Russell T McCutcheon and Craig Martin,with Leslie Dorrough Smith,Religious Experience: A Reader

Reviewed by Alison Robertson, Open University, UK

The traditional approach to religious experiences seeks to understand them as unique, irreducible, and universal. This view places “experience” at the heart of what it means to be religious, and establishes it as the origin of organized religion. The premise on which this collection has been compiled is that this approach is, at best, flawed.

In the introduction, an account by John Wesley is used to illustrate how, when approaching such reports, we make assumptions about language and meaning. These may be unhelpful in relation to what we understand the report to mean, and also to understanding the basis for judging an experience as worth reporting. The introduction proposes “What does it mean?” to be understood as a question about shared linguistic rules. When sufficiently internalized, these mean that no experience belongs solely to the individual—not only the pool of metaphor which might be employed but also decisions about what registers as worthy of report are public and collective.

The editors’ conclusion is that it is more useful to ask questions about why we choose to speak of experience than to attempt to conceive its true nature, and the texts have been chosen to frame this debate. Section 1 includes Raymond Williams exploring “experience past” and “experience present,” while Robert Desjarlis considers the relationship between epistemic and ontic concerns in the context of experience. Together these introduce issues of language and interpretation. Sections 2 and 3 illustrate claims about which the editors are “sceptical” (viii), namely that religious experience is both real and essentially universal. A section of William James’s “Varieties of religious experience” is included, together with part of Charles Taylor’s modification of James’s thesis. This is followed by extracts from Joachim Wach and Diana Eck, included for their “shared sense” (89) of a universal reality underlining apparent differences in religion. Sections 4 and 5 challenge these elements by looking at different ways in which scholars have approached the question of experience. Wayne Proudfoot considers forms of reductionism, and Ann Taves argues for the importance of recognizing context. In section 5, we come back to the assumption identified in the introduction that a linguistic account of experience is “real” and showing how this can be questioned. Robert Sharf suggests culture is not a tool shaping experience, but is in fact the “very agent and material” (131) from which experience is created, and Joan Wallach Scott challenges the value of experiential accounts by looking at the ideological frameworks which surround and produce them. Section 6, by Craig Martin, argues that the self/institution distinction created by studying religious experience is “well adapted for capitalist or consumerist social norms” (196) and creates an impression of “unity where none exists” (197). This is the sum of the argument, and the reason it matters. This is not an abstract philosophical question about what language is, because such language creates ideas, which directly affect our interactions with the world.

The order of the texts enables someone reading through from beginning to end to follow the editors’ reasoning. However, the texts themselves are presented free of comment, except for a summary outlining where the author “fits” into the field (which is helpful in deciding whether to pursue each author’s work further). This allows the reader to bring their own views to the texts, and the argument being constructed from them.

One criticism that can be made of the book is the same as one levelled at the field in general by Sharf (133), namely that there is very little in the way of delineation between kinds of religious experience, although the use of the term is broad. In general, a concern with a special kind of awareness, such as that associated with mysticism, is implied; however, this is rarely made explicit or distinguished from other kinds of experience. There is the general experience of practicing religion—entering sacred space, performing rites or engaging in prayer—and this is, for the practitioner, distinct from what Taylor describes as “white hot” (63) experience of special or altered consciousness (mystical experience), which can apparently descend unsought upon people, resulting in conversion or renewed conviction. Between these broad categories are others. Ascetics set out to manipulate their physiology, with clear understanding of the role of the body in creating experience, so we cannot argue (as could be said of mystical experience) that it is ignorance of physiological causes that shapes the experience into a religious one. There are also individuals who seek to render their entire life-experience as an experience of religion—Christian monks/nuns, Hindu Sadhu/Sadhvi, and gurmukh Sikhs. For them every action, even the most mundane, focuses in some way on the ultimate. All these different forms carry different meanings for the individual, for their faith communities, and for society. The activities leading to religious experiences of all kinds are engaged in with differing intentions, and not all seek or are used to provide a basis for truth-claims. Given this potential variety to talk of the language or nature of “religious experience” as if it were a single thing seems an over-generalization.

Also somewhat obscured are approaches to the study of religious experience that do not claim such experience as “pure” or irreducible. Arguing that the concept of “experience” as interior awareness is a recent cultural creation of the West is valid, and we must be cautious about applying this understanding to, for example, medieval mystics. However, individuals today have been shaped by this concept and it is therefore likely that people now do discover, renew, or reject religion on the basis of deeply felt personal experience (or absence thereof). This may change what earlier believers thought about religion, or it may not. These experiences may tell us little or nothing about the origins of “religion,” but they can tell us how religion is regarded, how people engage with faith, what is categorized as religious, and how people construct meaning. There are scholars working in these areas, using the conversation presented here to help shape a contextualized, reflexive, and self-conscious approach to their study, which could be more thoroughly dealt with. In this regard, if the intention was to give students an overview of the entire field, the book fails, as any single book would. If, on the other hand, it is intended to open up one framework in which the concept of religious experience might be considered, and to introduce the challenge and debates created by that approach, it is successful.