ABSTRACT
The heated late nineteenth-century confrontation between religion and evolutionary thought, and the prominent role of evolutionary thought in Psychology’s creation (see Chapter 3), might lead one to expect an even more intense conflict between religion and Psychology. After all, conceding understanding of the physical world to science left religion’s central claims to expertise on human nature and the ‘soul’ more or less intact, but with Psychology science now presumed to invade even this hallowed territory. What is curious, therefore, is such a conflict’s failure to materialise, as even a relatively cursory historical exploration of the topic bears out. Some contemporary psychologists appear unaware of this; K.M. Loewenthal (2000) for example, opening a section on ‘A Short History of the Uneasy Relationship between Psychology and Religion’, states quite baldly that ‘Each domain has been seen as exclusive: if you are a psychologist you cannot take religion seriously, and if you are religious you cannot take psychology seriously’ (6). This is calamitously wrong. While many psychologists have indeed been hostile or indifferent to religion, the discipline itself has never achieved, or even sought, an anti-religion consensus comparable to geology’s rejection of the Genesis creation myth, and many canonically eminent psychologists have, as we will see, taken religion extremely seriously (while the first Psychology laboratory in Belgium was founded by the Catholic priest, later Cardinal, Desiré Mercier in 1891!). It has become a cliché to say that the psychologist (or psychotherapist) usurped the role of priest or church minister, but the reality is rather more complex. One could even argue, conversely, that many twentieth-century clergy sought to redefine their role in terms of being psychologists or psychotherapists. Psychology’s place in modernist cultures did, even so, have to be established alongside, and to some degree in competition with, that of religion. To be clear, this chapter is about the relationships between Psychology and religion, of which the subdiscipline Psychology of Religion is but one, albeit major, aspect. We may begin, therefore, with examining why the two camps appear, against the odds, to have coexisted relatively amicably.
