Abstract
In many ways, this is an excellent introduction to the psychology of religion. It is short (probably about 40,000 words plus notes and references), well written and easy to read. It is also authoritative and highly informative. The author is one of the leading figures in the psychology of religion and is completely on top of the research evidence. Given that, I might have expected to be writing an enthusiastic review that was wholly positive. However, I finished the book with some concerns and reservations.
Leaving aside the introduction and conclusion, there are four core chapters: on what distinguishes ‘believers’ from atheists; how religion relates to the life span; whether religion makes people moral; and whether it is good for them. These are all important questions. However, one problem with this book is that it talks about religious people as a group, assuming that they are all essentially the same, although there are occasional references to differences between different types of religious people. In contrast, what I take from the research evidence is that religious people are enormously different from one another on many things, even though the psychology of religion has not yet arrived at an agreed subclassification. On some things, different kinds of religious people differ from non-religious people in opposite directions. The diversity is huge.
Saroglou’s approach also tends to neglect some important aspects of religion. There is very little about religious experience, which seems to me a really important aspect of the religious life. There is also not much about religious psychological processes, and not much about how religious people think. The author is inclined to be too sweeping in his dismissal of religious beliefs when he says that ‘many religious beliefs are implausible, counterintuitive, or clearly irrational’. The relationship between religion and rationality is more subtle than that.
The final chapter considers whether religion will survive. I am sympathetic to his view that ‘traditional religion will be progressively transformed into and replaced by modern spirituality’. That is speculation, of course, but I agree that it is the most likely trajectory. It is not that traditional religion will die out, but the balance is likely to shift. Those in church leadership might reflect on the implications of that for the future of churches.
There is no comparable book on the psychology of religion of this length. However, under ‘further reading’, Saroglou mentions four mid-level authored books, including my own Psychology, Religion and Spirituality: concepts and applications (Cambridge University Press, 2017), in which I try to cover psychology of religion more broadly, and in a more religiously sympathetic way, blending insiders’ and outsiders’ perspectives.