Deconversion and “Spirituality”—Migrations in the Religious Field

Abstract

This book presents the findings of Bielefeld-based cross-cultural Study on “Spirituality,” which had research teams at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, and at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Both teams have cooperated in designing research, collecting data, evaluating them quantitatively and qualitatively, and finally in writing the—multi-authored— chapters of this volume.1 The research presented in this book is a direct result of our previous cooperative project on deconversion in both Germany and the USA (Streib, Hood, Keller, Csöff, & Silver, 2009). In that previous project, we used and introduced, for the first time in Germany, a fourfold distinction based on the binary that was gaining popularity among American researchers: the binary created by contrasting “religious” and “spiritual” self-identifications, which has a history that parallels in many ways Allport’s distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic religion and can be used to create a useful typology, which however is more common in sociological than psychological research (Hood, 1978). Psychologists are more likely to avoid typology measures particularly, since typologies and associated statistical analyses may have less significant power. Thus, Allport’s well-known typology has been explored by psychologists primarily as independent dimensions and testing interactive effects (e.g., intrinsic × extrinsic) as the primary research technique (Donahue, 1985). However, criticisms of empirical research with Allport’s typology have not suggested that Allport’s considerable conceptual work be ignored (Kirkpatrick & Hood, 1990), even as empirical research continues using various statistical techniques that nevertheless are guided, if only implicitly, by Allport’s original typology (Krauss & Hood, 2013).