LEUBA, JAMES H.

LEUBA, JAMES H. (1868–1946), was an American psychologist and one of the leading figures of the early phase of the American psychology of religion movement (1880–1930). Born in Switzerland, Leuba came to the United States as a young man and studied at Clark University under G. Stanley Hall. In 1895 he graduated from Clark and became a fellow there, and in 1896 he published the first academic study of the psychology of conversion. In 1889 he had begun teaching at Bryn Mawr College, where he spent all his active academic life. His numerous publications on the psychology of religion gave him a position of prominence in the field through the 1930s.

Leuba was responsible for the classic study on religious beliefs among scientists and psychologists. He found that the more eminent the scientist, the less likely he was to profess religious beliefs. The same finding held for psychologists. The results accorded with Leuba's own sympathies, for he was a critic of religion, a skeptic reporting on other skeptics. In his book The Psychology of Religious Mysticism (1926) he emphasized the importance of sexual impulses in motivating religious rituals and of the sexual symbolism of religious ecstasy. Leuba's work has been described as empiricist, reductionist, and antireligious. There is no doubt that in his time he was the least inclined among the leading psychologists to show any respect for conventional religion.

As Leuba himself reported, his early experiences in Switzerland led him to his critical views regarding religion and religious people. Raised in a Calvinist home, he began to have doubts, but then came under the influence of the Salvation Army and had a conversion experience. After he began his scientific studies he became an atheist. He remained, throughout the rest of his life, a critic of religion, much in the same vein as Freud, and a critic of religious hypocrites. He accused Hall and others of keeping up the appearance of religiosity for the sake of their social standing, or as a way of maintaining the authority of religious institutions in order to keep the "ignorant masses" under control. The current standing of Leuba's contribution can be gauged by the fact that of the six books he published during his lifetime, four are still in print, and one of them (The Psychology of Religious Mysticism ) was reissued as recently as 1972. His brilliant ideas regarding the origins of religion and magic presaged those of Freud and Malinowski, and should keep Leuba numbered among the true greats of the study of religion.

Bibliography

Argyle, Michael, and Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi. The Social Psychology of Religion. Boston, 1975.

Beit-Hallahmi, Benjamin. "Psychology of Religion, 1880–1930: The Rise and Fall of a Psychological Movement." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 10 (1974): 84–90.

Leuba, James H. A Psychological Study of Religion. New York, 1912.

Leuba, James H. The Belief in God and Immortality. Chicago, 1921.

Leuba, James H. The Psychology of Religious Mysticism (1926). Boston, 1972.

New Sources

Hay, David. "Psychologists Interpreting Conversion: Two American Forerunners of the Hermeneutics of Suspicion." History of the Human Sciences 12, no. 1 (1999): 55–73.

Leuba, James H. "Sources of Humanism in Human Nature." Humanist 61, no. 2 (2001): 12–15.

Wulff, David M. "James Henry Leuba: A Reassessment of a Swiss-American Pioneer." In Aspects in Contexts, edited by Jacob A. Belzen, pp. 25–44. Amsterdam; Atlanta, 2000.

Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi (1987)

Revised Bibliography