Is There One Emotion at the Heart of All Religion?
Beaten, But Rejoicing: The Puzzle of Religious Emotions
It was around 33 CE in Jerusalem. The apostles had been flogged by the religious council for teaching about Jesus. As they stumbled out, backs bleeding, they were not angry or scared. They were rejoicing — because they had been counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name (Acts 5:41). How could suffering bring joy? That joy felt different from ordinary happiness. It was packed with a belief: that their pain connected them to Jesus. This raises a huge question. What makes an emotion religious? Is there one special feeling that only religious people have? Or are religious emotions just ordinary human feelings — joy, fear, guilt — aimed at a divine target? Philosophers have debated this for more than two hundred years, and the answer matters for anyone who has ever wondered whether their feelings come from God or just from their own minds.
Schleiermacher’s Big Idea: The Feeling of Absolute Dependence
Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) was a German theologian who wanted to find the essence of all religion — the one thing every real religious experience shares. He called it the feeling of absolute dependence. Imagine you’re lying on your back on a clear night, staring at the stars. You didn’t make the universe; you can’t change its course. You feel completely, utterly dependent on something beyond you. That, Schleiermacher said, is the core of piety. He insisted this feeling is immediate — not something you figure out with arguments, but a raw awareness, like feeling cold before you think the word “cold.” The object of that feeling isn’t any particular thing in the world. It’s the “Beyond” that caused everything, the source of all existence. According to Schleiermacher, every truly religious emotion — joy, gratitude, awe — contains this feeling of absolute dependence as its hidden heart. Without it, an emotion might be nice or sad, but it wouldn’t be religious.
Yet many found problems. If God is completely beyond the world, beyond any influence, then God can’t have attributes like mercy or justice — God becomes a blank “something.” And if the feeling is just total impotence, it sounds more like despair than religion. Schleiermacher’s own Christian faith seems to clash with his philosophy: a God who becomes human and answers prayers is not absolutely beyond the world.
Otto’s Mysterious Trembling: The Numinous Feeling
Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) agreed that there is one essential religious feeling, but he described it differently. He called it the experience of the numinous, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans — a mystery that makes you tremble and yet fascinates you. Think of walking alone into a vast, dark cathedral and feeling a shiver that’s part fear, part wonder. Or the eerie dread that creeps over you in a deep forest, mixed with a strange attraction. Otto said the core of religion is this shuddering awe before a “wholly other” presence, a power that dwarfs you entirely. He criticized Schleiermacher for focusing on dependence: for Otto, the feeling was first about the overwhelming majesty and energy of the divine, not about your own smallness. The feeling isn’t about ethics or doctrines; it’s a raw, non-rational encounter. Otto thought this feeling lives in every religion, from ancient tribal worship to Christianity.
But Otto’s numinous feeling faces a similar problem: it’s so generic that it erases what makes a religion distinctive. A Buddhist monk and a Christian nun might both feel awe, but their emotions might mean very different things. If awe alone makes something religious, then a scary movie that gives you goosebumps could count — and that seems wrong.
William James Drops a Bombshell: There Is No One Religious Emotion
The American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910) thought the whole hunt for a single religious emotion was a mistake. In his classic book The Varieties of Religious Experience, he wrote: “Religious love is only man’s natural emotion of love directed to a religious object; religious fear is only the ordinary fear of commerce, so to speak, the common quaking of the human breast, in so far as the notion of divine retribution may arouse it.” In other words, joy aimed at God is still joy; guilt before God is still guilt. There is no mysterious extra ingredient. James compared the essentialists to someone who insists that all desserts must contain one secret flavor — but really, sweetness comes from sugar, smoothness from cream, tartness from fruit. The varieties of religious emotion are just as diverse: gratitude, contrition, hope, compassion, awe. The only thing they share is that they are about a divine object. This view is now called a diversity account: religious emotions are normal human emotions that happen to have a religious focus. James himself had a bodily theory of emotion — he famously said we feel afraid because we run, not the other way around — but his later work on religion emphasized the meaning and perceptions, not just gut reactions. Today, many philosophers side with James: there is no single “religious feeling.”
Beliefs That Shape Your Feelings: Gratitude, Contrition, and Compassion
If James is right, what makes a gratitude religious rather than ordinary? The answer is the beliefs you’re holding as you feel it. Religious emotions come with a backpack of ideas. When a Christian says the General Thanksgiving — “We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ” — her gratitude isn’t just warm fuzzies. She’s construing her whole existence as a gift from a personal God, her daily life as preserved by God, and her deepest hope as rooted in Christ’s sacrifice. The feeling is woven from those beliefs.
Contrition works the same way. In a classic prayer, believers confess “manifold sins and wickedness” before God as “Judge of all men,” yet also appeal to God’s mercy through Christ. So the emotion is a blend of sorrow, guilt, and serene trust — not just a knot in the stomach, but a perception of oneself as wrong yet loved.
Compassion offers a striking example. The philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) analyzed tragic compassion as a pain felt when someone suffers undeservedly, and you believe it could happen to you too. But Mother Teresa (1910–1997), who served the dying in Calcutta, prayed: “Dearest Lord, may I see you today and every day in the person of your sick.” For her, the poor sufferer was Christ in disguise, so compassion overflowed with gratitude and sweet service, not just pity. She didn’t care whether the person deserved the suffering; she saw a brother for whom Christ died. The religious character comes from the specific theological lens, not from a universal shudder.
Real or Fake? Kierkegaard and Edwards on Genuine Religious Emotion
If religious emotions are shaped by beliefs, then you can ask: Is this emotion genuinely Christian, or is it just a generic high? The Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) tackled this head-on. He examined the case of a pastor named Adler who claimed to have a revelation. Adler was deeply moved, shaken to the core. Kierkegaard respected the intensity, but pointed out that Adler’s emotion lacked distinctively Christian concepts. It was a powerful feeling, but not a Christian feeling, because it wasn’t “checked by the definition of concepts.” In other words, if your emotion doesn’t actually connect to the core ideas of the faith — sin, grace, redemption — it might be dramatic but misleading.
The American theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) made a similar point during the Great Awakening revivals. People were having intense bodily reactions, weeping, shouting. Edwards said intensity alone proved nothing. In his Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, he listed twelve reliable signs of genuine spiritual emotion. For instance, sign 5: the emotion involves a deep conviction that the gospel’s great truths are real. Sign 6: “evangelical humiliation,” a reluctance to think you’re better than others. Sign 12: the emotion leads to consistent Christian action — not just excitement that evaporates. Both Kierkegaard and Edwards offer a kind of emotional quality control: they help you sift through your feelings to see if they’re the real thing.
Why It Still Matters
Maybe you’ve felt a rush during a church service, a moment of quiet peace while helping a friend, or a shiver while looking at a sunset. Is that God? Or just your brain’s chemistry? The debate over essentialism vs. content helps you think it through. If Schleiermacher and Otto are right, then the test is whether you feel a special kind of awe or dependence — something unique you can’t quite put into words. But if James and the belief-shaping view are right, the question isn’t whether the feeling itself is special; it’s what you believe and how you perceive the situation. A gratitude that sees a friend’s kindness as a gift from God is religious; a gratitude that sees only a lucky break is not. And you can learn to cultivate these emotions by absorbing the stories and teachings of a tradition — they shape the way you feel.
Understanding this also protects you from being fooled. A crowd at a concert can feel overwhelming joy and togetherness, but that doesn’t mean they’re experiencing God. Intense feelings can be produced by music, lights, and group energy. Kierkegaard and Edwards remind us to ask: What does this feeling make me think, believe, and do? Does it lead me to be humbler, more compassionate, more honest? If not, the feeling might just be emotional noise — however loud it is.
The next time you feel something you suspect is religious, you can be your own philosopher: Don’t just ask “How strong is this?” but “What story am I telling myself about who God is, who I am, and what this moment means?”
Think about it
- If you felt a deep sense of peace while giving money to someone in need, would you call that a religious feeling? What makes it religious — the peace itself, or the thoughts you have about why you’re doing it?
- Can a feeling be “Christian” if the person doesn’t believe anything about Jesus? Or must the feeling be tied to specific beliefs like forgiveness or grace?
- When someone at a concert raises their hands and feels overwhelmed, is that the same as feeling God’s presence in church? If you think there’s a difference, what is it?
