American Psychology PDF

American Psychology Matthew S. Hedstrom Religion has always been concerned with the inner life of human beings as well as such external realities as gods and the natural world. The modern science of psychology arose from the philosophical and theological anthropologies of the Western religious trad...

American Psychology Matthew S. Hedstrom Religion has always been concerned with the inner life of human beings as well as such external realities as gods and the natural world. The modern science of psychology arose from the philosophical and theological anthropologies of the Western religious traditions and began its slow emergence as a scientific discipline, aligned with anatomy and physiology, during the European Enlightenment. Only at the end of the nineteenth century, however, in Europe and the United States, did psychology become formally distinct from philosophy and theology in the modern university curriculum. Ever since, psychology and religion have continued to interact at popular and scholarly levels, both within formal religion and in the wider arena of spirituality. Teasing out the relationships between psychology and religion, for these reasons, is central to discerning the contours of modern intellectual history, as well as vital to understanding the lived experiences of ordinary Americans, secular and religious. Matthew S. Hedstrom is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 2009. He earned his B.A. in history from Haverford College and his Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He also served as Lilly Fellow in Humanities and American Studies at Valparaiso University in Indiana and as a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University. His first book, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), explores the growth and dissemination of liberal religious sensibilities—especially mystical, psychological, and cosmopolitan forms of spirituality—through popular reading, bookselling and marketing practices, public libraries, and wartime reading programs. It won the Brewer Prize of the American Society for Church History in 2013. Psychology—the science of the human mind and human behavior—is a modern invention, a creature of the research university as it emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States. But the questions it probes about the inner life of human beings, about consciousness, habit, instinct, well-being, free will, depravity, transformation, creativity, and suffering, are as old as humanity and have always been entangled with religion. More than entangled, in fact: these questions have been at the core of Western religious and philosophical thought for millennia. That psychology even exists as an academic enterprise apart from theology and philosophy stands for this reason as perhaps the paradigmatic example of intellectual modernity. Here, more than in any other modern intellectual enterprise, one witnessed what had once been the domain of the church wrested away by the laboratory scientist, the humanist, and the clinician. The great question in the modern history of religion and psychology is just how clean and complete that break has been. Before the modern era, no such questions existed about how to delineate the religious from the scientific when it came to studying the soul. The modern English word ‘psyche,’ laden with scientific and humanistic overtones, de-rives via Latin from the more capacious Greek word psyche ̄ meaning variously breath, life, and soul. Ancient philosophers and sages across cultures, from China to India to Greece and elsewhere, developed philosophies of the mind and its various faculties, speculated on the links between the physical body and states of consciousness, and interpreted dreams, not only as otherworldly revelations but also for the insights they provided into human mental life. But the origins of psychology in the modern sense can best be traced to the sixteenth-century European Renaissance when the Latin neologism psychology-gia first appeared in scholarly writings; the first known English usage of ‘psychology’ dates to Steven Blankaart’s The Physical Dictionary (1693), in which psychology is described as the branch of physical anthropology that “treats of the Soul” in a manner analogous to anatomy’s treatment of the body (Colman 2015, 617). Here, in this earliest English usage, psychology remained holistic, both a branch of the emerging medical and academic disciplines and a form of inquiry for probing enduring religious questions about human nature. Early American Faculty Psychology The Puritans who first settled in British colonial New England were steeped in the learning of their age, not only in theology but across the scholarly fields, including the forms of moral and natural philosophy later to be called psychology. The eighteenth-century American theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), the greatest of late Puritan thinkers in America, read widely in continental thought and produced the most significant early American contribution to psychology, especially on matters of religious experience. Edwards, one of the foremost preachers of his age and a leader of the New England revivals of the 1730s and 1740s known as the Great Awakening, considered at length the link-ages among divine grace, the rhetorical arts, and the qualities of the human mind that contributed to a proper and enduring religious conversion. Psychology in this era was a philosophical rather than a laboratory discipline, yet Edwards in his Religious Affections (1746) and other writings nevertheless grappled with the emerging materialist empiricism of John Locke (1632 – 1704) and other Enlightenment thinkers, searching for ways to bring their work in line with the idealism and supernaturalism of his own Calvinist tradition. In the end, Edwards rejected Locke’s contention that the mind is a blank slate at birth and that all ideas are rooted in experience mediated through the senses. Certain ideas and structures of thought are divinely imprinted, Ed-wards asserted. Yet Edwards nevertheless recognized the significance of the body—especially the bodily senses and the body’s register of emotional states —in giving ideas legibility and credibility. The implications for religion were profound. If emotions that arise in the soul incline one toward or away from certain ideas by stirring pleasurable or unpleasurable reactions in the body, then the evangelical revivalists’ emphasis on stirring the heart made good psychological sense. Intellectual conversion, which Edwards understood to mean the acquisition of new spiritual and intellectual awareness of divine realities, flowed from this prior, affective transformation. Psychology in Edwards’s hands—the philosophical exploration of mental and spiritual states and their operation—stood as an adjunct to theology, and as a counterweight to the potentially reductive nature of strict empiricism (Hoopes 1983). Few American thinkers in the nineteenth century demonstrated the subtlety of Jonathan Edwards in linking the sensory and somatic with the ideal and theological. Much of American psychology veered into phrenology, a science of mind built on the older scholastic faculty psychology, a school of thought that understood the mind as divided into distinct faculties such as reason, will, and instinct. Phrenology multiplied such faculties and made them legible on the body, as each aspect of the inner life corresponded to a particular region of the brain and therefore to a particular shape of the head. While developed originally in Europe, phrenology reached a particularly wide section of the public in the mid-nineteenth- century United States, becoming, on the one hand, a significant tool in emerging discourses of scientific racism (according to some, it showed the racial correlations of various mental and moral qualities) and, on the other hand, of moral philosophy writ large. For example, the most prominent liberal preacher in the United States after the Civil War, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87) of Brooklyn, was friendly with the prominent phrenologist Orson Fowler (1809 – 87) and advocated the use of phrenology as a tool of self-knowledge and moral introspection. While phrenology faded by the end of the nineteenth century, this first form of scientific psychology paved the way for neurobiological psychology and psychiatry to come. Most of the interface of religion and psychology in the nineteenth century, however, remained rooted in the moral philosophy taught in American colleges and universities. Two widely read books of the era demonstrate this interaction clearly. Psychology: A View of the Human Soul (1840), by the Reverend Frederick A. Rauch (1806– 41), was the first book published in the United States with the word ‘psychology’ in the title (Good 2002). Rauch, founding president of Marshall College in Pennsylvania and a German- born Protestant Reformed theologian, argued for the common purpose of psychology and theology in crafting a rational basis for religion. Theology, Rauch contended, is the science of religion, by which he meant the exploration of religion through applied reason. Psychology stood alongside medicine and anthropology as a human science but showed its true utility only insofar as it illuminated human nature in light of revealed religion. “Man as the subject of psychology,” Rauch pro-claimed, “is created for religion and cannot do without it. Religion is not a mere quality, but the substance of man.... He ceases to be man in the full sense of the term when he has no religion;—he is then only an animal” (Rauch 1844, iv). Rauch’s book was the first, he declared, to bring together German (meaning Hegelian) and American “mental philosophy,” and he wrote Psychology in particular as a foundation for the moral philosophy courses that typically stood as the capstone of a nineteenth-century college education. Indeed, Rauch declared Psychology to be the first volume of an intended trilogy, to be followed by works on moral philosophy and aesthetics, though he was not able to complete the other volumes before his death in 1841. He concluded the work with a section on religion—including an early effort at comparative religion—that proclaimed, in evangelical fashion, true religion to be the work of God on the human heart. Though Rauch faced accusations of pantheism for his rather impersonal understanding of God, in this manner his Psychology nevertheless served the same ultimate purpose as Edwards’s Religious Affections, probing the inner workings of mind and soul in order to better understand and facilitate human receptivity to divine grace. The Reverend Oliver S. Munsell (1825 – 1905), like Rauch, was a clergyman and a college president, leading Illinois Wesleyan College at the time he authored Psychology; or, The Science of Mind (1871). While Rauch had used Hegel to reject the notion of distinct faculties of mind—he understood cognition and volition to be dialectically related—Munsell followed the more typical approach of the faculty psychologists and phrenologists in developing a complex taxonomy of the mind, applied here as well to the moral instruction of college men. Munsell’s work, written thirty years after Rauch’s, reveals a greater self-consciousness about psychology as a science, especially as a science rooted in structures of mind and body. “Psychology,” Munsell wrote, “is the science of embodied mind, and not of pure spirit.... It must not, therefore, be confounded with pure metaphysics,” though, he noted, “the two have their necessary and legitimate points of contact” (Munsell 1871, 4). Most of the book, therefore, consists of rather straightforward efforts to explain the faculties of intellection and reason, the senses, and the will. Munsell recognized, however, that human beings—as “half dust” and “half deity,” in his phrasing—have spiritual capacities, meaning that “our perception of the spiritual world, through intuition, is just as direct, just as comprehensible, and just as valid, as our cognition of the material world through sensation” (Munsell 1871, 115). Though he was an orthodox Methodist minister, the scientific method applied to spiritual perceptions led Munsell, as it would others, to expand his spiritual horizons. “It is neither wise nor safe for Christian psychologists,” he wrote, to neglect the “strange border-land of dreams, somnambulism, visions, and clairvoyance.” These strange phenomena, he declared, “are an open door through which we may look in upon the human soul and its mysteries, under conditions which, properly investigated and comprehended, cannot fail to add to our intelligent comprehension of its real nature and capacities” (Munsell 1871, 191). Munsell’s book, like Rauch’s before it, served as a standard college textbook in psychology for decades and likewise aimed to harmonize natural philosophy and moral philosophy. But it also demonstrated the capacity of psychology to blur the boundaries between formal philosophy and theology on the one hand and popular religious and spiritual beliefs and practices on the other. Mind Cure and Early Psychotherapy While mid-nineteenth-century scholars developed early works in psychology suitable for the classroom, a more popular and ultimately more influential form of applied psychology was being developed at a more popular level. ‘Mind cure,’ as it soon came to be called, emerged into a prominent religio-scientific movement in the nineteenth century and laid the groundwork for the psychotherapies, or talking cures, of the twentieth century. Mind Cure also provided an endless source of data for a whole generation of scholars, led by William James (1842 – 1910) of Harvard, who established the first academic psychology department in an American university. Mind cure shared techniques with many ancient metaphysical healing practices, but the roots of nineteenth-century American mind cure were most immediately in mesmerism, the hypnosis-based healing practices of the German Anton Mesmer (1734 – 1815). Mesmer posited that a force of animal magnetism, or natural energy, flows between all living things and can be harnessed by a skilled practitioner for healing purposes. The first significant American adherent and popularizer was a New England clockmaker named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–66), who established a traveling healing ministry in the 1840s and 1850s. Just as a clock harmonizes with the laws of the physical universe, so also, Quimby taught, there are spiritual laws that if understood and mastered can be similarly mapped and controlled. Quimby’s most significant legacy was in his students, especially Julius Dresser (1838–93) and Annetta Dresser—who along with their son Horatio Dresser (1866–1954) were prominent mind-cure practitioners and authors—and Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), who was healed by Quimby and went on to found the most important formal religious offshoot of mind cure, Christian Science. Mind cure shared with religious mysticism the use of altered states of consciousness and the union of the self with the larger cosmos. Rather than being an antimodern retreat, mind cure promised to harness modernity’s advances for the enrichment of human life. The belief system of mind cure, by the late nineteenth century often called ‘New Thought,’ postulated a correlation between the mind of the individual self and the Mind as an expression of an omnipotent and omnipresent Divine. The techniques of mind cure—meditation, hypnosis, autosuggestion, prayer—all focused on removing blockages between mind and Mind and opening the self to Supply—of energy, of health, of wealth, of wisdom—that might then flow in infinite abundance. The title of the first New Thought bestseller, Ralph Waldo Trine’s (1866 – 1958) In Tune with the In-finite (1897), captured the means of mind cure perfectly; its subtitle, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty, revealed its ends. Mind cure retained little of Calvinism’s sense of divine mystery and otherness. God’s power, it held, is here, to be used now. The trick was to figure out how, and thus mind cure developed intellectually along the lines of a science and in practice as a technology. Those who claimed to understand the Mind possessed insight into the deepest secrets of existence, a Gnosticism for modern times. As a religious ideology, mind cure held particular appeal for women. The historian Donald Meyer describes mind cure as a post- Calvinist Protestant expression of “pure wish,” but historian Beryl Satter more precisely characterizes New Thought as a “gendered discourse of desire” (Satter 1999, 15). Indeed, the institutional history of New Thought reveals a preponderance of white, middle-class women among both its leadership and adherents, especially in the urban centers of the North and Midwest, where the movement was strongest. If the sudden transformation mind cure offered recalled the life-changing power of evangelical conversion, its focus on the feminine aspects of the divine marked a radical departure from mainstream Protestantism. Most significantly, the popular mind-cure movement of the nineteenth century represented the first sustained, empirically oriented form of psychotherapy in the United States, and it forced the medical profession to acknowledge models of disease and healing beyond the narrowly somatic. Academic Psychology and Religion The single greatest transformation in the history of psychology came in the 1880s and 1890s when the first psychology departments were established in research universities in Europe and the United States. Here, for the first time, psychology seemed to have made a decisive break with moral philosophy on the one hand and popular and folk-healing practices on the other. Yet religion, and especially religious experience, remained central objects of study to the first generation of academic psychologists, and the insights generated by academic psychology have informed, challenged, disturbed, and vivified religious communities ever since. The first laboratories in experimental psychology were founded in Germany, by Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) at Leipzig in 1879, and soon thereafter in the United States by William James (1842–1910) at Harvard, and by James and Wundt’s student G. Stanley Hall (1846 – 1924) at Johns Hopkins University. Hall had earned the first American doctorate in psychology at Harvard in 1878, soon after James began teaching the nation’s first courses in the field. Wundt’s student Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916) was also instrumental in the early years of psychology at Harvard, while Hall moved from Hopkins to the presidency of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. At Clark, Hall wrote many seminal early works in the field and hosted Sigmund Freud on his only visit to the United States in 1909. The book that more than any other put the new field on the academic map was James’s The Principles of Psychology (1890). The new psychology of the 1880s and 1890s, while a laboratory science, nevertheless also engaged the same religious concerns about suffering, disease, and well-being—and their relationship to mental states and psychical phenomena—that preoccupied adherents of mind cure. Like mind cure, academic psychology offered a metaphysical science of healing. Indeed, throughout the twentieth century, the two discourses continued a regular intercourse in the arena of popular religion. Norman Vincent Peale (1898 – 1993), most famously, drew heavily on both psychoanalytic theory and the Unity School of Christianity, a New Thought denomination, in his hugely popular speeches and writings of the 1940s, 1950s, and later, most notably in The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). Perhaps more tellingly, most of the discipline’s American founders—men such as James, Hall, George Coe (1862–1951), James Leuba (1868 – 1946), Edwin Starbuck (1866 – 1947), and James Mark Baldwin (1861 – 1934)—had evangelical childhoods and yet were unable, as adults, to experience conversion or sustain conventional religious faith, as the scholar of religion Peter Homans has observed. William James’s unorthodox youth stands as a notable exception, yet he too wrote wistfully of religious experiences, noting, “My own constitution shuts me out from their enjoyment almost entirely, and I can speak of them only at second hand” (James 1999, 413). Not surprisingly, adolescence and conversion were prominent early topics in the psychology of religion. The young psychologists of religion who followed the pioneers James and Hall labored to use science itself as a means to keep religion viable in the modern age. Some, like Coe and Leuba, proved less willing than James to accept emerging theories of the subconscious as adequate to the task of accounting for religious experience. Much of this later skepticism proved decisive as psychology began its long process of withdrawal from its religious roots. But in the realm of popular religious life, the more open and pragmatic categories of James prevailed. His famed definition of religion—” the feeling, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider divine”—indicates most clearly his determination to place experience at the center of religious life (James 1999, 36). The trait that made James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) the most influential of all the early-twentieth-century psychologies of religion is the deftness with which he bridged liberal Protestant intellectual culture and the wider religious currents, including mind cure and paranormal phenomena, all while legitimating, rather than reductively dismissing, religious experience. James devoted considerable attention to the mind-cure philosophies he took as emblematic of what he called the “religion of healthy-mindedness.” In Varieties he quoted extensively from Trine’s In Tune with the Infinite, describing, without condescension or criticism, what he found there as “traces of Chris-tian mysticism, of transcendental idealism, of vedantism, and of the modern psychology of the subliminal self” (James 1999, 114). Varieties proved so useful to both academic psychologists and religious Americans because it brought under the universal umbrella of science experiences ranging from evangelical conversion to mind-cure healing, psychical phenomena, and mystical encounters with the divine, without reducing any of these to neurology or psychology of the subconscious. The academic psychology of these early decades spurred tremendous new efforts to study religion. Some of this work followed conventional liberal religious lines, seeking to use the latest thought to clarify, rearticulate, and thereby ultimately revitalize Christianity, transformed though it might be in the process. Scores of books, popular and academic, sought to reframe Christian thought and practice in light of modern psychological insight, including Hall’s massive two-volume Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology (1917). Perhaps most representative was the psychologist Henry C. Link’s (1889 – 1952) best-selling The Return to Religion (1936), in which he declared “the findings of psychology in respect to personality and happiness” to be “largely a rediscovery of old religious truths.” “The greatest and most authentic textbook on personality,” he concluded, ““is still the Bible” (Link 1936, 7, 103). A more scientific Christianity, proponents argued, might unite religious factions rent by schism and would make religious teaching relevant again to modern life. Many religious critics—from evangelical and Roman Catholic circles especially, but also from within liberal Protestantism—decried the incorporation of psychology into religion as a “sterile union,” in the words of theologian H. Richard Niebuhr (1894 – 1962) from a 1927 essay in The Christian Century, the leading journal of liberal Protestantism (Niebuhr 1927, 47). The conservative Presbyterian theologian J. Gresham Machen (1881 – 1937) was characteristically more blunt, as he decried “the dangerous pseudo-scientific fads of experimental psychology” in Christianity and Liberalism (1923), his celebrated assault on Protestant modernism (Machen 1923, 18). Later in the century, secular critics such as Philip Rieff (1922–2006) and Jackson Lears (b. 1947), among many others, like-wise lamented the psychologization of religion, fearing it made Americans more consumerist, more narcissistic, and less able to offer prophetic critiques of the liberal, capitalist political order. Liberal Protestants, nevertheless, kept producing scholarly works that updated or reaffirmed Christianity in the light of psychology, such as famed theologian, physician, and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer’s (1875 – 1965) The Psychiatric Study of Jesus, which was first published in German in 1913 but appeared in multiple American editions in the 1940s and 1950s. Other Americans embraced the union of religion and psychology, however, not to affirm historic Christianity but precisely because of the space and legitimacy it afforded religious minorities, dissenters, and heterodox believers. Historian Andrew Heinze, for example, has written of the significant role played by American and European Jews in both academic and popular psychology in the twentieth century, noting that psychology afforded a vocabulary and often an institutional location that allowed non-Christians to address moral, spiritual, and mental life authoritatively. The Viennese founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud stands as the most prominent example, certainly, but Harvard’s Münsterberg—and later in the century popular writers such as Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman (1907 – 1948) and Dr. Joyce Brothers (1927 – 2013)—also brought distinctively Jewish perspectives to psychology and, through psychology, to religious and moral concerns. In a different vein, early academic psychology—following the lead of Oliver Munsell and, much more significantly, William James—also explored psychical and paranormal phenomena such as telepathy, reincarnation, communication with the dead, memories of past lives, mind cure healing, and a host of other esoteric or metaphysical occurrences. Much of this work was done under the auspices of the American Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1884, which counted G. Stanley Hall, Joseph Jastrow (1863–1944), and William James as important early members. A host of American universities conducted similar work across the twentieth century, including most notably the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University and its successor, the Rhine Center Institute for Parapsychology. From the late 1960s to the present, the Division of Perceptual Studies, a research center in the Department of Psychiatry in the University of Virginia School of Medicine, has studied memories of past lives in children, in addition to other parapsychological phenomena. Pastoral Counseling in the Twentieth Century For all the criticism psychology received in certain religious quarters, and despite its ongoing entanglement with esoteric religious beliefs, mainstream churches remained the single most important conduit through which psycho-logical vocabularies and sensibilities influenced the religious lives of ordinary Americans in the twentieth century. The first notable effort to bridge psycho-therapy and congregational ministry occurred in Boston in 1906 when Epis- copal priests Elwood Worcester (1862–1940), who had studied with Wundt in Leipzig, and Samuel McComb (1864–1938) established a clinic at Emmanuel Church, drawing on both the longer history of mind cures as well as new insights from academic psychology. The Emmanuel movement, as it was called, quickly spread to other cities, and directly inspired the trend among liberal Protestants to make pastoral counseling a regular part of seminary education and ministerial care. Clergy who embraced psychology, as many did by the 1920s and 1930s, linked the progressive faith in scientific expertise with a So-called Gospel- inspired ambition to remake the world according to Christian ethics. Psychology and religion together, they believed, allowed clergy and their flocks to develop moral sensibilities appropriate for modern life. Over time, according to historian Susan Myers-Shirk, these sensibilities shifted from “an earlier emphasis on adjustment, social control, and moral uplift to an emphasis on personal autonomy and loving relationships” (Myers-Shirk 2009, 13). The work of liberal pastoral counselors “with individuals... was just as much intended to bring in the Kingdom of God through relieving emotional suffering as was settlement house work through relieving social suffering” (Myers-Shirk 2009, 70). The key figure in the early history of pastoral counseling is Anton Boisen (1876 – 1965), who combined the liberalism of Christian modernists like Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878 – 1969), the healing ministry of the Emmanuel movement, and his own experience with mental illness to lay the groundwork for a science of pastoral education. By examining the afflicted, Boisen contended, ministers were perfectly situated to advance the science of moral development. Like many liberals, he believed placing pastoral care on a scientific basis would offer better care—better relief from spiritual maladies—than the revivalism practiced by evangelical Protestants. Boisen’s emphasis on primary research was eventually supplanted by more direct application through individual counseling; indeed, as ministers began to compete with doctors, psychotherapists, and other healing professionals for status and recognition, direct counseling became ever more significant to their professionalization. Seward Hiltner (1909 – 84), a leading author and educator in pastoral counseling, in fact, favorably compared religious therapies to other forms of care. “Prayer, meditation, the Bible, other literature, listening, quietness, understanding,” he stated, “are as real as pills and sometimes more helpful” (Myers-Shirk 2009, 57). Nevertheless, even as the field moved away from primary science toward client care, Boisen’s larger agenda to use psychological methods to bolster traditional Protestant morality remained central to clinical pastoral education in the years prior to World War II. The deployment of psychology as a tool of national mobilization during the war brought greater legitimacy to all forms of counseling, and the non-directive approach of the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers (1902–87) soon emerged as the leading framework. Yet even as pastors shied away from direct moral advice, the larger religious imperative of social advancement remained. This more expansive freedom suited the middle- class, suburban clientele of the postwar years and made sense in a society battling totalitarianism in its fascist and communist forms. To combat the potential excesses of autonomy and the increasing isolation of modern life, liberal pastoral counselors simultaneously developed a theology and psychology that stressed the ethics of relationships. Freedom and relationships soon became the fault lines that divided liberals and conservatives, as matters of gender and sexuality in the 1960s and 1970s drove conservative Protestant counselors back to a more directive approach to moral questions while liberals championed women’s rights and gay equality. As liberals continued their long-standing project of building a just social order, conservatives reinvigorated arguments about human sinfulness, divine sovereignty, and the need for objective moral standards. Religion, Psychology, and Spirituality The interaction of religion and psychology continues to shape American religious life in myriad ways beyond traditional institutional religion, especially as a central dynamic in what is now commonly called ‘spirituality.’ Many Americans are eager to maintain a distinction between spirituality and religion, in fact, regard openness to science as a key characteristic of spirituality and therefore see psychology as a critical ally in disentangling the spiritual from the more specifically religious. The history of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and other addiction-recovery programs show the use of psychology by religious groups that stand outside traditional religion. Alcoholics Anonymous drew inspiration from many sources, including most directly the evangelical Oxford Group, a revival organization founded by the American missionary Frank Buchman (1878–1961) in England in the 1920s. Bill Wilson (1895–1971), the founder of AA, had been a member of the Oxford Group and turned to the group for guidance regarding his struggles with alcohol. Soon he separated his organization from the Oxford Group, formally incorporating AA in 1935. Wilson turned to the writings of William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience as he searched for a way to frame AA in more capaciously spiritual rather than sectarian terms. In particular, he found in James’s account of ‘the sick soul,’ and especially in James’s finding that personal transformation comes not from the will but from surrender to a ‘higher power,’ an analogy to Protestant notions of unmerited grace—now critically recast as psychological, scientific truth. Soon AA chapters spread across the country and countless other twelve-step programs followed, including Narcotics Anonymous, Over-Eaters Anonymous, and Sex Addicts Anonymous. While most of these organizations continue to deploy the language of ‘higher power’ and often open and close meetings with prayer, others have been recast in fully secular terms. Similarly, psychology and allied fields such as neuroscience have been key mediators between the long-dominant Jewish and Christian religious traditions in the United States and the rapidly growing forms of Westernized Buddhism, often called modernist or even Protestant Buddhism. Here too psychology has served both to universalize the spiritual and to secularize the religious. The most prominent form of Buddhist-derived psychotherapy in the United States is mindfulness- based stress reduction, a program of meditation derived from Buddhist practices by Jon Kabat-Zinn (b. 1944), a physician at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. Meditation practices are now commonplace in America not only as part of individuals’ private practices but also in university, medical, corporate, government, and military settings, often presented as tools to increase efficiency and productivity as much as pathways to well- being or enlightenment. The late-twentieth-and twenty-first-century interest in Buddhist meditation and mindfulness recapitulates many of the liberal Protestant orientations toward mind cure and psychotherapy from a century earlier: a pragmatic epistemology, the turn to science as a legitimating discourse, and the ambivalent transformation of religious beliefs and practices into hazily secularized therapies.