ABSTRACT
In general psychology too, the sub-discipline had failed to make much of a dent. Gordon Allport’s complaint in his 1950 book, The Individual and his Religion, was pretty much the same as the one made by Flournoy almost a half-century earlier: ‘scarcely any modern textbook writers in psychology devote as much as two shamefaced pages to the subject—even though religion, like sex, is an almost universal interest of the human race’. In effect, one might say that the practitioners of comparative religion felt free to pick and choose whatever conceptual bits of the psychology of religion best suited their sensibility. By mid-century, the part of psychology that appealed to a number of such interpreters was that which appeared to give some credence to the idea that religious experience was not altogether reducible to psychological or physiological categories.
