What Counts as a ‘Religious Experience?’: Phenomenology, Spirituality, and the Question of Religion

All experiences express a kind of spirit, a claim found in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Applying this to the religious allows a distinction between religiosity (a transcendental structure), religions (dynamic forces expressing that structure), and religious phenomena (concrete expressions of religions). Religiosity leads to the development of religion, suggesting that the religious is a dimension of all experience, not a distinct type. This expands the realm of possible subjects of study while narrowing and clarifying the proper object of study for scholars of religion.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This paper: a) offers a phenomenology of the religious that challenges the assumption that “religious experience” is primarily to be understood as a type of experience, called ‘religious’ experience, which is distinct from other (i.e., ‘non-religious’) experiences; and b) traces out some implications of this for phenomenological and other scholarly approaches to religion. To achieve these aims, the paper begins by explaining the phenomenological claim-found most explicitly in Husserl and Merleau- Ponty-that all experiences are expressive of a certain kind of spirit. This account of spirit, when applied to the phenomenological understanding of the ‘religious,’ allows us to distinguish between religiosity (as a transcendental structure), religions (as dynamic forces that express that structure), and religious phenomena (as concrete phenomena that express religions). In turn, this tri-partite distinction allows us to explain how religiosity leads to the development of religion in a way that suggests that ‘the religious’ is best conceived as a particular dimension of all experience. In that light, two major implications for the study of religion emerge from the phenomenology of the religious provided in this paper: 1) the realm of possible subjects of study is greatly expanded; while 2) the proper object of study is narrowed and clarified