reflect religious, ethnic, class, and other differences, there will be a great plurality and diversity in responses. From the perspective of

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phenomenology of religion, which attempts to uncover universal or general structures and meanings, think about whether various expressions can be broadened.

On the other hand, are some descriptions too broad in the sense that they are also true of experiences and beliefs that are not religious? For example, some may describe religion as consisting of whatever is true or real for the experiencer. But don’t nonreligious people also experience what they consider true or real? From the perspective of phenomenology of religion, our general descriptions must allow us to distinguish religious phenomena from nonreligious phenomena and analyze the religious as a specific kind of experience.

Reflecting on the assembled data, do some descriptions reveal a clear ethnocentrism, expressing one’s own background, socialization, and beliefs but not adequate to describe the religious experiences and phenomena of others? Do some descriptions reflect normative positions, based on value judgments, that do not do justice to religious others?

This is not meant to criticize such ethnocentric and normative formulations. Such formulations are inadequate for providing a general phenomenological description of ‘religion’ and ‘religious.’ On theological, philosophical, or some faith-based grounds, Christian fundamentalists may describe religious experience as consisting only in the experience of Jesus Christ, and they may argue that those who do not experience and accept this reality are doomed to Hell. Many Muslims may describe religious experience as submitting to Allah and recognizing Muhammad as the true Messenger, and they may argue that others are nonbelievers whose experiential referents are unreal or demonic.

Phenomenology of religion attempts to avoid such narrow, overly broad, ethnocentric, and normative approaches. It attempts to describe religious experiences with their religious phenomena as accurately as possible. In its descriptions, analysis, and interpretation of meaning, it attempts to suspend value judgments about what is real or unreal in experiences of others. It attempts to describe, understand, and do justice to the religious phenomena as they appear in religious experiences of others.

The term ‘phenomenology of religion’

Although ‘phenomenology’ and ‘phenomenology of religion’ are not part of ordinary language, they are popular terms in various scholarly disciplines. Starting in the early twentieth century, philosophical phenomenology became one of the major philosophical approaches. Phenomenology of religion emerged as one of the most influential modern approaches to religion. Scholars sometimes identify phenomenology of religion as a discipline and approach within the general field of Religionswissenschaft, the scientific study of religion. We shall use the term ‘religious studies’ to identify modern scholarly approaches to religion that include phenomenology as well as history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, and other disciplines.

It is possible to differentiate four groups of scholars who use the term phenomenology of religion. First, there are works in which the term means nothing more than an investigation of phenomena or observable objects, facts, and events of religion. Second, from the Dutch scholar P. D. Chantepie de la Saussaye to such contemporary scholars as the Scandinavian historians of religions Geo Widengren and Åke Hultkrantz, phenomenology of religion means the comparative study and the classification of different types of religious phenomena.

Third, numerous scholars, such as W. Brede Kristensen, Gerardus van der Leeuw, Joachim Wach, C. Jouco Bleeker, Mircea Eliade, and Jacques Waardenburg, identify phenomenology of religion as a specific branch, discipline, or method within Religionswissenschaft or religious