Editorial Introduction and Commentary

Abstract

In February of 2009 Drs. Vassilis Saroglou and Adam Cohen contacted JCCP with a proposal to develop a special issue that focused on religion and culture. It was the first time that anyone proposed such a project for us to consider. As special issues editor, I immediately became engaged with these two scholars. More than 2 years and over 200 e-mail exchanges later, and aided by a well-advertised call for proposals, the project reached its goal of producing this excellent special issue featuring a topic that is timeless, universal, and often controversial in both the field of religious studies, in all of the sciences, and of course in common debate and discourse. When JCCP was inaugurated in 1970, a slogan that helped guide its publication policy was “. . . to study all that is human.” Thus, all psychological topics or phenomena that may, presumably, be influenced by culture were candidates for scholarly research and professional application. In 1972 it became affiliated with the new International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology, thus enhancing its reputation as an important journal in the growing international interest involving the interface between psychology and culture. It is now widely recognized as the leading outlet for research in the area. Yet after 42 complete years it has never, until now, devoted a special issue or a special section of a regular issue to interrelationships between religion and culture. Religion is, after all, just as ubiquitous as many other human characteristics and attributes such as ethnicity, social status, level of education, marital status, the misused idea of “race,” family, child-rearing, gender, and numerous other demographic categories or variables. It is also among the most variable, personal, and subjective of all attributes that form the sentient person. Of course, JCCP has never been exclusionary, and in fact, many years ago we would have been delighted to consider what Saroglou and Cohen proposed. Yet the word religion appeared in only two titles of 347 articles published in its first decade. A recent analysis affirms this relative absence in JCCP of religion (or related terms) as targets of inquiry in research, scholarship, and teaching. In that analysis, using a software program named Leximancer, Cretchley, Rooney, and Gallois (2010) analyzed 1,416 articles that appeared in JCCP from its inauguration in 1970 through November 2009. Religion did not emerge as a core concept in any of the three-plus decades. An earlier analysis, however, did note that religion was at least part of a small number of articles; it just didn’t register as a central or core topic (Brouwers, van Hemert, Breugelmans, & van de Vijver, 2004). However, this paucity of references to religion was certainly not a manifestation of either cross-cultural psychology’s or the journal’s disinterest in the topic of religion, or of dismissiveness, or of scientific snobbery or of any other position that may have dampened the study of the “mystical,” the “transcendental,” or other adjectives that may have had pejorative intent. Perhaps sensing this, it seems that religious scholars opted for publications with proven track records in this area instead of submitting their work to a new journal that, to many, may have seemed to be “just another” addition to the growing family of psychology journals that championed empiricism