“Spiritual Capacities” in Psychological Research: Confronting the Appearances

Abstract

Researching phenomena associated with religion or spirituality faces a triple conundrum not easily resolved: What counts as religion or spirituality, are they independent or derivative phenomena, and can they be empirically determined at all? Appropriately, therefore, a recent special issue of the journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality asks: What is its object of study? We argue that this cannot be resolved merely by considering diverse religious or spiritual phenomena. It requires a turn instead to what grounds religious and spiritual experience. Illustrating this claim from field research on “spiritual capacities and religious assets for health” in the face of interpersonal violence in two local communities, we argue that a set of supersensible, non-material, and therefore “spiritual” but nonetheless real human capacities that we must assume human beings possess, ground the sensible, empirical phenomena or “appearances” we call religion or spirituality. The notion of supersensible spiritual capacities, by definition incapable of empirical proof or disproof, places strict limits on phenomenal claims about religion or spirituality, particularly ontological ones. Although studying the phenomena or appearances remains important, paying attention to spiritual capacities enables us better to grasp the contingent nature of such phenomena while grounding them in that innate and general disposition of the human being—which we tentatively define as the C-factor.