Unsettled Minds: Psychology and the American Search for Spiritual Assurance, 1830-1940.

Fuller, Robert C.

Unsettled Minds: Psychology and the American Search for Spiritual Assurance, 1830-1940. By Christopher G. White. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. xii + 269 pp. $45.00 cloth.

The liberal religious tradition has adopted many strategies over the course of American history. It faces the challenge of identifying intellectual categories that steer a middle course between biblical theology and nonreligious humanism. Christopher White joins a group of scholars that recognizes that a recurring tactic has been to invoke the authority of psychological science for explicating--and advocating--a distinctively religious, yet nonsectarian, orientation to life.

White draws attention to the biographical moorings of religious liberalism's affinity for psychology. Science and religion compete for Americans' allegiance not just on a cultural level, but also in the lives of individuals. Henry Ward Beecher, Andrew Jackson Davis, G. Stanley Hall, and Edwin Starbuck are but a few of the many Americans whose conversion experiences failed to produce the long-lasting certainty they had been led to expect. Their uncertainties deepened as they gained exposure to their eras' scientific thought. Torn between the promptings of head (science) and heart (biblical religion), they seized on psychology as a "middle way" that promised to mediate between their conflicting loyalties.

Psychology has, of course, prompted different kinds of intellectual journeys in the lives of religiously unsettled Americans. Some have borrowed psychology's prestige to buttress their biblical faith. Others, however, adopted psychological lines of thought only to find themselves beset with doubt and confusion, eventually leading them to abandon religion altogether. Yet for the most part (and certainly in the cases of Beecher, Davis, Hall, Starbuck, and others featured in White's narrative), psychology has provided a vocabulary that leads to religious innovation, fostering the invention of new religious possibilities.

White insightfully points out that the rise of psychology in American thought has rarely evidenced the kind of irreversible trend to secularization that some historians have claimed. As he copiously documents, psychological theories have persistently abetted religiousness in quite unexpected ways. Psychology is rich ground for mining metaphors of humanity's intimate connection with a divine order of things. For this reason it has a natural affinity for the liberal religious tradition that has historically championed certain identifiable theological themes: confidence in human nature; a belief in God's immanence in nature and human nature; an ecumenical conviction that ultimate truth can be found in different religious traditions; and an interest in harmonizing science and religion. Because psychology can both allude to mysterious inner processes and simultaneously suggest technical measures for bringing such processes under willful control, it provides a progressive vocabulary for stating the deepest truths about the spiritual universe.

Virtually all religious liberals who seize on psychology for spiritual reassurance do so in hope of discovering criteria that distinguish between good and bad forms of religion. William James put this agenda as succinctly as any when he confessed his belief "that, although all the special manifestations of religion may have been absurd (I mean its creeds and theories), yet the life of it as a whole is mankind's most important function" (146). Good religion invariably meant modes of belief and feeling that readily accommodate the categories of modem culture. Bad religion, in contrast, resists such negotiated compromise. The psychologists of religion demonstrated that humanity's greatest potentials flow from distinctively religious mental functions while yet sundering these life-enhancing capacities from any doctrinal base. In this way psychology provides a yardstick for separating healthy from unhealthy types of religion while showing how religion functions to adjust people to new life-cycle stages.

At times White's narrative loses its central thread. It is not always clear, for example, whether he is arguing that religiously charged ontological assumptions shaped the development of psychological theory or that psychology imparted new ontological moorings for liberal Protestantism. This is in part due to the narrative's inconsistent attention to the formative role played by America's metaphysical tradition in the evocation of both the liberal wing of the nation's formal religious institutions and the religious wing of the nation's psychological theories. Unsettled Minds is, to be sure, a well-researched and expansive treatment of an enduring theme in American religious life. White succeeds in illuminating the process whereby Americans repeatedly turn to psychology to mediate between otherwise competing cultural allegiances and, in the process, demonstrate remarkable religious creativity.

doi: 10.1017/S0009640709990242

Robert C. Fuller

Bradley University