Becoming Religious: Understanding Devotion to the Unseen. - Review - book review

Sociology of Religion, Fall, 2000 by James V. Spickard

Becoming Religious: Understanding Devotion to the Unseen, by SUSAN KWILECKI. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1999, 269 pp., $46.00.

Normal science, says Thomas Kuhn, proceeds blithely so long as its theoretical inability to cope with data escapes notice. Only when it is obvious that the emperor has no clothes can he be evicted from the castle. Susan Kwilecki argues that the time has come for some serious house -- or castle -- cleaning in the psychology of religious development. She uses this book to present data that demolish several current theories of individual religious life-trajectories. That she does not have much with which to replace them with is less important than the fact of her honest attempt to portray individual religious lives.

The book consists of seven chapters, three of them critical, four of them constructive. I found the critical chapters to be the least interesting, if only because I have never given much credence to universal stage theories of religious development (e.g.,: Fowler), nor have I regarded psychoanalytic and object-relations theories as more than creative post-hoc insights, since neither is particularly testable. Even in Fowler's hands, stage theory does not demonstrate empirical longitudinal development from Stage One to Six, and lets adults come to rest at any stage except the first. (Some universal development!) And depth-psychological dynamics are by definition invisible to surface confirmation. Kwilecki treats these theories and others clearly and at length, though few but specialists (and graduate students) will dwell on them.

This is, in part, because the real point of the book is the presentation of fourteen individual religious biographies, which the author has collected over a 25-year period. Taken from a much larger set of biographies of rural residents of southwest Georgia, these fourteen individuals show the immense variety of the religious impulse. Furthermore, they give us good longitudinal data, as Kwilecki interviewed them repeatedly over many years. We thus see these people's religious growth, change, and sometimes decline as the vagaries of temperament, biography, and socioeconomic circumstance shape their lives.

Kwilecki groups her interviewees into four groups, corresponding to four different core approaches to God. "The Submissive" see themselves as bowing to God's law: "not my will, but thine, be done" (Luke 22:42). Though resembling Fromm's "authoritarian believer," Kwilecki shows how the religious impulse to submit became for these individuals "a path to ego strength and self-satisfaction" (p. 59). "The Repentant," though they also submit to God, do so primarily because they are convinced of their own potential damnation. Diverse in personality, each of these individuals took on religion as one would take on a diet or exercise program: as a means to an end.

"The Shepherded" are of similarly diverse personalities, but with a radically different concept of deity. They feel themselves led by God, even in the minutiae of daily life. Their religious self-affirmation, says Kwilecki, tends to stem from two recurrent kinds of matches between their God-image and individual personality dynamics. Either "God as personal shepherd" corresponds to an existing healthy self-image, or it bestows and sustains ego-integrity. Often, one cannot sort out which is which. The fourth group, "The Anointed," "are small-town Weberian 'prophets,' ... whose authority derives from a personal call and the demonstration of special magical or ecstatic abilities" (p. 191). Usually loners, often with limited psychological integration, these individuals use God's call to make their way in the world, though sometimes also to lose their way as well.

I found the last group the most interesting, if only because Kwilecki's presentation of them shows the folly of reducing their religious experiences to category mistakes (attribution theory!) or to psychosis. Not afraid to point out the depth-psychological dynamics operative in individual cases, Kwilecki is careful to show how religious eruptions from the unconscious may, in fact, bring about psychic integration with a speed unknown in ordinary therapy, thus transcending the purely psychological. Or they may fail to bring about integration at all. She is also careful to stress the rough-and-readiness of her interpretations. One of the strengths of this book is the author's openness about what her data cannot prove.

This includes her own theory of religious development. Kwilecki suggests the importance of a rough match between individual temperament and collective traditions. "The Shepherded" are so in part because their personalities lead them in a particular direction, which matches -- or doesn't -- the religions around them. Psychic change over a lifetime may lead one to different religious positions; different religious influence may lead to psychic change. But Kwilecki does not insist on this; in fact, she comes near to saying that such grand theories are never true to individual lives. Things are at their best when the insightful analyst uses bits and pieces of several theories to open those lives to us.