Fits, Trances and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (review)

Fits, Trances, and Visions: Exploring Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James.By Ann Taves. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. xiii + 449 pp. $22.95 paper.

Ann Taves, professor of the history of Christianity and American religion at Claremont, has written a monumental and momentous book about ecstatic religious experiences--phenomena like falling into trance states, shouting, speaking in tongues--and the competing ways they have been understood. Several years of special studies in psychology during the early 1990s, added to her ongoing work in religious history, enabled Taves to construct a substantial foundation for the present work. The book may be likened to a rambling three-story American house with very many rooms, some elegantly refined and others housing the poor, all surprisingly interconnected by hallways and staircases or previously undetected secret passages. Indeed, when we look again the house suddenly seems more like a unified whole than it had at first, although Taves is not interested in how it holds together on the outside so much as how its parts are connected on the inside. She warns against any method that would reduce the varieties of experience--especially the kind of "involuntary" experiences that interest her here--to some model of "religion-in-general," arguing that "the experience of religion cannot be separated from the communities of discourse and practice that gave rise to it without becoming something else." Resisting scholarship's "power to colonize" (353), Taves engages the wide range of individuals and movements that are her subjects with astonishing sympathy and sensitivity. Thirteen well-placed illustrations and 70 pages of endnotes (a number of which are helpful short essays in their own right) augment the text. For all the weight of its scholarship, this book can also be placed in that rarest class in academic publishing--it's a page-turner. We end up really wanting to read the "Conclusion," to catch a glimpse of where Taves' Jamesian interest in "living religion" as "things in the makng" or "experience-in-practice" might point us in our own study of spirituality.

Fits, Trances, & Visions is at once a detailed study of experiential religion in America focused on the Methodist-Holiness-Pentecostal camp meeting tradition; an analysis of the naturalistic, reductionist, secularizing ways religious experiences have been explained or explained away; a history of the development of both academic and popular psychology from their roots in mesmerism and theories of animal magnetism; and a description of the emergence and influence of the new field of the psychology of religion epitomized by William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). The author covers more than 170 years of American history, from the colonial era's Great Awakening through the first decade or so of the twentieth century when developments as varied as the Emmanuel Movement, Pentecostalism, and the modernist religious education movement each advanced some element of the story. Although Taves organizes the book's eight chapters chronologically in three parts (covering the periods 1740-1820, 1820-1890, and 1886-1910), she moves deftly back and forth among the periods to establish themes and connections. Perhaps most impressive is the fact that "experiencers" and "explainers" are not portrayed here as in mutually exclusive categories. Those who described their experiences in supernatural terms nevertheless explained religious experience according to their own theoretical models and even--especially when distinguishing themselves from other groups--with methods and terms shared with rationalist secularizing explainers. And those whose explanations reduced the spiritual to physiological or psychological pathology harbored religious motives of their own just beneath their cloaks of scientific objectivity. The book reveals "the complex interplay between experiencing religion and explaining experience over time" (10).

The three chapters in Part One cover the time from the Great Awakening through the widespread revivals of the early Republic known as the Second Great Awakening...