Alex suggested to me that readers here might be interested in the history and topic of my new book The Authenticity of Faith: The Varieties and Illusions of Religious Experience (which you can look at here: amazon.com/Authenticity-Faith-Varieties-Illusions-Experience/dp/0891123504/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2. I wrote the following (with some edits for posting here) for the recent edition of the APA Division 36 newsletter:
I remember the Christmas when I first turned my attention to the psychology of religion. My early research had been focused on clinical psychology but I was getting bored and looking for a change. Having never had a course on the psychology of religion I decided to start at the beginning. I got a copy of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience and read it over the holidays. I was smitten.
The aspect of The Varieties that captured my attention was the distinction James made between a healthy-minded spirituality and a spiritual style James called the sick soul. When James spoke of religious “varieties” he was speaking to the distinctions he observed between styles of religious experience. On the one hand we see within the healthy-minded experience a style that tends to minimize the experience of disorder, evil, pain and suffering in the world. By contrast, the sick soul maximizes these experiences, ruminating upon the darker aspects of existence. In my own research, using a metaphor by Martin Marty, I call these types Summer Christians and Winter Christians.
In reading The Varieties I quickly identified myself as a sick soul, a Winter Christian. My spiritual biography is filled with doubt and ruminations on the problem of suffering in the world (as I’ve noted before on this forum, this is the main reason I was drawn to UR). I believed in God but that belief was often a source of distress rather than comfort.
Having encountered the healthy-minded and the sick soul typology in The Varieties I turned to the empirical literature. Surely researchers had developed a variety of measures to assess these styles? I fully expected psychology journals to be full of discussions as to how to best assess James’s types and filled with studies discussing the various correlates of the types.
To my great surprise, I found nothing. Why, in the hundred years since The Varieties, had no one investigated James’s types, assessing, comparing and contrasting the healthy-minded and sick soul experiences? I wasn’t sure, but I’d found a research project I could sink my teeth into.
Soon after I encountered what is called Terror Management Theory (TMT), the work of Sheldon Solomon, Tom Pyszczynski, and Jeff Greenberg. TMT uses the work of Ernest Becker, author of the epic book The Denial of Death, to assess how belief systems and cultural worldviews (of which religion is a part) are used to repress, deny or manage existential/death anxiety. Specifically, I was struck by a study these researchers conducted in 1990 that observed Christian participants denigrating Jewish targets when faced with a death-awareness prime. These results suggested that the Christian participants were deploying their faith in an existentially defensive manner, by attacking an outgroup member, as a means to repress/assuage death anxiety.
This result struck me as it seemed to confirm the argument Freud famously made in The Future of an Illusion, that religious belief was a form of wishful thinking, an illusion deployed to repress existential anxiety. It seemed that Terror Management researchers had bolstered Freud’s case. That seemed like a big deal to me.
However my engagement with The Varieties made me suspicious that religious populations could be treated in a homogenous manner, particularly when existential motivations are being assessed. If William James is to be believed the healthy-minded and the sick soul engage with existential material very differently. Shouldn’t those differences be taken into account before we observe how religious participants react to existential stimuli like those in TMT research?
Thus began a series of studies that have culminated in the book The Authenticity of Faith: The Varieties and Illusions of Religious Experience (you’ll note the nod to both James and Freud in the title). The logic of much of this work has been straightforward: Assess James’s types and then observe how each engages with existential material. The outcome of such observations would tip toward either Freud or James. Specifically, do the religious types behave in a uniform manner, consistent with Freud’s contention that religious belief is, across the board, engaged in anxiety avoidance? Or do we observe evidence for James’s varieties, evidence that some religious believers (James’s sick souls) actively engage existentially distressing experiences? The existential experiences I’ve investigated in this manner have involved the encounter with ideological Others (in a replication of the TMT research cited above), aesthetic judgments of artwork (i.e., why is Christian bookstore art often so bad?), the problem of theodicy (how to reconcile a belief in God with the experience of pain and suffering in the world), and existentially troubling doctrines within the Christian faith (i.e., the Incarnation, the belief that God fully participated in the human experience of the body—sweat, urine, feces and all that messy stuff).
In each case, as reviewed in The Authenticity of Faith, I found evidence for James’s varieties suggesting that Freud’s “one size fits all” treatment of belief in The Future of an Illusion misses out on the diversity inherent in the religious experience.
In the end it seems that I’ve come full circle, returning to where I had started: the wisdom of William James and The Varieties of Religious Experience.
…
If you read the book and have something you’d like to talk or ask about, please post these under the Questions to Richard link. I’m interested to find out what you think.
I was smitten with James’ book as well back in high school. His fair and balanced and open-minded approach was rather refreshing, and it appears, from what I’ve read, that your book captures well the spirit of James’ book. 
