Psychological studies of religion head for derailment

Abstract

Richard Hutch's recent survey article' poses the question `Are psychological studies of religion on the right track?' In the course of his survey he draws upon the debate between Ian Vine and myself which we began at the Second Lancaster Colloquium on the Pschology of Religion in 1977 and subsequently continued through the pages of the Bulletin of the British Psychological Society .' I am pleased to have been invited to reply to Hutch's review article for three reasons . First, I had allowed Vine's second paper to go unchallenged because I suspected that his misrepresentation of my case was so transparent that those who subsequently followed our debate would recognize the mistake for themselves . 3 However, Hutch has clearly failed to distinguish between the case I was making and the case Vine misrepresents me as making . I can at least offer to clarify this debate for future reviewers . Second, Hutch fails to offer a satisfactory answer to the question posed by the title of his paper . His failure is due not to an inadequate search of the literature, but to the absence of a serious discussion of what would be involved in assessing the `right track' in the first place . I suspect that Hutch would have appreciated the nature of this problem more clearly had he come to terms with the argument of my original paper . By developing my case I can at least offer some criteria against which psychological studies of religion can be assessed . Even if the notion of identifying a `right track' should appear illusory, it ought to be possible to identify the major causes of derailment . Third, in contrasting my original paper in the Bulletin of the British Psychological Society with my two subsequent articles in that journal, 4 Hutch accuses me of having 'thrown in the towel as far as the theoretical advancement of the discipline of the psychology of religion is concerned' and of having limited myself `mainly to issues in religious education' . At a personal level I may well want to argue that the criticism is unjust, but, more importantly, at a pro-