The psychology of religion: is religious experience a natural phenomenon of development to be studied genetically?

G. Stanley Hall, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Religion is not an intrusion into human nature from outside it but one of its deepest and most natural growths, and it can and must be studied by the genetic and empirical method like any other. I found that religious awakening and conversion cluster overwhelmingly in the years of adolescence — that the second birth of the body and the new birth of the soul are the same passage seen from two sides — and that conversion is the normal crisis by which the expanding adolescent self reorganizes itself around a new center.

To study this by questionnaire, by the collection of thousands of cases, by the tracing of its stages, is not to profane it but to understand it as a fact of the developing mind. And when I turned the same method upon the figure of Jesus, I sought not to diminish him but to read his inner life as the supreme instance of the religious genius, the highest reach of the human soul in its growth toward the divine. The genetic psychology of religion honors its subject by taking it seriously as a natural power of the maturing spirit.¹²³

Sources

1. Now it becomes full of meaning. It is a new interest, and very many speak of it as a sudden awakening. It is often spontaneous, like the interest in art or music, or the love of nature.

   Adolescence Vol 2, pp. 292–293

2. This is the ideal and goal of the psychogenetic movement, which cross-sections previous modes of studying the human soul. The achievements of geology and of all the cO'Sinogenetic sciences have not, perhaps, altogether required the labor yet needed to accomplish this work, but the currents of endeavor already setting in this direction, and the actual progress now being made, have given birth to a new hope in the…

   Adolescence Vol 2, pp. 359–360

3. Indeed, the chief fact of genetic psychology is conversion, a real and momentous change of unsurpassed scientific and practical importance and interest. It is one of the best criteria of the degree of culture of different ages, races, religions, and communities, how it is conceived, interpreted, formulated, and administered.

   Adolescence Vol 2, p. 358

Where the argument is made

• Adolescence (1904, the chapter on the adolescent psychology of conversion)
• Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology (2 vols., 1917)
• the founding of the psychology-of-religion movement at Clark

How the argument was received

Hall, with his student Edwin Starbuck and alongside William James's Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), founded the empirical psychology of religion, and the association of religious conversion with adolescence and the questionnaire study of religious experience are lasting contributions. His genetic-psychological study of Jesus was more controversial and less enduring, read by many as reductive and by others as idiosyncratic. The standing objection is the one any naturalistic psychology of religion faces — that to give a developmental and physiological account of religious experience is to explain it away — which Hall, like James, answered by distinguishing the account of religion's psychological genesis from any verdict on its truth or value.