Unsettled Minds: Psychology and the American Search for Spiritual Assurance, 1830–1940 (review)

White has written an exciting new book that significantly advances our understanding of the interplay between religion and psychology in the United States from 1830 to 1940. White focuses on “religious liberals,” defining the term generously to encompass liberal Protestants, post-Protestant metaphysical believers, spiritualists, theosophists, deists, and others on the religious left. Drawing upon the emergent psychological ideas to fuel their spiritual innovations and distance themselves from the Calvinism of their parents’ generation, these “liberal believers” viewed psychology as a positive force. For them, it suggested the existence of powerful spiritual energies that could be engaged by the mental faculties, provided a means of demystifying the inner spaces of the self, and offered new ways to thinking about mental functioning. Deliberately building on recent historical work that attends to the way that religious and psychological discourses informed people’s understanding of their experience, White focuses less on unconscious processes and more on the way in which liberals turned psychological understandings of conscious processes related to rationality, willpower, and self-control to spiritual ends. In so doing, the book adds to the literature that counters the still common secularization narratives, emphasizing “not how enlightenment discourses minimized or obliterated religious belief but how they abetted religiousness in unexpected ways” (p. 7).

White develops his argument in chapters devoted to the mid-century fascination with phrenology, the rise of the new experimental psychology during the latter part of the century, the emergence of the psychology of religion in the early twentieth; and then, delving more deeply into developments at the turn of the century, he elaborates on liberal appropriation of psychological discussions of nervous energies, the will, and suggestion. The chapter on phrenology stands out for its refreshingly historical consideration of phrenology, analyzing it as it was viewed at the time: as an aspect of mental philosophy, rather than retrospectively as pseudo-science. The last two chapters are particularly notable for what they add to our knowledge of Edwin Starbuck and his students. White’s concluding chapter on the use of suggestion to understand unconscious religious phenomena is particularly fine.

White’s focus on religious liberals from Protestant backgrounds highlights their use of psychology as a weapon to undercut the claims of Calvinists and other conservative Protestants. Catholic intellectuals in Europe and the United States provide an interesting counterpoint. As (mostly) neo-Thomists, chastened by the modernist crisis, these Catholic intellectuals shared some of the characteristics of both White’s religious liberals (confidence in human nature and its spiritual capacities and an interest in harmonizing religion, nature, and science) and their conservative Protestants opponents (an anti-universalistic commitment to the truth as understood by their tradition). Although religious liberals of a faintly or formerly Protestant persuasion may have been the most enthusiastic borrowers of psychological notions, by the end of the nineteenth century some American Catholic intellectuals were appropriating psychology through a Thomistic lens, following the lead of Cardinal Desiré-Joseph Mercier at the Catholic University of Louvain. Although they did not draw upon psychology to fuel religious innovation in the fashion of the religious liberals studied by White, psychologists at The Catholic University of America, such as Edward Pace and Thomas Verner Moore, did advance psychology within a Catholic framework. Future work that takes a wider range of traditions into account will most likely illuminate an even greater variety of religious ends to which psychology was assimilated, thus furthering White’s claim that enlightenment discourses abetted religiousness in unexpected ways.