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Psychology of Religion – what do we know?

What I am attempting to present here is an overview of the state of knowledge in the psychology of religion. This overview is first and foremost personal. It cannot pretend to be "objective" or "comprehensive", since it contains a selection of several issues which seem to me to be most crucial. My personal overview is informed by my knowledge of research in this area, and by my personal philosophy about what kind of endeavour psychology should be among the other human sciences. It is clear that what I will have to say will reflect mostly upon Western concepts of "religion", and we may all want to acknowledge that our reflections upon religion are themselves part and parcel of the Western culture tradition in which we all live. As will become clear later, the overview has some implications for future directions of work. The issues I am about to present are hopelessly entangled, so I will not attempt to disentangle them, but to show their interrelationships. Before embarking on my bird's eye view of the field, let us first define it.