Varieties of Religious Experience in Young Adolescents

Abstract

IN his book, Varieties of Religious Experience, (1902), William James distinguished between institutional and personal religion. Institutional religion involves all the formal aspects of the Church and has as its central aim winning the favor of Gods. (op. cit., p. 40) Personal religion, on the other hand, involves the inner dispositions of man, whose conscience, helplessness, incompleteness form the center of interest. (op. cit., p. 40) In his writing, James further limited personal religion to The feelings, acts and experiences of individuals in their solitude (our italics) so far as they themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider to be divine. (op. cit., p. 42) By limiting personal religion to those experiences which occured in solitude, James was hiecessarily led to striking and perhaps extreme forms of the religious consciousness such as the sick soul and the divided self. There would seem to be, however, a variety of religious experiences which-while remaining personal in the sense of individual apprehension of the divine-do not necessarily occur in solitude nor to persons of a peculiar religious temperament. If we start from the notion that religious experience is a relationship between the individual and God, we can also suppose that this relationship, at least in form, is comparable to a relationship between two individuals. Such a relationship, say friendship, is conditioned by two types of experience. Recurrent experiences such as lunching, golfing, or going to the theatre together are consciously chosen and serve to maintain and strengthen the relationship. On the other hand there are also acute experiences, such as misunderstandings, breaches of trust, and emotional conflicts which are largely fortuitous and serve to test the strenght of the relationship. same distinction would appear to hold true for the relationship between man and God. Here too we find consciously chosen recurrent experiences, such as going to Church, saying prayers, and performing rituals which can serve to strengthen and maintain the relationship. But there are also acute fortuitous experiences such as death or unanswered prayers which serve to test the strength of the relationship. According to this distinction, the experiences described by James would be extreme types of acute experience and would not exhaust the varieties of religious experience peculiar to personal religion. In the present study we made an exploratory attempt at discovering the variety of recurrent and acute religious experiences in which adolescents apprehend themselves in the presence of the divine regardless of whether such experiences occurred in solitude. We also explored the possiblity that there were sex, ability and denominational differences in the frequency with which partic-