ABSTRACT
Traditionally, the rise of psychiatry is seen as overturning the claims of magic and religion. Naturalistic interpretations of religious claims predate the birth of psychiatry. In the Christian West they formed a central part of the Protestant and Catholic critiques that emerged during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. The eighteenth-century separation of psychiatric expertise from mainstream medical practice was driven largely by jurisprudential concerns. The analogy between social and spiritual disorder fostered in the New Testament was reinforced in the religious and political upheavals that wracked early modern Europe. Early investigations into the psychology of religion opened up the spiritual life to the possibility of a new kind of government. The technical promise of psychological and psychiatric knowledge that had been explored in the work of interwar faith groups such as the Emmanuel Movement was taken up by a number of more unorthodox new religious movements in the wake of the Second World War.
