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Religion

Religion has almost as many meanings as writers on the subject. Traditionally, in Western culture the term religion refers to all aspects of our life in relation to the divine. However, the 20th century saw religion redefined, especially in academic circles. According to new definitions, religion refers to individual and corporate beliefs and practices dealing with our relationship with some ultimate being or reality and is distinguished from spirituality, which typically refers to the more experiential component of that relationship, or more broadly to one's core values or search for meaning. Some empirical work has begun to support the utility of this distinction, although in the United States it is most common for individuals to place importance on both.

General History and Development of the Field

Religion has been of interest to psychologists at least since the time of William James, whose classic work The Varieties of Religious Experience began a tradition of phenomenological work in the psychology of religion. The later work of Gordon Allport and Carl Jung provided a basis for personality and social psychologists to also examine religion, and since that time a rich empirical and theoretical literature has developed. However, two factors have limited our understanding of religion in a multicultural environment. First, the discipline of psychology has had an ambivalent relationship with religion. Most 20th-century philosophy of science in psychology was based on European positivism that saw religion as an impediment to be eliminated. Freud largely adopted this positivistic stance toward religion and pictured it as a primitive defense that had no place in a modern scientific world. Second, researchers have neglected the study of the relation between culture and religion. Psychology-of-religion researchers have mostly focused on Western versions of Christianity in European and North American Caucasian groups, and investigators in cross-cultural or multicultural psychology have seldom included religion as a meaningful variable in their studies.

Recently, interest in religion and its connection with culture has been growing. In most areas of the world, large majorities of the population adhere to some type of religion, although in some Western cultures, particularly in Europe, attachment to organized religion has been declining and interest shifting toward a smorgasbord type of individual spirituality. In global terms, the largest religions—Christianity, followed by Islam and varieties of Hinduism—have seen substantial growth in recent years. In the United States, the growth of conservative religion and of cultural groups traditionally committed to religion has challenged a therapeutic system unprepared to deal with religiously committed individuals, leading to a growing literature on handling religious and spiritual issues in counseling. Mounting scientific evidence that religion provides valuable coping strategies leading to enhanced resilience, well-being, and health has also increased general interest in religion within the fields of psychology, mental health, and medicine.

Approaches to Religion and Culture

A number of different positions have been taken on the relationship between religion and culture. One approach is to treat religion as a part of culture, as was done in classic anthropological work on religion. If we follow Geertz in defining culture as a symbolic conceptual system that helps form our knowledge and attitudes toward life, then religion can be seen as a subsystem of symbols residing within a larger cultural symbolic framework. In this view, a religion functions within a particular cultural context and cannot be understood outside of it. This postmodern-friendly perspective lies behind the work of scholars such as Steven Katz, who views religious experience as a phenomenon that is inseparable from the cultural context and religious tradition within which the individual lives. When this culture-centered view is applied to counseling, knowledge of religion becomes an expected part of the therapist's multicultural competency and is viewed as another aspect of the client's culture.

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