In their chapters, Barret (Exploring Religion’s Basement) and Emmons & Schnitker (Gods and

Goals) seem to take quite different approaches to whether there is unique content to religion.

Barret argues that, at the core, religion is based on normal mechanisms of cognition applied to

the religious domain. Emmons & Schnitker argue that sanctification is a psychological process

unique to religion. Whose approach do you find more compelling and why, or in what situation?

The work of Justin Barrett in In Religion’s Basement, in which he compares a religion

with an architectural artifact, such as a cathedral, attempts to explain the significance of psycho-

cultural context. Barrett argues that just as a cathedral has plumbing, basements, and

architectural constraints, so does a religion: besides the rituals and other ornamentation that is

usually of interest to psychologists, there is a supporting substructure of beliefs and needs, which

can be informed by the Cognitive Science of Religion. In his own words, his assumption is that

“ordinary human pan-cultural psychological dynamics (cognition) inform and constrain cultural

expressions, including those we might deem religious.”

Barrett’s survey of CSR sees religion as an organic concept, grown from ordinary

psychology and not from particular situations or needs; it is an imprecise concept, with a “folk”

rather than a precise definition, and may include contradictions, as people are capable of “skating

over” inconsistencies when in “on-line” mode. The author mentions that many researchers are

comfortable with a “piecemeal” approach, considering religion to be a heterogenous grouping of

only roughly similar experiences and concepts; for example, he mentions McCauley and Lawson

as considering religious rituals to include cheering at football games, as much as sacrificing pigs

to the ancestors.

The understanding of religion in CSR, according to Barrett, is motivated by various

concepts: some are drawn from the existential need for meaning; some, from the general

tendency to find agency where there is none (for example, for the shape of rocks); and some, as

extreme or pathological versions of rituals that served a practical purpose such as hygiene. The

explanation provided for religion in this work is very mechanistic, in the sense of “focused on

the mechanism”: it includes study of the “underlying conceptual structures, bases, or

predilections” that can lead to the formation of religion and its maturation into a complete

meaning system. In this sense, it is related to the work of Kirkpatrick (in chapter 6), which

attempts to build a theory of the psychology of religion from evolutionary psychology.