Columbia University has become the first Ivy League school in this modern era to venture into psychology and spirituality. It’s clinical psychology program is experimenting with integrating psychotherapy and spirituality in ways seldom seen at a major research university. It may be part of a trend.

It appears a few more secular universities, which have been almost phobic in their resistance to religion and spirituality in the past 50 years, are getting ready to take the subjects more seriously.

Indeed, the academic logjam of materialistic atheism seems to have been broken a couple of other times this year, with the philosophy department of the University of California, Riverside, breaking a stigma by accepting a $5 million Templeton grant to research reports of an afterlife.

As well, University of B.C. researcher Edward Slingerland is heading upa $3 million grant to study the interface of religion and morality.

And, as this week’s New York Times article about Columbia University says, there are other institutes around the U.S. that are looking at “spiritual psychology.” They include the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco and Sofia University, until last month known as the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology, in Palo Alto, Calif.

Here’s an excerpt from the NYT piece:

“It’s a very significant step, because outside of the faith-based training programs, these training programs related to religion and spirituality have been few and far between,” said Julie Exline, the president of a division of the American Psychological Association focused on the subject. “It helps to make the topic seem more mainstream and less fringy.”

At the same time, this kind of psychology has critics. “From my perspective, psychology must remain neutral,” said David Wulff, a past president of a division of the American Psychological association. “With the assumption that we are inherently spiritual beings, I worry that therapists who come out of such a program are going to be approaching their clients with this expectation that they have to contact their spirituality, and I don’t know where that is going to leave some clients.”

I find Wulff’s comments peculiar. What does he mean by “neutral?” I suggest he is implying that “neutral” psychology means non-religious psychology. And it could even be he thinks only atheistic psychology is “neutral.”

But how is it “neutral” to keep religion and spirituality out of psychology; to keep it a forbidden subject? Polls continually show most North Americans are spiritually or religiously inclined. Wouldn’t they want to talk to therapists about such subjects? It seems Wulff’s “neutrality” reflects a distinct bias, if not prejudice. It is a misunderstanding of the value of secularization.

Why, until recently, has one of the most powerful phenomenon known to humanity been largely shoved out of academia? There is nothing inherently wrong with a person holding to a philosophy of materialistic reductionism.  I’m sure some of the researchers involved in these programs hold such views. But there is no reason that scientific materialism — if not actual atheism — should be the default position in higher education. Kudos to Columbia and others.

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