This interview was conducted in conjunction with the SSRC’s project on Spirituality, Political Engagement, and Public Life.—ed.

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NS: The New Metaphysicals is a study of a particular time and place, but one that means to speak about much broader currents in American culture. Why Cambridge? Why these people?

CB: In all honesty, I started fieldwork in Cambridge because I was living there, transplanted from New York for a few years. I initially approached Cambridge more as a lab than a field—that is, not as a specific place, but rather a kind of place: an educated university town, with lots of people whom I presumed would fit the sociological model of the liberal spiritual seeker or consumer. For a long time I resisted any urge to think or write about Cambridge as a particular place, a unique place. But I eventually realized that I could make more of the study, and develop a better way of addressing the significance of spirituality in America, if I addressed Cambridge as such.

NS: Cambridge is a place with so much history for American metaphysicals, yet your subjects seem much more concerned with the future than the past. Do you see them more as a relic or as a vanguard?

CB: They can be either, depending on whom you talk to. Certainly, many people who live in Cambridge think that they’re in the vanguard!

NS: How do you do scholarship—and, in so doing, take account of history—about a community that denies its own historicity? I was struck by your claim that “the puzzle of spirituality in America cannot be solved by locating it in a history it refuses.”

CB: It is important to talk about and investigate the various historical links and pasts of contemporary spirituality. History is extremely important, and its elision is an ongoing problem with so much of the popular discourse about spirituality, which tends to suggest that it is a condition rather than a tradition. Sociologists and scholars of American religion need to have a better understanding of the complex religious and cultural pasts that form our present. There are lots more things to be written on these subjects, and while I was writing this book I was able to draw on a number of exceptional new volumes that focus on aspects of these ungainly histories. I’m thinking of work by Christopher White, Leigh Schmidt, Catherine Albanese, Molly McGarry, Alex Owen, Ann Taves, John Lardas Modern, and the list goes on.

But what is puzzling about spirituality is that, even as the number of monographs on the topic grows, these histories don’t seem to resonate with contemporary people who call themselves spiritual, or with most scholars who look at its present manifestations. One reason for this is that the living practices of spirituality allow people to cultivate ways of being in time that are future-focused, or that situate practitioners in perennial time. All religious practices place people in time and in space. In this case, the spiritual practices that I trace do interesting things to the kind of narrative history that most historians write, so paying attention to these practices, and chronicling how they unravel and decouple from most recognizable historical narratives, is just as important. That’s what I have tried to do.

NS: What, then, does it mean for you to tackle, in the words you cite from John Dewey, “things in their complex entanglements”?

CB: For a long time I’ve been interested in the effects of social scientific methods on our understanding of religious life in the U.S. Despite the great strides in theorizing religion and religious complexity—with heterodox arguments about secularism and secularization, or the emphasis on practice, for example—almost all of the social scientific studies of religion in America begin in unquestionably religious places, like churches. As I’ve argued, it’s these methods that effectively leave out social processes that are not so clearly separate or distinct from the religious in social life. They make it difficult to develop the theoretical potential that many of us aspire to consider. Even with a few stellar exceptions—Winnifred Fallers Sullivan’s work comes to mind—the whole corpus of scholarly work tells us that religious groups and individuals are appropriate and adequate sites of inquiry into the shaping of religion in American life. Other kinds of religious production are regularly judged or measured by the standard reproduced by these methodological choices.

As a consequence, religion that is generated elsewhere doesn’t appear to be religious. This has very powerful consequences. An entire apparatus of critique—that spirituality is disorganized, individualized, corporatized, commodified—reinforces the view that “spirituality” is both ubiquitous and socially problematic.

Looking at all of this, I embraced a study of entanglements because it demands different starting points for analyzing religious life: experience, discourse, meaning, and practice. We can ask how religious practices are produced or carried in secular contexts, and we can think about how to conduct research on religion in those settings in ways that do not presume that everything is sacralized, but that recognize that things are often a bit more complicated than we have made them out to be—I’d say a bit more interesting too.

NS: If not in such traditional, formal contexts, where does one find the markers of spirituality?

CB: Well, first I should say that we do indeed find markers of spirituality in traditional religious institutions. In an early chapter, I focus on a variety of sites in Cambridge where spirituality is produced: alternative medicine, the arts (particularly amateur arts), and also various religious groups. There is a lot of interaction among these.

But in The New Metaphysicals, I don’t focus serially on those settings or spaces. Rather, I followed a number of practices that are sometimes spiritual, sometimes religious, and sometimes secular. Yoga is one, but a more intriguing case, and a favorite of mine, is the transformation of medium- and spirit-writing, and automatic writing (popular in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spiritualist circles), to “flow writing” and cathartic writing. An even more intriguing practice that sits at the core of the book is the emergence of “religious experience”—which is taken up in legal and psychological literature, then carried and reproduced in secular discourse about the self and private belief. In other words, these practices are not firmly or primarily located within “religion” or “science” or “health” or “artistry.”  Part of their power for my respondents is in the ways that their multiple locations, and multiple linked sites of reproduction, add to the sensation that they are “everywhere” and universal.

NS: You point out that these ways of speaking about the spiritual also play a part in the story of American secularity. How does spirituality affect the usual narratives of the secular and, now, the post-secular?

CB: “Spirituality” is a word that resonates in all of the usual narratives of the secular; it’s a word that pops up everywhere. It does different kinds of work in Charles Taylor’s and William Connolly’s works on secularism; it is valued and promoted in Sam Harris’s various books, and he makes it consistent with atheism; it is embedded in psychological discourse, which is itself disembedded from any religious tradition; and so on. So, “spirituality” doesn’t affect the narratives of secularity from the outside, but is already part and parcel of them. For me—and for those of us who are working in various ways with the SSRC’s initiative on spiritual forms—the questions then turn to why and how these forms, or formations, work: what they do, what they make of the secular, and how they fashion it.

NS: Your subjects see academic scholarship as a legitimating presence, one that they’re comfortable in and eager to engage with. What do you think your book will do for your subjects? What will it legitimate and what will it challenge?

CB: Presence is the key word here. I unexpectedly found myself participating in and engaging a religious culture in which academics have from time to time played a peculiar role. Within the Cambridge milieu, skeptical academics, in particular, are considered to be people who carry the weight and authority of “science.” I realized after the fact that sometimes just asking questions performs an act of legitimation; it was a sign for my respondents that we were pursuing a common goal of learning “the truth.” I never used words like “truth,” “science,” or “proof” in my questions, but I often found myself answering questions about my work that suggested that my respondents thought of what I was doing in those terms.

That said, I’m not sure that the book is going to either provide a measure of legitimacy or push buttons any more than my presence already has. Every writer hopes that her book will challenge someone somewhere, but I make no predictions. Sociologists aren’t very good at predictions anyhow.

NS: Science and American spirituality have always had a complex relationship, and this is no less the case today, with widespread interest in, for example, the neuroscience of religious experience and research on alternative medicine. What work does science do for your subjects? Do you think they misconstrue it?

CB: My husband is a biologist, and we spend a lot of time at home talking about the innumerable ways that people misconstrue scientific evidence, facts, and data. Most Americans have outsized hopes and fears about what science is able to do now, or will be able to do soon. Therefore, it’s hard for me to argue that the people I met in Cambridge are unusual by virtue of the mere fact that they misconstrue science. We all do. Yes, some of their ideas are often uncritical mixtures of nineteenth-century Theosophical ideas, what they learned from any number of alternative health practitioners, and whatever David Brooks says about neuroscience in his New York Times column. But most Americans hold some combination of ideas about science that include heavy doses of misunderstanding, rumor, hope, and imagination.

NS: For many religious Americans, though, sins against science come rooted in suspicion and omission. Those in your book seem prone, instead, to an overzealous embrace.

CB: Perhaps it would be fair to say that the people I met in Cambridge are aware of the fact that they are drawing on unorthodox combinations of science, religion, and philosophy—probably more so than many others. The unorthodoxy of their expectations about science’s possibilities, and its relation to the character and quality of the universe as a metaphysical whole, makes them more aware than others that the science they think about is an imagined one. That said, the great majority of them also insisted that their views would some day be vindicated. As they see it, true spiritual laws never change, and given their universality and generalizability, they will someday—soon—capture the attention of mainstream physicists and neuroscientists. That is where they believe true legitimacy and authority ultimately rests—with the “real” scientists and, I should add, not the social scientists!

NS: If not ultimate legitimacy, what does a social scientific study such as yours propose to tell us? In particular, do you mean to offer a critique, as sociological accounts of American metaphysical spirituality often have in the past?

CB: Offering a critique is not what gets me out of bed in the morning, to be honest. Of course critique is a quality of much scholarly writing, and readers will find that I do offer several. I’m aware also that the book opens itself up to several lines of critique—both old and, I hope, new. With that in mind, I’d like to imagine it as a gentle provocation—something that stimulates and unsettles, rather than tidies things up.

The change that must be recognized, grappled with, and prised open has everything to do with what we are talking about when we talk about secularism. It is a change that we have little choice but to believe in: Ideas, particularly religious ideas, can be seen and measured. They are located in the body and directly manifest in practice. This elegant notion is passionately articulated by televangelists and the token religious characters of reality television even as it remains entrenched in foreign policy debates about the Middle East. It is a habit propagated in therapeutic spiritualities, Christian nationalism, and suburban Catholic catechisms. And it goes unquestioned in certain academic circles.

Secularism, then, should not to be considered in terms of cognitive science affecting some species of belief and/or practice called religion, either positively or negatively. Nor should secularism be understood as a process in which a religious tradition, say liberal Protestantism, adapts itself to the methods and insights of cognitive science. On the contrary, secularism has to do with the mutual imbrication of two seemingly different traditions. For if one begins to excavate the relationship between cognitive science and various practices of Protestant religiosity—at least in American history—it becomes more and more difficult to demarcate any essential difference. Something else looms.

This difficulty of demarcation, associated with the looming presence of secularism, is precisely what makes predictions of a cognitive revolution affecting religion not simply premature but also reveals them to be ignorant of their own conditions of possibility.

Contra Brooks’ predictions about the future of neural Buddhism, Americans have long acted as though the self is a dynamic process of relationships. How else to begin to explain the alluring practice of revivalism across the centuries, the persistence of metaphysical religiosity, or the wholesale embrace of circulation under the guise of capitalism? Generally speaking, Americans have also approached both their own piety and critically appraised the religions of others according to the criteria of a common morality located deep within the recesses of self. And finally, they have often assumed that proper cultivation of a common humanity is subject to external verification, that is, resulting in truths that are universal and falsehoods that are actionable. Citing Brooks’s own words, Americans have long been involved in the enterprise of producing and evaluating grainy pictures of the “unknowable total of all there is.”

For better or for worse, we have already become a nation of neural Buddhists. We have become so not because of the formidable influence of Buddhism on the imagination of Americans. On the contrary, Brooks’s prognostications have already come to pass because of two interrelated phenomena: the importance of mental activity in the religious lives of Americans and the technics (and technologies) that have been deployed in measuring this importance. In other words, visual technologies, or more precisely, technologies of vision, have played a significant role in allowing Americans to come to terms with religion. Whether in the form of a statistical chart of the American Tract Society or an MRI, Americans have looked to a variety of images in order to provide terms for understanding their own religiosity, and, subsequently, to make claims about the past, present, and future of religion in America.

As suggested by Leigh Schmidt in his incisive prolegomena to a religious history of American neuroscience, visual technologies are laden with metaphysics of their own. He urges us to recognize that as machines change—becoming better, stronger, faster—so, too, does the form and content of the first principles emanating, with moral force, from these machines. In that sense, the most tangible effects of visual technologies are not necessarily the images that they provide us about neural activities associated with the religious. On the contrary, they are the ways in which their metaphysics become our aesthetics, affecting modes of sense perception, channeling our senses in particular directions, and making some feelings more real, that is, more reliable than others.

In light of recent claims of cognitive science to picture what “your brain looks like on faith,” I want to take a moment to reflect on the penchant for gazing inside the head for the purposes of seeing everything, confidently and assuredly, from the outside. What could be more representative of secularism’s power? The compulsion to capture, and therefore secure representations may not be distinctive to modernity but our technological capacity to produce images of everything—a situation that novelist Don DeLillo has called our pornography of seeing—certainly is. And it has been this penchant for picturing religion that has so often informed, and sometimes spurred, the desire to talk about religion as if it really existed—something you could catch, possess, or alternatively lose. There is an entangled history here, one that I take Schmidt to be calling for us to excavate.

The desire to explain religion by way of seeing it (and, conversely, to see religion by way of explaining it) is a remarkable feature of the world we live in. And although one could argue that this proclivity is not new in the American grain—it is manifest in Puritan notions of covenant and publicity or perhaps in Jonathan Edwards’ realignment of religion and the affections—the role that technologies of vision have played in the history of this desire, in its intensification and naturalization, is wholly undeniable.

Pictures of religion are ever becoming more precise, more pixilated, more infused with the air of verisimilitude. And in all due respect to Barack Obama, it is to this proposition—rather than to guns or religion, per se—that many in the so-called secular age cling. Pictures of the self being religious morphing seamlessly into knowledge morphing into knowledge of self morphing into the self as it is in essence. This series of elisions is, perhaps, fundamental to American life and has become, more ominously, both a weapon and religion of choice.

I call your attention to two examples that speak to the springs and motives of this choice: 1) antebellum phrenology and 2) Andrew Newberg’s “biology of belief” cited with prophetic approval by Brooks.

The infamous “Symbolical Head,” made ever-present in antebellum America by Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, expressed not simply a will to measurement but the notion that there were ideal moral categories that corresponded to a universal law. Each of the faculties identified in their cognitive map were thought to be sensual components of reason. In Religion: Natural and Revealed, Orson Fowler argued that the “demonstrative science” of phrenology is extending yet also displacing the “religion of Jesus Christ” in its power to exert “an all-controlling influence over the intellects, the emotions, and the conduct of mankind—engrossing the feelings, shaping the lives, occupying the minds, and filling the souls, of untold millions of the human family.” Phrenology would prove what many Americans at the time already knew-that religion was a complex of ideas that forms habits, moulds characters, shapes and perpetuates governments, guides intellects, and governs conduct. Phrenology would also measure (and not simply declare) the failed religious mechanics of “conceited Chinese,” the “benighted Hindoo,” and the “degraded Ethiopean.”

According to Fowler, the human head was a more reliable text of universal truth than the Bible. Unlike the “Scriptures,” which demanded interpretation, the “truth” of phrenology was “come-at-able.” “Men cannot help believing it, any more than they can help seeing what they look at, or feeling fire when they touch it. All must and will admit its truth . . . It is crushing beneath the car of its triumphal progress whatever and whoever resist or oppose its advancement.”

Phrenology pictured religious experience as an interaction among various faculties, in particular, those of “Spirituality” and “Veneration” located at the top and center of the head. Together, the capacity to pay attention to things religious (“Spirituality’) and the capacity to orient oneself to things religious (“Veneration”) constituted a biological rendering of belief.

Spirituality was defined as the capacity to be attentive to the wonderful and the marvelous. It hinged upon the degree of attention one was capable of directing toward things not seen. The organ of Spirituality “adapts man to a world of spirits. It imparts the element of spirituality to his nature, and renders him a spiritual, immaterial, immortal being.” Too little of this faculty and one would be hardened to transcendent realities. Too much and one would risk being lost to the necessities of this world.

Veneration complemented Spirituality in creating “the feeling of awe” and the capacity to defer to power whether it be divine or human. “This organ is divided,” wrote Fowler, containing both the capacity for feeling amazed in the presence of God and the tendency to submit to “elders and superiors.” When proper balance was achieved both within each faculty and between them, the experience of “true religion” was all but guaranteed.

According to Fowler, the existence of God had become a matter of “ocular demonstration.” In light of the results achieved among his clients who, after receiving their initial diagnosis, had adjusted their faculties accordingly, Fowler proclaimed: “Behold, then, the true science of mind! Behold the study of this godlike department of our nature reduced to demonstrable certainty!  . . . The study of mind is, then, the STUDY OF GOD in the highest work of his hand and embodiment of his nature.”

More recently, Andrew Newberg has employed SPECT scans to argue “that transcendent and mystical experiences can be traced to specific neural processes in the brain, and that they are valuable—to anyone who seeks them, including secular individuals.” Unlike the ostensibly passive phrenological chart, single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is a high-tech imaging tool that detects radioactive emissions underneath the skin. Newberg injects subjects (Franciscan nuns, Tibetan Buddhist meditators, Pentecostals) with a radioactive tracer at the onset of their religious experience (the threshold determined by Newberg in consultation with his subjects). SPECT scans then produce freeze-frame pictures of blood-flow patterns in the brain and have allowed Newberg to claim that “our studies are beginning to show that each system of belief, and each form of meditation, activates a unique pattern of neural activity that changes the way we perceive reality.”

According to Newberg’s comparative studies, religion happens when your capacity to pay attention increases while your sense of a grounded and bounded self decreases. In each of his case studies he has found a common thread of religious experience-heightened focus to no thing in particular (signified by increased neural activity in the frontal lobe) combined with a sense of being disengaged from all things in general (signified by decreased neural activity in the superior parietal lobe).

Unlike Fowler, Newberg defers on questions concerning the existence of God.  Instead he emphasizes a more pressing matter—the existence of religion, itself. According to Newberg, his images portend the creation of a religionome—similar to the human genome project—defined as a way to “begin to look at all of the different beliefs and practices and traditions and try to evaluate and understand them not just from a spiritual perspective or a subjective perspective, but from physiological and biological” perspective. And as Newberg has already made clear, such evaluation and understanding will confirm  that “humans, in fact, are natural born mystics blessed with inborn genius for effortless self-transcendence.”

This is certainly an argument to be taken seriously and one that has been made countless times, perhaps most vividly at the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893. But to not recognize that this gesture toward biological essentialism is, in fact, an argument, and not a truth waiting to be discovered, risks something, dare I say it, essential to the human.

But from the perspective of history, Newberg’s images do not suggest the enduring presence of religion so much as they confirm the persistent metaphysics of brain imaging techniques. For what is most remarkable about Newberg’s SPECT scans is that they capture images of the afterlife of phrenological concepts of religion. For is it not the ready acceptance of phrenological notions of Spirituality and Veneration that helps produce Newberg’s SPECT scans and precipitate the “aha” moment? Truth is there to see in plain sight. What is visible corresponds, if not directly, then allegorically, to invisible laws of being.

More provocatively, I want to suggest that Newberg’s pictures capture something that has already happened—the rupture of secularism in American religious history. This rupture was (and is) all but invisible, having created in its wake a discourse which has set the terms that all arguments about religion must adopt in order to become intelligible. Newberg’s particular version of secularism goes something like this:

When properly cultivated, religious experience will allow us to transcend the culture which contains us. For if we can produce a clear enough picture of religion, if we can rehearse our attention enough so as to capture an image of the brain in the heights of rehearsing its attention and losing its earthly orientation, then we are that much closer to “knowing ourselves” and therefore “becoming ourselves.”

Questions concerning the metaphysics of technology come into fleeting focus here. But might Newberg’s deployment of single photon emission computed tomography possess more than a metaphysical dimension? Might his machines be assuming a kind of divinity in their ability to direct our attention in particular ways? Might they, as well as other technologies of vision, be creating us in their capacity to imprint themselves upon the human? Do the ways in which the human brain is imagined and visualized affect the ways we use our brains, not to mention our bodies? To what extent have we begun to see what our technologies see?

I am stubborn and remain skeptical of aggressive truth claims accompanying various technologies of locating and dissecting religion. I am, instead, committed to the indefensible and ridiculous proposition that the human is a malleable thing in the world, that neural activity is dependent, in part, upon the degree to which words, ideas, and particular bodily actions that accompany such activity are shot through with lines of force. In other words, different vectors converge upon the individual at any one time. And to begin to measure what is happening on the inside of the brain without accounting for the various combinations of what Durkheim called “moral forces” seems to me to be a project doomed to success. Although seeing religion as it truly is may feel like the right thing to do, such vision risks affirming the universalism of those words, ideas, and bodily actions taken by the investigator to be precisely what his or her account of neural activity is meant to explain in the first place. There is an ominous circularity here, or more precisely, a feedback loop between phenomena and explanation that does not simply avoid the reflexivity demanded by genealogical excavation of one’s own categories but aggressively defends against and casts aspersions toward the critical enterprise of what John Dewey once called “severe thought.”

Perhaps I, in my humanistic plea, am guilty of casting a different set of aspersions. So be it.

For in fooling myself with the conceit that the emergence of secularism happened sometime in the nineteenth century I am all too aware that I am its victim, enveloped by its swirl of indefensible claims about the way reality is in essence and habits of defending those claims in the name of a reality that is essential.

But even though the atmosphere of secularism may have conditioned the trajectory of my words and the arc of my thoughts, perhaps even molding their content, I insist that such power is not to be taken lightly or without a degree of tactical resistance.

I’m an historian of American Christianity, so my examples will be American, but it should be said that the conversation about neurology and religion has roots in centuries-old reflections in Europe about how to understand and map out the inner contents of the self.  This conversation became intense in the centuries after the Protestant Reformation, when reformers wary of “empty” rituals and old Christian traditions relocated true Christianity in faith and personal piety.  This was a powerful moment of turning to the interior life—toward examining the inner self, probing it, wondering about it.  That we today think experimental studies of personal religious experiences can test the truth of a particular religion is itself evidence of the dominance of this Protestant perspective.  Leigh Schmidt makes this point, in a slightly different way, towards the end of his contribution to this discussion.

So let me turn to a few historical examples to illustrate the point I’m making about Christianity’s adaptability.  Though as a system it seems ridiculous to us today, phrenology initially emerged with the same fanfare that has accompanied neuroscience, for it was a way finally to see with certainty into our inner lives, a method for mapping out elusive dispositions and feelings on the physiological self, especially on the head and brain.  At long last, here was a philosophy of mind that, because it linked mental capacities to physiological structures that could be measured, resolved interminable metaphysical debates about human nature, free will, and the nature and existence of divinity.  All of these problems could be probed by examining the organs of the brain and body.  It was not just scientists and philosophers who were keyed up about this new knowledge.  “If…we can know the condition of the physical organism at any time, we can determine therefrom the condition of the mind,” one American minister wrote.  In this new procedure lay “the mysterious pathway to the court of the soul.”  Others agreed that older philosophies of mind amounted merely to “conjecture, speculation, theoretical abstraction,” and that newer sciences, such as phrenology, promised greater certainty and clarity for pastors and others pursuing self knowledge.

The irony here, of course, an irony not noticed by most who embraced this new science, was that moving the site of experience outside of its mysterious, interior spaces and onto the outer surfaces of the brain and skull did not solve the problem of seeing mental and spiritual things clearly.  This was so because ways of interpreting body and brain were changing too, and, thus, in very short order, phrenological categories and practices took their turn as too imprecise and “speculative.”

The so-called “new psychology” that arose in the 1860s and 70s, essentially modern experimental psychology, was seen as an improvement upon the old way of searching in the body and skull for clues about mind and spirit.  This is a second historical moment worth mentioning.  By the second half of the nineteenth century the correspondences posited by phrenologists had been shown to be erroneous, even if the impulse to localize mental capacities in the brain and nervous system continued in different forms.  (The new psychology shared a methodological assumption with both nineteenth-century phrenologists and today’s neurologists: that all mental events can be located in the body.) New psychologists located the mind not in the brain per se but in stimulus-response patterns that made up nervous processes.  They were interested in what we today would call sensation and perception, in arcs of nervous transmission as they pulsed from initial sensation to muscle contraction, nervous transmissions that in aggregate made up the self.  It was now possible, these scientists thought, to understand and explain complex human behaviors by examining how they were made up of simple stimulus-response patterns.

Again, scientists involved, and some lay observers, predicted a revolution in how Americans saw both human nature and religion.  Finally, human beings were peering with clarity into the deep parts of the self.  In a 1901 issue of Harper’s Monthly Magazine, G. Stanley Hall, son of Massachusetts Calvinists and founder of the new psychology in America, insisted that painstaking experimentation on human sensation and perception would revolutionize philosophical and religious pursuits.  ”Beginning with [studies of] touch,” Hall wrote, “the experimental method has slowly come to include almost every kind of psychic activity.  Imagination, sentiment, reason, volition, and all the rest are taken into the laboratory, and its methods have taught us a sharpness and refinement of introspection and self-knowledge which make these methods almost comparable with a microscope for the soul.”  From painstaking studies of sensation and perception could be built absolutely certain knowledge about all inner aspects of the self-feeling, reason, intuition and faith.  The result, Hall believed, would be that scientific psychology would entirely reorient Christianity, replacing its objective supernatural divinity with subjective psychological truths and maxims about morale and mental health.

The third and final historical moment I wanted to mention is more recent and perhaps more familiar—the biofeedback and meditation studies that began in the 1960s, including those by Herbert Benson, who studied the physiological correlates of meditation and coined a term for these, the “relaxation response.”  This was another situation in which new, psychological tests and technologies “saw” into the physiological self, another situation in which religious conditions and states could be seen and measured in the body.  It also was a situation in which scientists and lay believers predicted (and in some cases worried) that these kinds of new scientific studies would dramatically change American religious practices.

In all three historical moments there were scientists who employed experimental study as a weapon against belief; and in all three situations there were believers who feared that such study amounted to reducing mental and spiritual states to physiological ones.  But both fearful religious predictions and confident scientific proclamations appear to have given way to a different kind of logic in American cultural history—a logic by which everyday American Christians kept their Christianity and harmonized it with scientific knowledge.  The result has been an astonishing proliferation of Christian spiritualities, including evangelical ones, that draw on psychological studies for new insights on human nature, the healthfulness of Christianity and the best ways to foster Christian conversion.

Why have things turned out this way?  Why has the rise of mind/brain science not led to the expected decline of traditional religions or their wholesale transformation?  One reason has been pointed to by Brooks and others in this discussion—that psychological studies often point to the usefulness of religious belief and practice.  It is true that such studies do not authorize specific religious ideas or practices.  But in my experience, this doesn’t matter to most believers.  (Scientific experiments, just because they don’t specifically support one type of belief, do not therefore undercut specific types of belief, do they?)  Like others, I’m not sure why Brooks thinks neurological study might support Buddhism in particular.  Does neuroimaging support specific Buddhist doctrines, texts, gods, revelations, supernatural beings and rituals?  Lopez and others in this discussion have quite usefully reminded us that Buddhism is much more than a regimen of experimentally tested meditative techniques.

A second reason that psychological experimentation hasn’t dramatically altered the American religious landscape is that American Christians borrow selectively and (might I say) ingeniously from psychological work, embracing insights that support their views and resisting insights that seem reductive or are destructive of deeply-held beliefs.  There is a longer story to this, and it is in my forthcoming book, Unsettled Minds—shameless plug—so I won’t give away the whole story here.  A third and final reason that psychological technologies haven’t dramatically altered belief is simply that it is difficult for believers to sustain a living religion either because of pragmatic reasons (it’s good for me) or because experimental results call for it (studies show it is healthy).  Hall expected Christianity to transform itself into a merely hygienic or therapeutic system, but when faced with the choice, most Christians kept the old doctrines, rituals, gods and supportive communities.  They can hang on to all of that and incorporate what they can of newer, therapeutic practices and ideals.  The last one hundred years has shown this to be the case:  It has been at once a century of astonishing psychological growth and power and a time of remarkable Christian (and evangelical Christian) growth.

Has scientific psychology changed nothing, then?  Have new psychological categories, therapies and experiments not influenced American religions at all?

Perhaps the psychological sciences have done one thing: Perhaps they have abetted a growing trend among traditional believers, Christians and Jews and Muslims, toward more universalist religious perspectives and more eclectic devotional practices.  In American Christianity I think this is happening among liberal evangelicals and mainline Protestants in particular.  Perhaps psychological studies, by drawing attention to the health benefits (for example) of all religions, have abetted a new openness to once strange devotional practices such as meditation and yoga.  Certain Christians are incorporating these non-Christian practices.  I am not making a new or startling observation here; there is a lot of evidence that monotheists in America today are cobbling together eclectic practices and beliefs.  The survey data is dramatic; but I recently came across a bit of anecdotal evidence, a Christian review of Herb Benson’s Beyond the Relaxation Response, that illustrates more clearly the religious style I’m identifying:

About a month ago I read the Beyond the Relaxation Response. I decided to try Dr. Benson’s simple technique which is based on the same principles of Eastern meditation. Instead of using a mantra I used a term from the Bible. Immediately I felt like I was right back were I left off years ago. I have now come full circle, adding the Relaxation Response to my Christian faith. As an RN and a lay counselor I see many possibilities for using this technique to bring relaxation and relieve stress. As a Christian I believe this is a technique to help incorporate our prayer time experience with God into our daily lives.

A wonderful example, because it shows what I see all the time in my research—so few qualms, so little stress or strain about incorporating new psychological notions into older, traditional religious systems.  For people on the liberal to moderate Protestant spectrum in particular, I think this kind of spirituality is flourishing.  Perhaps, then, once we’ve registered an appropriate historical caution, there are a few new things afoot—no revolutions, but for a subset of intrepid monotheists, a developing impulse to use scientific insights, selectively at times, to fashion better, more useful and healthy forms of their old-time religion.

However, Brooks unadvisedly argues that neuroscience will affect metaphysics. He claims that neuroscience can validate sacred experiences and that it can show us that these experiences are the same as God. “Scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism,” Brooks writes, will be the primary challengers of revealed religions. The implication is that neuroscience has found a way to transcend the practical and philosophical boundaries within which it operates. This has not occurred. Moreover, my years of reflecting on brain and behavior have made me deeply appreciate how scientifically intractable metaphysical propositions are. While individuals should be encouraged to form their own private opinions, there is no need to adopt religious intolerance in the name of neuroscience. Below I share a few reasons why I think this is the case. Each speaks to the difficulty neuroscience has characterizing the ultimate nature of reality.

First, there is Brooks’s claim that people are equipped to “to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love.” At present, neuroscience is poorly positioned to evaluate this. The brain’s complexity is a tremendous practical constraint on neuroscience’s reach. New kinds of measurement bring about advances in neuroscience: the more sensitive, reliable, and physically interpretable a measure, the better. Much of the challenge in developing new measures is finding an interpretable signal buried in all the complexity. We do not have a sensitive, reliable, and physically interpretable measurement of “transcendence” or related phenomena.

The brain is active from early in development until death. It would be remarkable if there were no brain activity during a presumed mystical state. A challenge confronting neuroscientists who study mystics is determining which part of observed brain activity relates to the subjectively meaningful part of a mystical state. Brain activity may arise from performance anxiety, daydreaming, or attention to the endeavor at hand. One way to evaluate this would be to correlate brain activity with real-time ratings of subjective mysticism. We could ask someone who is attempting to cultivate such a state to adjust a knob every few seconds according to the intensity of the experience. However, doing so might interfere with the state.

Late night television comedian David Letterman occasionally does a sketch called “Is This Anything?,” where he and sidekick Paul Schaffer jokingly debate whether some bizarre stage performance is “nothing” or “something.” By analogy, neuroscience has confirmed that mystically oriented practices are “something.” However, as in the comedy sketch, “nothing” isn’t really an option.

We can currently evaluate comparatively mundane aspects of mystically oriented practices. Are practitioners subsequently less distracted or anxious? Does a given practice increase antibody titers, or decrease inflammation? Are practitioners better at spatial reasoning or math? Such things are measurable. Some such findings may prove useful to society, but will likely not take a side in the worldview debates.

There are more deeply philosophical reasons why neuroscience will stay out of metaphysics. For instance, neuroscience may never solve the age-old philosophical puzzle of how primal our subjective experience is. This is my second disagreement with Brooks. He says, “God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at [mystical] moments, the unknowable total of all there is.” I am sure that some people have these deeply meaningful experiences. However, it is pointless for neuroscience to update a term (God) that in conventional parlance refers to the ultimate power that rules the universe.

It is true that our access to the “real” world, meaning the objective world “out there” that science purports to study, is through our subjective awareness. Some proponents of the ancient Greek school of Solipsism have maintained that the only thing that is knowable is this subjective awareness. To cite one recent popular example: how can I possibly prove that I am not part of a video game? The blockbuster movie The Matrix portrayed a world whose inhabitants were unknowingly part of a fictitious computer-generated world, a world piped straight to their brains. A Matrix scenario challenges universality and other assumptions of physical law. Non-universality opens an infinite number of alternative options for how the universe works. It is easy to imagine a future interactive video game in which the game engine treats each player differently, with a strain of fundamentalism being “true” for some, and quantum electrodynamics being “true” for others.

Solipsism has vexed philosophers throughout history. Most have thought it unlikely. However, most also have thought it causes trouble. One critic, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer spoke of it as an irremediable evil. I, too, feel uncompelled by solipsism. Because I think about the chasm between introspective awareness and the physical world, however, I am sensitive to the trouble it causes. The Matrix illustrates just how poorly positioned one is to see the grand design of the universe. No functional neuroimaging device, even if it is pointed at the most transcendentally devoted brain, will take us to the highest vantage point in the universe.

Nevertheless, there is promise in pointing tools at mystics’ brains. We will not find true metaphysical reality or define God. Instead, such research is an opportunity to explore something different from standard lines of inquiry, something that may cast new light on how the brain works. Resulting findings will fold into the evolving model of the nervous system. Perhaps these new understandings will benefit mental health or improve technology.

As for neuroscience as a whole, it will give society a lot of new material to work with. For both pragmatic and philosophical reasons, however, it is clear that Brooks granted neuroscience an undeserved authority over metaphysics.

Before I begin, I can’t resist noting that the characterization of “Buddhism” upon which the piece is premised—one that is suspiciously amenable to a modern western liberal lifestyle—gives scholars of East Asian religions fits. I am glad to see that Don Lopez has tried to introduce some historical perspective here. I’ll say no more about this topic, other than to note that a similarly deracinated, Protestantized version of my own focus of research, early Confucianism, has also enjoyed wide currency since the Enlightenment. What I’d like to focus on, instead, is the apparent confusion about what brain imaging technologies tell us about ourselves, and what, precisely, materialism is and is not.

To begin with, Brooks reports that Andrew Newberg’s neuroimaging work “has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain”! Of course they can: all mental experiences can be identified and measured in the brain, or they wouldn’t be mental experiences. This says absolutely nothing about the existence or non-existence of metaphysical entities in the world. A “friend of mine” (for the purposes of maintaining plausible deniability) recalls experiencing mystical states of oneness induced by a variety of hallucinogenic substances consumed in his 20s, including physically flowing into and becoming one with Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County and dissolving into the Pacific Ocean. I don’t know much about the psychopharmacology of LSD and psilocybin, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they, like certain meditative practices, are able to suppress activity in the parietal lobe, among other things. This may explain why both meditators and drug users report Freud’s famous “oceanic feeling” (their monitoring of ordinary spatial boundaries is being altered). While this is interesting—and the fact that it feels so good is even more interesting—it says absolutely nothing about the ontological status of the mystical Ocean.

Brooks’s conclusion that “people are equipped to experience the sacred” would more accurately read, “people are equipped to appear to themselves to experience the sacred.” Moreover, similar mediation- or drug-induced repression of the parietal lobe in practitioners prepared with other cultural primes (for instance, Catholic nuns) would probably result in very different reported experiences: not merging with some indefinite “larger presence” or Mt. Tam, but being physically embraced by a very concrete and vividly perceived Jesus, complete with flowing beard and a retinue of horn-blowing angels. The idea that “God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at [moments of transcendental love], the unknowable total of all there is” is a fairly accurate expression of a vague “spirituality” that is now quite widespread among modern, educated people who eschew the religious beliefs of their parents, but it is in no way “proven” or even suggested by experimental work in the cognitive science of religion.

This confusion of neuroimaging data with some sort of magical report about the true nature of the world, typical of the breathless manner in which the popular press covers this topic, is actually the product of a deeply seated cognitive bias in humans, our innate folk dualism (on this, see especially Descartes’ Baby by Paul Bloom). Intuitively, we think of ourselves as something other than our brains, even though this intuition appears to be empirically wrong. Our folk dualism gives us the feeling that there is a huge gap between “mind”-like activities, which are individual and subjective, and physical events, which are objective and measurable. We then get very excited when we discover that thinking about or experiencing X is accompanied by physical activity in area Y of the brain—X must be real! Properly speaking, though, “our” thinking about or experiencing X is, in fact, nothing more than activity in area Y of the brain (or, more likely, a network of regions).

Brooks’s piece is also characterized by a confusion concerning what “materialism,” as an ontological claim about the world, might be. This seems to be the result of conflating the philosophical position of materialism, or physicalism, with the common use of the word “materialist” to refer to people or beliefs that are perceived to be selfish, unemotional, or unloving. For instance, emotions are not, as Brooks suggests, any more “squishy” than anything else: they are reactions subserved by an entirely material body-brain system. “Hard-core materialism,” like that of Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, does not preclude the existence of emotions, love, or unselfishness—in fact, quite the opposite is true. Recent work on the apparently hard-wired nature of altruism and fairness are entirely compatible with, and indeed predicted by, the neo-Darwinan, physicalist model of the self. It is often in the interest of selfish genes to build selectively unselfish “hosts” to get them into the next generation, and these hosts work best when pre-loaded with a spectrum of fast, “emotional” responses to their environments, including the all-important environment of other people. Human beings, as well as other social primates, seem to be built by their genes to be guided primarily by reactions we would characterize as “emotional,” to have the capacity for deep familial and romantic love and attachment, and to perform great acts of apparently selfless altruism for kin or ersatz-kin (such as co-religionists and fellow soldiers). Similarly, there is no reason to think that because consciousness depends upon “idiosyncratic networks of neural firings,” the relationship between neurons and consciousness is “mysterious” or somehow non-physical: the collection of dust particles I see on the floor next to my desk is idiosyncratic, but not non-physical. Again, Brooks’s conclusion here seems to involve unexamined, and unjustified, folk beliefs: if my neural network is “idiosyncratic,” then it’s unique to me, and I am non-physical, something other than my brain or my body; therefore, idiosyncratic neural networks mean that hard-core materialism is wrong.

Finally, Brooks is right that behavioral neuroscience is having a lasting impact on culture, but it isn’t going to prove that Alan Watts was right and that big bad atheists are wrong. It’s that physicalism—the idea that we are nothing more than our body-brains—fundamentally contradicts deeply-seated folk ideas that we have about free will and responsibility. This in turn has profound legal and social implications. As more and more studies come out concerning the correlation of brain state X with certain undesirable behavior Y, we are seeing more and more instances of what Michael Gazzaniga calls the “my brain made me do it” defense in legal cases. Paul Bloom is one of the people who has articulated most clearly what is wrong with this type of thinking; as he notes in a recent commentary:

Micheal McGough, reporting on a 2005 conference on law and neuroscience, outlines [the "my brain made me do it"] logic very clearly in his first paragraph:

“Suppose you’re a juror in the trial of an accused child molester. A medical expert called as a witness for the defense says that magnetic resonance images of the defendant’s brain show unusual activity in an area that lights up in many—though not all—pedophiles. Are you now willing to acquit the defendant on insanity grounds?”

For anyone who is not a Cartesian dualist, this is all seriously confused. There is no immaterial conductor using the brain to accomplish its will. And the notion that pedophilia involves the brain is not a bold empirical hypothesis; it is a truism, and if it leads to the conclusion that the pedophile is blameless, then it follows that everyone is blameless for everything.

The “everyone is blameless for everything” position is not one likely to be widely embraced, but it does raise challenges. How to get our intuitive notions about free will and moral responsibility to peaceably coexist with a materialist conception of the person—which, pace Brooks, is in fact the consensus coming out of modern cognitive science—is the real intellectual and cultural task that still needs to be accomplished.

What is customarily referred to as the Cognitive Revolution in psychology began in the 1950s to bring mental states, processes, and structures back from their Behaviorist-mandated exile. The result was a return to talking about human memory, attention, perception, thought, problem solving, concepts, and feelings. Behavior was no longer the only game in town, and the presumption that human thought and action were wholly dictated by environmental contingencies (apart from some boring observations about gross physiological differences between, say, humans and Skinner’s pigeons) was rejected. The Cognitive Revolution was, then, first and foremost about cognition and not about brain activity. We can learn what human working memory capacity is like, for instance, without knowing anything about what the requisite neural architecture is like. We can specify how people tend to solve analogical problems without knowing what their neural correlates are.

To call neuroscientific or genetic studies of religious experience and behavior “cognitive” is curiously misleading. Some neuroscientific work, such as those studies that help to distinguish between competing models of cognitive architecture, is genuinely cognitive, but merely finding neural correlates of experiences or behaviors does not pass this test. It may be scientific, and it may be interesting, but it is not properly “cognitive.” The move is comparable to studying pole-vaulters in action, recording a characteristic muscle activation pattern, calling that discovery “cognitive,” and going on to suggest it has profound implications for humans’ natural receptivity to or even the goodness in general of pole-vaulting.

Something of a cognitive movement (“revolution” is too strong a term) in the study of religion has been growing for the past two decades, but it is distinguishable from genetic, neuroscientific, and many evolutionary approaches. Barbara Herrnstein Smith rightly identifies some of the cast of characters in this cognitive movement in her postings of June 16 and June 23, 2008 on The Immanent Frame. Together, their cognitive approach is characterized by an attempt to explain the cross-cultural distribution of different forms of beliefs, practices, and social arrangements that generally fall under the “religion” umbrella by appealing to underlying cognitive mechanisms that make people more or less likely to entertain and adopt certain beliefs, practices, and social structures. A comparison can be made to Chomskian linguistics. Chomsky rejected the idea that language can be (and is) entirely constructed by the linguistic environment and his research program generated ample evidence that the character of language acquisition and the diversity of linguistic expression is informed and constrained by underlying cognitive systems (regardless of specifiable neural pathways). Cognitive approaches to studies of religion have a comparable character by attempting to show how cognitive systems inform and constrain (but do not determine) religious acquisition and expression. This cognitive science of religion (CSR) can also be likened to cognitive turns in economics pioneered by Kahneman and Tversky. As human economic behavior is at least partially explained by individual mental representations concerning resource management, so too religious behavior is at least partially explained by individual mental representations (that is, cognition) concerning superhuman agency, the relationship between minds and bodies, death and afterlife, the nature of fortune and misfortune, the origins of the natural world, and so forth.

CSR possesses three attractive features for scholars interested in explaining religious phenomena. First, it avoids the age-old problem of defining “religion.” Rather than dictating what religion is and trying to explain it in whole, scholars in this field have generally chosen to approach “religion” in a piecemeal fashion, identifying human thought or behavioral patterns that might count as “religious” and then trying to explain why those patterns are cross-culturally recurrent. If the explanations turn out to be part of a grander explanation of “religion,” then all the better. If not, meaningful human phenomena have still been rigorously addressed.

This piecemeal approach makes CSR complementary to the activities of other religion scholars from many disciplinary perspectives, a stance of explanatory non-exclusivity. CSR does not pretend to explain exhaustively everything that might be called “religion” (provocative book and project titles aside). Rather, it seeks to detail the basic cognitive structure of thought and action that might be deemed religious and invites historians, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and other religion scholars to fill in the rich details of particular religious phenomena. Where CSR scholars are less friendly toward more traditional approaches is when interpretations or descriptions are offered as substitutes for causal explanations. Different levels of causal explanation are acceptable (e.g. socio-political, cultural, behavioral, economic, psychological, evolutionary, neurological, etc.), and rich description is invited as valuable data, but descriptions of historical or cultural states-of-affairs offered as directly “explaining” human beliefs and actions without specifying causal pathways or without consideration of the mediating factors of human bio-psychological systems are considered unacceptable, as is the position that takes interpretation and description to be the ultimate product of inquiry.

A third virtue of CSR is its methodological pluralism. In seeking out what constitutes cross-culturally and historically recurrent features of human religious cognition, scholars in this field have turned to whatever data collection and analysis methods appear appropriate to the questions at hand, including archaeology, ethnography, interviews, history, and experimentation, both cross-cultural and developmental. What CSR tends to require of methods is only that they evaluate hypotheses empirically.

In his column, Brooks suggests that the “cognitive revolution” in the study of religion will likely encourage belief systems that focus on “self-transcendence” but discourage “the idea of a personal God.” The more genuinely cognitive trend in contemporary science of religion does not directly bear upon whether one should hold any given religious beliefs, but if it offers any clues as to which religious beliefs are likely to remain resilient in the future, it suggests that belief in personal gods aren’t going anywhere soon. A common refrain in CSR is the naturalness of belief in supernatural agents or gods. In his review of the cognitive and evolutionary studies of religion, anthropologist Scott Atran writes: “Supernatural agency is the most culturally recurrent, cognitively relevant, and evolutionarily compelling concept in religion. The concept of the supernatural is culturally derived from an innate cognitive schema.”

Many different and perhaps mutually supporting pathways to belief in gods have garnered some supportive evidence, as I review elsewhere. Here I offer just one example. Developmental psychologist Deborah Kelemen and colleagues have generated experimental evidence demonstrating that from early childhood humans (1) have a strong tendency to find design and purpose in the natural world, (2) know that design is not attributable to human agency, and (3) find a powerful God (or gods) an intuitively reasonable cause(s) for the apparent design and purpose in the natural world. For these reasons among others, Kelemen suggests that children are “intuitive theists” (see Kelemen’s 2004 article in Psychological Science). Humans have early-developing cognitive biases waiting to be filled in by a specific God or gods, much as we have early-developing cognitive biases to acquire natural language. These cognitive predilections to believe in gods can be overridden by special types of enculturation but experimental, historical, archaeological, and ethnographic evidence suggests that as a species we are prone to belief in gods.

Religious experience can’t be described or explained in biological terms alone. An experience is constituted, in part, by the way it is interpreted by the person experiencing it, and it is the interpretation that makes an experience religious. Two people might have experiences that are indistinguishable biologically (slower heart rate, decrease in body temperature) or phenomenologically (sense of oneness, calm), but one might experience what is happening to him in religious terms while the other does not. Study of any experience requires attention to historical and cultural contexts that inform a person’s interpretation of what is happening to her and to the conditions under which she comes to identify her experience in particular terms. Though he criticized medical materialism, James didn’t sufficiently appreciate the need to elucidate the concepts and practices that enter into a person’s experience and to study them as historical products. He was too intent on trying to identify a common core in religious experience that would be universal across cultures.

As psychologists examine the extent to which people can control attention, emotion, and other mental and even autonomic processes, it is not surprising that they would be drawn to practitioners of spiritual exercises in various religious traditions that have developed techniques for achieving this kind of control. Buddhism in particular has a long history of sophisticated reflection on and experimentation with the control of mental and physical states, though here Donald Lopez’s comments about Buddhist Modernism are apt.

In The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience, Newberg and his colleague Eugene d’Aquili, psychiatrists at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, propose a “study of theology from a neuropsychological perspective” that they claim would explain all elements of religion. They describe their book as the culmination of almost 25 years of research on the relationship between the brain and religious experience. This suggests that their theory carries the prestige and credibility of science. In fact, the model they offer is based on speculation, not laboratory science. There is nothing wrong with this. They are as entitled to speculate as are other theorists of religion, but their conclusions ought not to be given special scientific status.

D’Aquili and Newberg maintain that there are core elements in religious experience that “appear to be universal and can be separated from particular cultural matrices.” They suggest that sensations of awe and a unitary experience may be caused by deafferentation, the cutting off of incoming information to a brain structure. From speculation about localization of functions in different areas of the brain, they develop a structural model that includes a holistic operator that “might allow us to apprehend the unity of God or the oneness of the universe.” This structuralism, combined with deafferentation, constitutes their theory of religion.

In the one experimental result cited in the book directly relevant to the theory and in another paper published in 2003, Newberg and his collaborators report experiments using brain imaging (functional neuroimaging) on experienced meditators in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. They found that meditation was associated with mildly increased blood flow in the frontal areas of the brain, consistent with studies that show increased activity in the prefrontal cortex associated with concentration. They had hypothesized that there would be decreased flow in parietal areas of the brain associated with altered experience of space, but results here were mixed. In one kind of analysis of the data they found no significant decrease, though they did find it using another kind of analysis.

These results are consistent with Newberg’s theory, but they don’t provide experimental support for it. In addition, by ignoring the concepts by which their subjects understood what was happening to them they fail to ask what makes these experiences religious. Newberg’s comment about apprehending the unity of God and Brooks’s statement in his column that people are equipped to experience the sacred and overflow with love include interpretations that go way beyond anything measured in these experiments. “God,” “the sacred,” and “overflowing love” each have a culturally specific provenance that can only be elucidated historically.

Richard J. Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, and his colleagues have undertaken a project to study mental abilities achieved by long-term meditative practitioners that is more sophisticated than Newberg’s. Here, again, the subjects are Tibetan monks, but the researchers are trying to study the ways in which these monks pursue and attain compassion through meditation. That requires them to attend to the content of Buddhist doctrine and practice.

In Visions of Compassion, the volume he and Ann Harrington edited describing the project, Davidson surveys psychological research on emotion and notes that much has been done on negative emotions, but considerably less on positive affect. Psychologists have identified distinctive facial expressions recognizable across cultures for negative emotions, but not for their positive counterparts. The only basic classification of positive emotions that correlates with biological data, he says, is that between pre-goal attainment and post-goal attainment affect, between eager anticipation and satisfaction. For his research, Davidson writes, he will focus on this division rather than on distinctions within the emotion lexicon that don’t have biological correlates.

That may be a reasonable research decision, but it substitutes a simple bipolar classification for a much larger set of emotion terms, each of which has its own grammar and criteria of application. For example, within the category of post-goal attainment positive affect, we can easily distinguish between the meanings of contentment, pride, enthrallment, and relief. The choice of which is appropriate in a given situation requires knowledge of context, background assumptions, and reference to relevant norms.

Davidson and his colleagues compared Buddhist monks who had been training in Tibetan traditions for at least 15 and in some cases 40 years with control subjects who had undergone just one week of meditative training. During the study both long-term practitioners and control subjects were asked first “to let their minds be invaded by a feeling of love or compassion” toward someone they cared about, and later “to generate unconditional loving-kindness and compassion toward all sentient beings without thinking about anyone in particular.” The researchers recorded electroencephalographic (EEG) activity and found that the monks had induced in themselves high-amplitude EEG gamma oscillations and phase synchrony during the nonreferential compassion meditative state. This kind of synchronization, Davidson writes, may reflect attention and affective processes, and is consistent with the idea that these are flexible skills that can be trained.

This study may be valuable for training subjects to control their affective states, but it doesn’t tell us anything about the Buddhist notion of compassion or its pursuit. Traditional Buddhist texts on meditation distinguish between calming (achieving a stillness of mind and body) and discernment (insight). The first is considered preparation for the second. Davidson’s EEG study may measure calming, but it leaves discernment unexplored, in this case discernment of Buddhist teaching about compassion and its application to oneself or others.

Instructions to “generate a state of loving-kindness and compassion toward all sentient beings” must have been understood very differently by the Buddhist monks and by members of the control group. The monks had undergone years of training in debating skills that are a large part of Tibetan scholastic pedagogy. They had cultivated practices that include not only techniques for the control of mental and physical states, but also criteria for the proper use of terms like “compassion” and “sentient beings.” Their understanding of these terms would be quite different from that of the controls, who had trained for a week in an admittedly superficial way.

Georges Dreyfus, a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, writes in Visions of Compassion that there is no Tibetan word for emotion and he asks whether compassion is an emotion. He cites a distinction drawn both in texts and practice between beginners who feel compassion (they are saddened by the sufferings of others and moved to wish them relief) and advanced bodhisattvas who attain compassion with equanimity without being themselves moved.

Is compassion then a trait? The difference between a state and a character trait is not only one of endurance over time. We call someone “loving” or “kind” not on the basis of what we take her to feel, either on the basis of her self-report or some other evidence, but because we take the term to capture something of her character. We ascribe kindness to her by observing how she acts in response to different situations over time. Similar observations and attempts at discernment are at work in my reflections on my own character, though usually clouded by bias in my own favor. To understand Buddhist compassion meditation one would have to explicate the criteria that govern the way the monks themselves use that term in their own self reflection. Were Buddhist practitioners to agree to conditions under which they would be given simultaneous feedback of their gamma-band oscillations and phase-synchrony during meditation, it might be possible for them to manipulate those variables more directly, but that would have no bearing on their judgment or anyone else’s about the extent to which they were on the path to compassion.

The study of religious experience requires attention to culturally specific language and social practices by which people come to understand themselves and their world in religious terms, as well as to the results of neuroscience and other inquiries into universal characteristics of mind and body.

As my own mind was being massaged with images of Richard Dawkins having his temporal lobes stimulated, an odd notion popped into my head: namely, when it comes to religion, history and culture trump neurology. I quickly noticed that the same neuroscientists who were experimenting on Dawkins, among other more amenable test subjects, were also enfolding American religious history into their neurotheological data. One of the neurologists involved in the Dawkins stunt suggested in an interview, for example, that Ellen G. White, nineteenth-century prophet of the Seventh-day Adventist movement, suffered a childhood head injury that affected her temporal lobes in such a way as to produce her subsequent religious visions.

That example immediately struck me as a curious incursion of history into the laboratory. To be sure, even as an outsider, I was aware that a thriving set of conversations exists on the borders of neuroscience and religion. There are the theological questions, the God-spot questions: can the places of divine-human encounter, or, at least, the places of the felt-experiences of divine-human encounter be scanned and visualized? There are the ethical questions: for example, can the lying brain be mapped, detected, and exposed? Or, can compassionate affects be imaged and reproduced—in effect, is altruism a mental skill that can be trained? There are also, of course, innumerable psychotherapeutic questions; prominent among them is whether prayer and meditation are effective allies in the healing arts and medical sciences. But, here was the prolific visionary, Ellen G. White, suddenly thrust into the speculations of a pediatric neurologist studying temporal lobe epilepsy, all because she had been hit in the face by a rock when she was nine years old. Perhaps there is, indeed, a conversation to be had not only between religion and neuroscience, but also, more specifically, between American religious history and American neuroscience.

By way of proposition and broad outline, I want to suggest three conversational pivots for that kind of discussion.

1) The first is the historical interchange between religion and technology. It is useful, I think, to step aside for a moment from the religion-science nexus and to foreground the religion-technology relationship. The use of MRI brain imaging techniques to study religion displays an exuberant confidence in a new technology’s ability to render the invisible visible, to materialize the spiritual dimensions of human experience, whether as a source of naturalistic explanation or empirical validation. The instrument itself is culturally freighted with metaphysical significance, the power to expose religion as an illusion or, conversely, to manifest its reality. Brain imaging techniques participate in this larger historical framing of technology in those terms. Neurotheology, in other words, is one more species of what we might call techno-theologizing—a phenomenon that has flourished in Western culture, especially since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Take examples from both sides. The magic lantern was widely used by the end of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century to produce ghost shows, and one of the prevailing morals of such techno-exhibitions was the ease with which the superstitious were duped. The flickering projection of spirits was an emblem of the benighted credulity of the religious imagination. When presented in this light, magic-lantern shows were a kind of performed skepticism—as Ludwig Feuerbach demonstrated. The technology made visible the illusion of the supernatural, the mechanisms of religious misperception.

On the other side of the aisle, technology was regularly seen as a conduit of empirical proof for divine realities. Was not the telegraph, for example, a herald of spiritualist communication? The Society of Psychical Research, on both sides of the Atlantic, was enamored with the notion that the new auditory technologies could well yield spiritual dividends. When the telephone appeared on the scene, some in the SPR threw themselves behind a new contraption called the “psychophone” through which the inventors claimed to be hearing the voices of angels. The psychophone no doubt sounds absurd, but I can’t say that it sounds much more far-fetched than a transcranial magnetic stimulator. Both demonstrate the enduring cultural impulse toward techno-theologizing. However much neuroscientists might want to forswear an interest in the metaphysics of their brain-scanning technology, it is clear that such brain-imaging techniques are inevitably framed by precisely those kinds of religious and cultural debates: is MRI brain imaging finally a technology that reveals absence or one that reveals presence? Is it a mechanism that shows religion to be fully reducible to and determined by biological materiality or is it one that ultimately reveals the God-spot, the hard-wiring of divine-human encounter? Asking those kinds of techno-theological questions has been a recurrent cultural theme since the Enlightenment.

2) The second pivot point is recognizing the way that the nation’s religious history shapes the way the mind has been and continues to be imagined, even in many of the study designs on meditation that emerge among contemporary neuroscientists. As novel as it may sound to be monitoring the brainwaves of Tibetan Buddhist monks in university laboratories, it is certainly not the first time that American psychologists have been drawn to meditation and its salubrious effects. It is in the tradition of Harvard’s William James, pioneering psychologist, psychical researcher, and philosopher of religion, that the current turn to the contemplative mind is best understood. Counter to the popular image of Americans as endlessly enterprising, agitated, and restless—all busy Marthas, no reflective Marys—James discerned a deep mystical cast to the American psyche and pursued that strain with uncommon intellectual devotion. Yet, when it came to what he labeled “methodical meditation,” James saw little of it left among American Christians and turned instead to homegrown practitioners of various mind-over-matter cures. He particularly accented those New Thought metaphysicians who were pushing forward a dialogue with far-flung emissaries of yoga and Buddhist meditation in the wake of the World’s Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in 1893.

Among James’s favored practitioners of these newly improvised regimens of meditation was Ralph Waldo Trine, a Boston-based reformer with a knack for inspirational writing. In his classic account The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) James used Trine’s blockbuster, In Tune with the Infinite (1897), as an epitome of the emergent practices of concentration, mental repose, and healthy-mindedness then percolating in New England and elsewhere across the country. Though an unabashed popularizer, Trine was not a light-weight. With an educational pedigree that ran from Knox College to the University of Wisconsin to Johns Hopkins University, he moved easily in Boston’s wider metaphysical circles. In much the same way that current studies promote the clinical applications of meditation, Trine emphasized the healthful benefits that accrued from cultivating a calm yet expectant mind. He had no scanners or electrodes, but he had the same hopes about improving the mental and physical health of Americans through elaborating a universal practice of meditation, one that transcended the particularities of any one religious tradition and represented a kind of essential composite of all faiths. And while Trine did not have the Dalai Lama at hand, as some neuroscientists now do, he did have extended contact with a similarly well-traveled Sinhalese Buddhist monk, Anagarika Dharmapala, with whom he compared notes and devotional habits as he was putting together his own system of meditation for Americans, a practical antidote to American nervousness and the then newly identified disease of neurasthenia.

The real pay-off for Trine, it should also be said, was not established through a calculus of productivity or cheerfulness: would encouraging meditation or other visualization techniques make people more alert and proficient at the office or on the playing field? Would it make them feel happier and less disgruntled? Trine, like James and some current neuroscientists, was finally more interested in saintliness and compassion than helping stressed-out brainworkers relax and concentrate. It is hard not to hear a hint of Richard J. Davidson’s pursuit of altruism in Trine’s contemplative emphasis on the “Spirit of Infinite Love.” And it is hard not to see that the world of William James and Ralph Waldo Trine is alive and well as American investigators wire up Buddhist monks in a search for the powers of the concentrated mind, the mental disciplines of harmony, compassion, and peace that might make the world a marginally kinder, less selfish place. That optimism about human nature—that the mind has deep reservoirs of potential for empathy and altruism—had a lot more backing among religious liberals and progressives in 1900 than it does today. Still, the considerable hopes now invested in meditation suggest that the old Jamesian aspirations continue to flourish, especially among members of the mind-preoccupied knowledge class.

3) The third point is how the broader cultural equation of religion with “spirituality,” with “mystical experience,” and with the “search for meaning,” has shaped the research concerns of neuroscience when it turns its attention to religious questions. At least in the popularized image of the intersections of religion and neuroscience that filter out of the laboratory and into, say, Newsweek, the focus seems inevitably to be on “Tibetan monks lost in meditation” or “Franciscan nuns deep in prayer.” Such images of brain imaging convey an essentialized romantic picture of religion as mystical absorption, as immediate personal experience. Despite the institutional and monastic structures that shape the lives of monks and nuns, under the scan of current cultural assumptions, they might as well all be bearers of what William James called “personal religion pure and simple.” In other words, we have in the current popularization of neuroscientific studies of prayer and meditation a near perfect mirroring of James’s definition of religion as “the experiences of individual men in their solitude.”

It is a stretch to say this, but the very image of the MRI scanner appears as a kind of hermit’s cell, a withdrawal into a narrow cave of isolation and bodily stillness. Would anyone ever expect such technology to generate a picture of the devotee’s commitment to ecclesiastical organizations, social solidarities, sacrificial systems, or gendered hierarchies? While this is a technology that James might well celebrate right along with Abraham Maslow, would it be of any use at all to Durkheim or Mary Douglas or Talal Asad? One of Andrew Newberg’s popular books on religion and brain science, for example, carries in its subtitle the equation of religion with “Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth.” We still need the companion volume on power, violence, and the construction of truth, but those brain-science images of religion are going to be a much harder sell in a culture still hungry for William James’s particular variety of religious experience—the joyous expansions of soul, the momentary gifts of intensity and calm repose, the exalted feelings of presence, and the serenity of meditative well-being. William James, a century later, remains a dazzling writer on religion, but I wouldn’t want to build a science of religion—or, a neuroscience of religion—around his fascinations alone.

Brooks’ essay is not really about Buddhism; the term only appears twice: first, when he argues that advances in neurobiology will not lead to militant atheism but to “what you might call neural Buddhism,” and second, when he says that the new work will come from “scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.” That Brooks does not define what he means by Buddhism is itself interesting. He may assume that it is common knowledge, and he is probably right.

Although it is always risky to speculate about authorial intention, one might imagine that by Buddhism, Brooks means an ancient Asian tradition that is largely free of beliefs, dogmas, and rituals; whose central form of practice is meditation; which focuses on the here and now rather than the past or the future; which has no personal deity; which is fully compatible with Jewish and Christian mysticism and, especially, with science. Each of these characteristics is historically dubious when one surveys the various forms of Buddhism that emerged across Asia over the past 2,500 years. Those characteristics, however, are all central tenets of something called Buddhist Modernism, which emerged as a result of the colonial encounter.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Methodist missionaries in Sri Lanka, Chinese revolutionaries in Shanghai, and Japanese reformers in Tokyo were all dismissing Buddhism as superstition and (in the case of the former) dismissing its followers as idolaters. A group of Buddhist elites, several of whom would visit the West, responded to these charges by claiming that Buddhism was not primitive, but instead was modern. Indeed, with its lack of a creator God and its mechanistic universe (driven by the engine of karma), it was the religion most suitable for the modern world. Some went so far as to say that Buddhism was not a religion at all, but rather a philosophy, even a science. In this way, viewed in light of the academic model of the day, which saw a movement from superstition to religion to science, Buddhism was able to leap from the beginning of the evolutionary chain to its end.

But the formation of Buddhist Modernism cannot be credited entirely to Asian Buddhists. Central to the process was the work of nineteenth-century European Orientalists. Although there were Buddhists almost everywhere else in Asia they found no Buddhists in India, the land of the Buddha’s birth; Buddhism had disappeared there by the fourteenth century. Instead, they found monuments (often in ruins), cave temples (overgrown by jungle), and statues (often broken). There were stone inscriptions to be deciphered, and there were Sanskrit manuscripts preserved in Nepal to the north and Pali manuscripts in Sri Lanka to the south. These were the materials from which European scholars would build their Buddhism.

What would come to be called “original Buddhism” or “primitive Buddhism,” became the domain of European and, later, American and then Japanese scholars. They would create a Buddha and a Buddhism unknown in Asia, one that may never have existed there before the late nineteenth century. Just as there was a quest for the historical Jesus, there was a quest for the historical Buddha, and European Orientalists felt they found him. Like Jesus, the Buddha wrote nothing and, unlike Jesus, nothing that he said was written down until four centuries (rather than four decades) after his death. This Buddhism then became a model against which the various contemporary Buddhisms of Asia were measured, and were generally found to be lacking, not only by Europeans, but eventually by Buddhist elites in Asia as well.

The Buddha was transformed from a stone idol into a man of flesh and blood, a man very much of modern times. Described by some as “the Luther of Asia,” he became famous for having spoken out against the corrupt priestcraft and the crippling caste system of “Brahmanism.” He also became something of a Romantic hero. In 1879, Edwin Arnold published a poem on the life of the Buddha, entitled The Light of Asia, that would become one of the most popular books of the Victorian period, and a favorite of Queen Victoria herself; Arnold was knighted for his work. The Buddha became an alternative Jesus, a Jesus who was not a Jew, but an Aryan. In a Europe obsessed with questions of race and questions of humanity, the Buddha was both racially superior and a savior for all humanity, an ancient kinsman, a modern hero. This Buddha was the product of a different Enlightenment.

This is the Buddhism of Brooks and the Buddhism of the burgeoning business of Buddhism and neuroscience. Here, researchers who often identify themselves as Buddhists measure the effects of meditation techniques that are not unique to Buddhism. Their Buddhism bears the mystique of the infinitely morphable, the ever modern, the perfect alternative; we can be confident that whatever these neuroscientists discover will somehow be “Buddhist.” This neural Buddhism may indeed lead to big cultural effects, as Brooks claims. But if it does, it will be important to remember how we got there, and what might have gotten lost along the way.

To begin with, neuroscientist Andrew Newberg’s brain-imaging studies of meditation, highlighted by Brooks, can easily be used to confirm rather than disprove a materialist worldview. Newberg’s finding that people who are meditating have measurable decreases in parietal lobe activity fits perfectly with the idea advanced by Richard Dawkins and others that religious experience is a product of altered or abnormal brain functioning. Contrary to the popular view that Newberg’s research supports religion, it can readily be taken as supporting the “militant atheism” Brooks wants to reject. The mind may, as Brooks says, have “the ability to transcend itself,” but we didn’t need Newberg’s SPECT scanners to tell us that.

Scientific research on “universal moral intuitions” is sure to appeal to a social conservative like Brooks, and he’s correct that evolutionary psychology has made big advances in our understanding of attachment, bonding, and pro-social emotions. Of course, these were the staple themes of early 20th century psychoanalysis, so I’m leery of calling this a “revolution” (for more on “disciplinary amnesia” in the psychology of religion, see Jeremey Carrette’s essay in this collection). In fact, Brooks leaves out the other half of the psychological equation, which Freud and Jung understood all too well: the anti-social instincts of aggression and xenophobia. In addition to showing that “love is vital to brain development,” contemporary neuroscience is also revealing how deeply primed humans are to react with hostility toward those whom we view as “other.” Given that most religions have been, and continue to be, guilty of prejudice, discrimination, and violence against perceived outsiders, I find only modest theological comfort in the latest findings of cognitive science. Brooks betrays perhaps too much confidence that the atheist cause is doomed to irrelevance.

This leads to the boldest claim made by Brooks, that “the cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.” From my perspective, he’s got it exactly backwards. Our growing knowledge about the nature and functioning of the human brain-mind system is revealing the importance of cultural influences (like the Bible) in the development of our “highest” mental faculties, while at the same time challenging traditional monotheistic belief in a single universal deity.

Regarding the Bible, I imagine Brooks means that a fundamentalist belief in the literal meaning of scripture can no longer be held. Once again, we didn’t need neuroscience to tell us that. Setting aside Creationism and other scientifically invalid claims in the Bible (and in the Qur’an, for that matter), what remains is a valuable collection of teachings about history, morality, and collective meaning-making. This is where cognitive science becomes relevant, because researchers are finding that the most sophisticated aspects of human mental functioning (language, memory, reason, imagination) are dependent on cultural influences shaping our minds from the very beginning of life. Oxford anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse, a leader in the study of cognitive science and religion, has taken to speaking of “embedded cognition” to emphasize the dynamic interplay of cultural and psychological factors in the growth of each individual mind. In sum, the cognitive revolution is giving us new ways of understanding why people’s faith in a cultural system of meaning-making like biblical religion remains so strong and is sure to continue despite its apparent incompatibility with modern science.

And what of God? Brooks speaks eloquently of God as “the unknowable total of all there is,” a formulation similar to Newberg’s “absolute unitary being” as the apex of all religious experience, whether it be Christian, Buddhist, or secular. There’s a superficial appeal to this kind of “neurotheology” (Newberg’s term), but it founders on one problematic fact: Religious experiences are more different than they are the same.

Consider the research of Nina Azari and colleagues, who performed PET scans of evangelical Christians praying to the words of Psalm 23 and found, contrary to Newberg, heightened activation of a frontal-parietal region of the brain associated with sustained reflexive evaluation of thought. Consider, too, the research of Hans Lou and colleagues, who used PET to study the brain functioning of a group of highly experienced yoga teachers during a relaxation meditation called Yoga Nidra, which includes a series of visualization exercises. Their PET results showed heightened activation in exactly those brain systems corresponding to the guided imagery tasks, which are different than the brain systems involved in praying to Psalm 23 or the types of mind-emptying meditation studied by Newberg.

The point is that there is no single model for religious experience. Humans are capable of many different modes of being religious, and the brain subserves them all in predictable and measurable ways. Brooks may follow Newberg in advocating belief in a single totalizing deity, but the actual findings of neuroscience are pointing in the opposite direction. What’s emerging is a new appreciation for the radical pluralism of religious experiences that humans are capable of generating. As better brain imaging technologies come online, we will begin to study a wider variety of spiritual phenomena (not just what occurs when people are sitting perfectly still in a laboratory), revealing new multiplicities of cognitive processing involved in different modes of religiosity. This research will not support traditional monotheistic faith in God, though it may spark a renaissance of spiritual exploration by researchers of a poly- or pantheistic bent. That’s the cultural-scientific revolution we may yet live to see.