Christian Psychology
8
view] has its own distinctive domain and its character-
istic methods that can be justified on its own terms.
Proponents of this view say there are two jurisdictions
and each party must keep off the other’s turf. Each
must tend to its own business and not meddle in the
affairs of the other” (p. 84).
This separability solution provided in part by
modernist dualism has also been adopted as the ethi-
cal position of many modern professional societies,
including the American Psychological Association. The
APA Council of Representatives’ (2007) resolution on
religion and prejudice makes this ethic clear as it echoes
Barbour’s (1997, 2000) and Gould’s (1997) descriptions
of separability and draws a stark line of demarcation
between science and non-science. The resolution reads:
It is important for psychology as a behavioral
science, and various faith traditions as theological
systems, to acknowledge and respect their pro-
foundly different methodological, epistemological,
historical, theoretical and philosophical bases. Psy-
chology has no legitimate function in arbitrating
matters of faith and theology; and faith traditions
have no legitimate place arbitrating behavioral or
other sciences (para. 4).
Given its standing and even institutionalization
within the discipline, we refer to this separability fram-
ing of the relationship of naturalism and theism as the
conventional
view.
The APA resolution on religion and prejudice
(2007) asserts that psychology and faith are “profoundly
different” (para. 4) at almost every level. This radical
difference implies that even if psychologists and people
of faith are interested in the same phenomena and
activities (e.g., forgiveness, prayer, meditation) their
ideas about those phenomena, their methods of study-
ing those phenomena, and their interpretations of the
phenomena are completely unique and wholly different
from the other. There may be chance parallels here and
there but these two approaches and the naturalistic and
theistic worldviews they represent would not depend
on each other for knowledge. On the contrary, each
of these approaches refers only to its self-contained
epistemological criteria for tests of its knowledge claims
(Reber, 2006b).
The APA resolution on religion and prejudice also
implies that any violation of this notion of separate
domains would result in bad science and bad theology,
a sentiment strongly shared by Helminiak (2010) and
other critics of a theistic approach to psychology (Al-
cock, 2009; Hibberd, 2012). Note the language against
violations of these
nonoverlapping magisteria
in the reso-
lution: “it is
outside
the role and expertise of psycholo-
gists as psychologists to adjudicate religious or spiritual
tenets” and “those operating out of religious/spiritual
traditions are encouraged to recognize that it is
outside
their role and expertise to adjudicate empirical scientific
issues in psychology” (APA, 2007, para. 25, emphasis
added). The resolution does state that psychologists can
“appropriately speak” to the psychological implications
of faith “when relevant psychological findings about
those implications exist” (para. 25) and people of faith
“can appropriately speak to theological implications
of psychological science” (para. 25), but that is only
possible because those implications occur within the
relevant domain of expertise. If religious activities or
beliefs promote psychological health, for example, it
is appropriate for psychologists to study those psycho-
logical health outcomes because psychological health
is within the domain of psychology. The precepts and
values of the faith that inform the religious activities or
beliefs, on the other hand, are off limits because faith
belongs to the non-psychological, non-scientific, subjec-
tive domain. Such is the perspective of many psycholo-
gists in the discipline, including many in the psychology
of religion (Piedmont, 2008; Nelson, 2009).
One challenging implication of this separability
perspective is that it leaves psychologists who are also
theists little choice but to compartmentalize their the-
ism and their psychology (Clark, 1993). As one profes-
sor described it (Nelson, 1999), he had to learn how to
wear two hats. When he went to work at the psychol-
ogy laboratory he wore the hat of naturalistic, scientific
psychology and operated according to all the assump-
tions, values, and meanings of that worldview. When
he went to church or studied the Bible he put on his
faith hat and operated according to all the assumptions,
values, and meanings of that worldview. This meant
that God’s activity only mattered in the realm of faith
and worship. God was wholly irrelevant to the natural
events and causes this professor studied and interpreted
in his psychology lab.
This compartmentalization approach is not just a
matter of separability. It is, as we will discuss in more
detail in the next section, also a matter of superiority.
The professor who claimed to wear two hats takes the
hat of naturalistic psychological science to be superior
to the hat of faith in the context of his work in the
lab where he assumes he must conceive of his “world”
as dealing solely with natural events and causes, and
God’s activity is not functionally relevant. At the same
time, he considers his hat of faith a better fit for his
religious life where God is relevant and participates.
This context-specific superiority is not surprising. The
problem is that the hats and the contexts of the lab
and church, as well as many other contexts are framed
by the same subjectivity/objectivity dualism that also
frames methods, theories, disciplines, and worldviews,
and inevitably hierarchically arranges the hats and con-
texts themselves (Clark, 1993).
Worldview Superiority
It should go without saying that objectivity is
generally
seen as superior to subjectivity in modern psychological
science. Yet, just to make the point, we have examined
THEISTIC PSYCHOLOGY AND THE RELATION OF WORLDVIEWS
