Religion and religiosity

Allolio-Näcke, Lars; Demmrich, Sarah

Zusammenfassung

Religion and religiosity are among the most controversial terms in cultural psychology. While religion remains at an external descriptive level of a symbol system with cosmic perception, religiosity characterizes an inner experience and actually leaves it up to the individual to define what is religious in his/her everyday world. However, this ideal conception has been blurred by the increase in Euro-American-centric measurement tools for religiosity—which are increasingly and often uncritically applied cross-culturally. Following this object and concept determination, a theoretical-historical introduction to the psychology of religion and to the recent cultural psychology of religion is provided. In conclusion, the Euro-American-centric distortion of our field is questioned using a case example from the Turkish-Muslim context and a further decolonization of the subject is advocated.