{"agent_id":"hall","agent_name":"G. Stanley Hall","slug":"the-psychology-of-religion","label":"The psychology of religion: is religious experience a natural phenomenon of development to be studied genetically?","topic":"The psychology of religion","question":"Is religious experience a natural phenomenon of development to be studied genetically?","position":"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.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"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.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[1]}],[{"t":"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.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[2]},{"t":"The genetic psychology of religion honors its subject by taking it seriously as a natural power of the maturing spirit.","n":[3,4,5]}]],"texts":"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. Reception: William James's Varieties of Religious Experience as the parallel and rival treatment; the establishment of the psychology of religion as a field; the theological objection that genetic explanation explains religion away.","works":["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"],"reception":"William James's Varieties of Religious Experience as the parallel and rival treatment; the establishment of the psychology of religion as a field; the theological objection that genetic explanation explains religion away.","status":"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.","era":"1844-1924","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Adolescence Vol 2","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"One of the dominant motives in this coming reorganiza- tion of philosophy and history is the coordination of the biologic changes of adolescence in the microcosmic individ- ual and its macrocosmic analogue in the forces which center in the era of dawning Christianity, when both national and ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 333 personal selfishness merged into a higher human consciousness of universal brotherhood…","label":"Adolescence Vol 2"},{"n":2,"work":"Adolescence Vol 2","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The religious life and growth of thought might be almost said to consist in gradually transforming theological into psycho- logical ideas, as Greek transcendence is gradually replaced by the original Hebrew immanence.","label":"Adolescence Vol 2"},{"n":3,"work":"Adolescence Vol 2","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"Adolescence Vol 2"},{"n":4,"work":"Adolescence Vol 2","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"If the Church allows it to fossilize, psychology, when it be- comes truly biological, will preach it. Indeed, the chief fact of genetic psychology is conversion, a real and momentous change of unsurpassed scientific and practical importance and interest.","label":"Adolescence Vol 2"},{"n":5,"work":"Adolescence Vol 2","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"He feels himself superior in penetra- tion but very inferior in execution. All that he really could accom- plish seems mean and homely. Hence some form of renunciation is inevitable, for salvation is not by works.","label":"Adolescence Vol 2"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"recapitulation","label":"Recapitulation: does the development of the individual mind repeat the mental history of the race?"},{"slug":"adolescence-as-storm-and-stress","label":"Adolescence as storm and stress: is the turbulence of youth a biological necessity of development?"},{"slug":"the-education-of-women","label":"The education of women: ought the sexes to be educated differently because they differ by nature?"}]}