15 - Summing-Up

Summary

In this final brief chapter, I will draw together three themes that have recurred through the book.

The Complexity of Religion

The first is about the complexity and multidimensionality of religion. In some ways, this is already widely recognized. Almost every leading researcher in the field would endorse the value of using multidimensional measures. What I think is largely lacking and currently needed is a theoretical perspective that leads to differential predictions about various facets of religion. We need a theoretical basis for predicting when dissociations between facets of religion are going to occur and what the consequences of those dissociations will be.

There are currently rather mixed feelings in the field about the categories of intrinsic, extrinsic, and quest religious motivations. However, despite the conceptual and methodological complexities that work on those categories has run into, it has at least provided a coherent approach to research on different types of religiousness. We badly need other comparable research programs.

I suggest that the distinction between internal and external religion may provide that. External religion is mere religious affiliation and activity. Internal religion is concerned with private experience and heartfelt inner commitment and is close to spirituality. External religion can exist on its own or in conjunction with internal religion. To put forward some specific hypotheses, I suggest that (i) internal religion has a stronger biological basis, whereas external religion is largely a cultural phenomenon; (ii) internal religion makes more of a contribution to personal change and adjustment than external religion; and (iii) internal religion will be less affected than external religion by any future trends toward secularization.

I also suggest that the psychology of religion should pay more careful and critical attention than it has so far to the phenomenon of conservatism, and how that relates to religion. Conservatism seems to have a relationship to religion that is in some ways parallel to that between spirituality and religion. Another important reason for attending to the impact of conservatism in religion arises from its current dominance. Unless researchers adopt a deliberate strategy of distinguishing conservative from more liberal forms of religion, they may find that they are actually just studying conservative religion when they believe they are studying religion more generally. It seems that liberal religion is currently going underinvestigated because it is swamped by conservative religion.