A Taxonomy of Religious Experience

Abstract

* This is pubication A-29 of the Survey Research Center, University of California, Berkeley. The paper was written as part of a five-year program of research on various aspects of anti-Semitism being conducted at the Survey Center, under the general direction of Charles Y. Glock. The research is supported by a grant from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. I should like to thank Professor Glock for his comments on earlier drafts. I am also indebted to John F. Lofland and Frederic Templeton for valuable contributions. 1 The scientific study of religion in general suffered a similar lapse. Charles Y. Glock has recently noted that after "the golden era of Troeltsch, Weber, and Durkheim," the sociological study of religion virtually disappeared during the period between World Wars I and II. See his "The Sociology of Religion," in Robert K. Merton, Leonard Broom, Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr., (editors), Sociology Today, New York: Basic Books, 1959, p. 153177. 2 James H. Leuba, The Psychology of Religious Mysticism, New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, Inc., 1925. 3 Edwin Diller Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1899. and, of course, William James.4 But the next generation of social scientists failed to pursue these promising beginnings, and in subsequent decades virtually nothing of merit has been added to our understanding of religious experience. If the quest is to be taken up once more, the initial task to be accomplished is conceptual. James' work was primarily descriptive, while the explanatory efforts of Leuba and Starbuck were addressed to rather narrowly restricted aspects of religious experience.s But the term religious experience covers an exceedingly disparate array of events: from the vaguest glimmerings of something sacred to rapturous mystical unions with the divine, or even to revelations. Clearly, some basic elements must be systematically extracted from these diverse