Religious Experience

views updated

Religious Experience

The idea of religious experience is relatively new. It gained scholarly prominence in the late eighteenth century, with Friedrich Schleiermacher's attempt (On Religion, 1799) to justify Christianity against Enlightenment rationalism. Thinkers from Descartes to Kant and Hume had dismantled the scientific and metaphysical justifications for religious belief. Historical studies of Scripture and of early Christendom had eroded faith in church authorities. Schleiermacher sought a base from which to defend religion against its "cultured despisers."

Roughly put, Schleiermacher argued that religion is best grounded in sentiments, not in ideas; he said that these sentiments are experienced directly, unstructured by thoughts and actions. Such experiences point beyond the natural realm. People experience, for example, a sense of utter dependence—something that cannot be comprehended within the bounds of the everyday world. As they reflect on this experience, they develop the idea of an all-powerful, benevolent God, the only possible source such an experience might have. This is an "overbelief," to use the term William James introduced in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1903). Its details are an intellectual elaboration of the experience itself. In this view, religious experience comes first, and religious ideas are crude attempts to explain experience in everyday terms.

For Schleiermacher, James, Rudolf Otto (The Idea of the Holy, 1917), and others who see experience as primary, religion cannot be destroyed by metaphysical or ecclesiastical criticism. Religious ideas, they say, make sense only to the extent that they express people's experiences in symbolic form. Though science and philosophy may attack such ideas, they cannot undercut the experiences themselves: experiences of dependence (Schleiermacher), of "the More" ( James), or of "the Holy" (Otto). As long as people have such experiences, religion will endure. The idea of religious experience, then, is a weapon in the past two centuries' war between religion and rationalism—one with which religion has fought off the rationalist assault.

American Manifestations

The claim that religion is based in experience has had tremendous influence in late-twentieth-century America, feeding at least five different religious streams: Pentecostalism, Christian mysticism, Asian-based new religions, New Age religion, and American Evangelicalism.

Religious experience is central to Pentecostalism's appeal. Members of the theologically conservative Assemblies of God place great importance on "speaking in tongues," "being slain in the Spirit," and other events they regard as manifestations of divine favor. Charismatic Catholics—also often theological conservatives—embrace similar signs and wonders. Such Pentecostal groups have been among the fastest-growing religious bodies of the past thirty years—a testimony both to the allure of the extraordinary and to the popularity of its traditionalist clothing.

American mystics, too, seek the extraordinary, though often in a more liberal theological mode. The nineteenth-century Transcendentalists were among the first to embrace mystical ideas, along with a religious tolerance that set the tone for those to follow. Quakers followed in the early twentieth century, becoming until recently the most prominent American religion to host a strong mystical cohort. Their silent group meditation, in which each individual seeks guidance from the "inner light" common to all, sustains a religion that values experience more than doctrine. Yet Quakers are no longer alone. Many mainline churches now avidly explore the Christian mystical heritage, mining the medieval era in hopes of enriching modern life. The recent "Celtic Spirituality" movement among Catholics and Episcopalians, for example, offers Americans the contemplative techniques of Irish monks without the originals' cold and penury. Like Pentecostalism, its appeal lies in its combination of personal experience and traditionalism—though it reaches a far different audience.

Liberal mysticism has long shaped the American reception of Asian religions, especially Buddhism, transforming them in peculiarly American ways. The easing of immigration laws in the 1960s brought many Asian religious leaders to these shores, attracting disciples among the young. Several of the resulting groups followed the mystics in deemphasizing doctrine in favor of practice—and gave their members an almost experimental outlook. Techniques from silent mudras to "chaotic meditation" drew followers to new states of consciousness. As David Preston showed in The Social Organization of Zen Practice (1988), adepts regard these states as more important than creeds, though they do not necessarily see them as the highest religious goal. Survey research documents the allure of such experiences to followers of Asian-based religions generally.

The last two streams—New Age religion and American Evangelicalism—do not so much focus on actual religious experiences as they use the metaphor of experience to describe their religious insights. Both are individualist, though the New Age movement is much more eclectic. Eastern and Western, tribal and civilized, ancient and modern—there is scarcely a source that one or another New Age writer has not touted as helpful for "the spiritual quest." Indeed, the movement uses terms such as "spirituality" rather than "religion," and "quest" or "journey" rather than "doctrine," precisely because the former terms focus on individuals. New Agers see religion as an inward, not an outward, matter. They resist churches and external authorities, borrowing (or inventing) rites, hymns, and prayers only to the degree that they find them useful in their search for personal growth. To this way of thinking, individual experience is the touchstone of all religion. In contrast to Pentecostals and mystics, however, even reading the daily newspaper can be a religious experience—if it gives the individual a sense of spiritual progress.

American Evangelicals famously do not reject churches; they join them! Even those who avoid a doctrinaire or "fundamental" Christianity choose orthodoxy over eclecticism and respect church tradition, authorities, and especially the Bible. Yet they, too, speak the language of religious experience. Their call for individual conversion, their sense that God speaks to each person, their quest for a "personal relationship" with the resurrected Jesus all put the idea of individual experience at the center of religious life. Church, doctrine, and authority can guide one to the brink, one is told, but one must plunge in oneself—and this plunge alone brings salvation. In contrast to Puritan Calvinism, Evangelicalism promises its followers that they can directly experience their salvation. Neither the secular world nor rationalism can interfere with such leadings of the heart.

The idea that one can have a direct line to God resonates with American practical individualism—and also with late-twentieth-century America's distrust of institutions. Both lead one to value direct, unmediated experience. The five religious streams here listed are divided by their theologies, but all give such experiences the same weight and status in their worldviews.

Scholarly Approaches

Scholars have treated religious experiences in four main ways. The first follows Schleiermacher in treating religious experiences as raw data. It assumes that people first experience things, which they then interpret with overbeliefs. As some 30 percent of Americans claim to have had religious experiences, investigators do not lack for data. In Where the Spirits Ride the Wind (1990), Felicitas Goodman traced some of these to the ritualized body postures, dances, and rhythms present in many world religions.

Yet there is a problem. The Pentecostal experiences of "speaking in tongues" and "being slain in the Spirit" are not raw, but interpreted. To have them, one must know what each experience means, what having it looks like to outsiders, how and when it is appropriate, and so on. That is, one must be a religious insider: one must be able to interpret the experiences in order to have them. This is the reverse of Schleiermacher's claim.

In Religious Experience (1985), Wayne Proudfoot takes this as license to question the reality of religious experiences per se. Drawing on attribution theory, he argues that one cannot separate any experience from the ideas that grasp it. Any attempt to evaluate religious experience is thus inherently theological and closed to science.

Yet this is only true of everyday states of consciousness. Susan Blackmore's Beyond the Body (1992) presents a psychological model of altered states of consciousness—accidental, drug-induced, or created in meditation—that structure the relationship between ideas and experience differently. One can learn, for example, to generate meditation states in which ideas do not appear but that are still conscious. Blackmore advocates the investigation of such states while recognizing that any description of them made on returning to normal consciousness is subject to Proudfoot's strictures.

A final approach explores the experience of religious ritual, which it treats as shared experiences in time. Rituals focus people's attention. Like music, their sights and sounds channel participants' streams of consciousness in ways that cannot be reduced to mere ideas. But, contra Schleiermacher, these streams do not exclude ideas; indeed, ideas and experience here interpenetrate to produce a meaningful whole.

Despite their differences, all four of these approaches have provided fruitful glimpses at a much-cited but little-understood phenomenon.