an introduction
admitted that the concept of religion was vague, but this did not mean that
it was vacuous. Enough was known about what people inferred by the
term to proceed with the study of it.
psychOlOgical apprOaches tO religiOn
Before the theoretical advent of psychology, the experiential and subjec-
tive aspects of religion attracted the attention of the liberal German theo-
logian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1766–1834), who identified religion
with a feeling of absolute dependence when encountering something
greater than oneself. If Schleiermacher identified the essence of religion
as the feeling of absolute dependence, it was another German scholar
Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) who discovered the essence of religion in a
subjective experience of the numinous, a unique, irreducible or sui gen-
eris (unique of its kind) phenomenon, and an a priori category. This
meant that religion was set apart as something special and internal to the
experience of the subject. Schleiermacher and Otto used evidence from
the Bible to construct their theories.
The subjective experience of religion was explored by those within the
field of psychology, another social science, which also offered its own
definitions. William James (1842–1910), an early pioneer of the field,
was interested in religious experience that he thought was not abnormal,
in contrast to other opinions. If one took a person in solitude, considered
that person’s feelings, actions, and experiences, and understood that the
person stood in relation to what was considered divine, one got an idea
of James’s understanding of religion. From James’s perspective elements
such as dogma and theology were secondary features of religion in con-
trast to conscious states of experience. James drew a distinction between
healthy-minded (“once-born”) and sick souls (“twice-born”) for the pur-
pose of indicating that the latter type of person experienced a second birth
by dying to their former way of life.
Viewing himself as a scientist and advocating scientific knowledge as
the cure for the ills of civilization, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) discov-
ered the origins of religion in the Oedipus complex, connecting it to a
projection of infantile dependencies onto external reality and making
religion a manifestation of mental illness. Driven by this complex, the
son killed his father in order to gain access to the women of the society,
a violent deed followed by remorse and guilt, which motivated a son to
substitute and worship a totem animal to replace the slain father. Religion