Are Religious Experiences Too Private to Study?

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When a charismatic Christian has a religious experience in which she encounters Jesus as her husband-lover, much about this experience is public in nature. For example, her body is in a particular posture during the experience, and this posture is observable. Furthermore, if she should report the experience to anyone, her testimony, whether verbal or written, is a public matter. And even the concepts she brings with her into the experience, concepts like Jesus, God, love, and so on, are public in that they are shared and were acquired through social processes of language learning. But beyond all this, it seems that something about the experience is private in nature, undergone by her alone, removed from the public realm. Only she really knows what the event felt like. Only she knows whether she really had an experience or whether she is lying about what occurred. Some aspect of the experience transpires in the privacy of subjective consciousness, a seemingly invisible, inaccessible realm. This private dimension of religious and mystical experiences has long posed vexing methodological issues for scholars of religion. Nevertheless, until recently, most have taken it for granted that experiences are something that we can talk about and theorize. That assumption, however, is increasingly facing a challenge from a new and important approach to religious studies in which attention to discourse, social prac-