Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things

Abstract

Two books have significantly shaped the social-scientific study of religious experience: William James's 1903 The Varieties of Religious Experience and Wayne Proudfoot's 1985 Religious Experience. We now have a third. Taves follows James and Proudfoot in using an “overbelief” model, which separates the experiences themselves from the ideas that people use to interpret them. Taves differs from James in her insistence that experiences are not religious sui generis, but become religious as people deem them so. She differs from Proudfoot in insisting that the process by which religious meaning is attributed to experiences occurs after the fact, not as part of the experiences themselves. These are matters of degree, not kind. All three separate experiences from interpretations, all are at root psychological, and all advocate the naturalistic study of what, for some, are nonnatural phenomena. All also advance the field. Taves brings considerable historical scholarship to this project. She situates the tussle over religious experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries effort to protect religion from what Schleiermacher called “its cultured despisers.” On this view, science and historical criticism can undermine theologies, doctrines, histories, scriptures, and organizations, yet religion retains its experiential core. James subjected this experience to psychological analysis without explaining it away. Proudfoot explained it as a psychological construction. Taves follows the latter's lead, using a rather sophisticated attribution theory to explain why experiences seem religious to their experiencers. In this, she highlights her opponents’ metaphysical choices while failing to recognize her own. No matter: her journey is worth traveling for the detailed scholarship she provides.