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

Spiritual assurance is a curious notion. Suggesting a calm serenity always just out of reach, or the hope for a guarantee that never arrives, spiritual assurance seems like a goal that might not make one a better (or a bearable) person should one achieve it. In Christopher White's hands, spiritual assurance becomes the elusive century-long goal of religious liberals in the United States; a destination approached largely via routes, detours, and dead-ends mapped by the nascent field of psychology. While never quite giving an explicit definition of what counts as spiritual assurance, White equates it with both "certainty" (1) and "meaning" (2)—two concepts that are not entirely commensurable. His narrative illustrates that the ambiguities of what might be perceived as assurance, or what might constitute evidence for it, continued to haunt liberal Protestants as they articulated psychology as a science of the self and a path to spirituality, while also fending off evangelical, Pentecostal, and other rival forms of spiritual assurance.

From the mid-nineteenth-century phrenologists and their travelling exhibits, to the Harvard-validated energies of William James, and including the confidence in suggestion shared by many early-twentieth-century Christian "psychotherapists," the liberal search for spiritual assurance turns out to have been largely a quest for a new map of the self that could be read with both "scientific" and "spiritual" coordinates. Rooting their innovations in what they held to be the most up-to-date psychological theories, the colorful assortment of clergy, seminary professors, popular devotional writers, and academics who people White's narrative were not seeking a new statement of faith that their modern lips could utter, but were looking instead for a new method of spiritual formation that could allow their modern selves to flourish.

White's book is a fascinating account of a range of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century religious liberals as they sought to launch psychology as a pathway to spiritual experience, at the same time that they established it as a tool for the analysis of such experience. Oscillating between advocating communion with the "infusing Presence" (156) as crucial for the healthy modern American, and seeking to pin down just what such spiritual communion was made of, with graphs, diagrams, surveys, and experiments (White's illustrations speak volumes), religious liberals largely counted on the witness of science, and not their own personal testimonies, to do the work of conviction. White's argument and method is poised upon this juncture of scientific evidence and personal testimony. While bringing together a wide variety of sources from clergy, intellectuals, and religious entrepreneurs, White focuses repeatedly on the writings of prominent religious liberals—such as William James, G. Stanley Hall, George Coe, and Edwin Starbuck—demonstrating that they were both practitioners of the new field of "psychology of religion" and religious seekers themselves. Along the way, he provides illuminating insight into how religious liberals at once took on the language and metaphors of psychology to translate Christian theology and practice into "scientific" terms, while also transforming the meanings and reception of psychology in wider U.S. culture.

Unsettled Minds is comprised of six chapters and a short introduction and epilogue. White defines his focus, "religious liberals," as "believers" with a "confidence in human nature," a belief in "God's immanence," a conviction that truth can be located in different religions, and an "interest in harmonizing religion, nature, and science" (8). Largely Protestants, or at least bearing Protestant pasts, White's religious liberals are for the most part an assortment of, with some exceptions, highly educated white men who had a commitment to cultivating Christianity as an "active" religion of virtue, spiritual experience, and physical vitality. The chapters are organized chronologically, beginning with an insightful and entertaining discussion of how Protestant encounters with phrenology cleared a space for thinking about psychology as a resource for new approaches to self and salvation. The second and third chapters deal...