In Spiritualities of Life, Paul Heelas has what seems to me a common sense approach to studying spirituality from a social science position. It is, of course, difficult to do. One the one hand you can take people’s word for what’s going on, or you can claim that the social scientist knows better than them what they are doing. Neither approach should be ruled out. But, Heelas comments:
‘As social scientists, we do not have independent access to ‘spirituality’. By this I mean that if spirituality exists, it is highly likely that it exists as a state of affairs which lies beyond anything which can be studied, scientifically, by way of publicly accessible information.’ (92).
Therefore, though ‘We don’t have to believe the ontological truth of what they report…it is appropriate to take their word’ (93). The point is there is no ‘objective reality’ against which to test what people say about their spirituality. It is not like class, about which we can have fairly good indications (newspapers, housing, occupations), so that what class people consider themselves to be, can be compared to a fairly robust description and we can agree/disagree on good grounds. In order ‘to move beyond the participants’ frame of reference requires good evidence; perhaps the participant letting slip; perhaps observational evidence; perhaps contradictions.’ (95). Heelas thinks the amount of good evidence for moving beyond what people experience in their spirituality is difficult to come by.
This causes another problem, because we are then stuck with competing accounts of spirituality, or spiritual realities. Another difficult with studying spirituality is that it can be used to ‘render apparent falsifications non-falsifiable.’ E.g. you prayed for healing but she died, and the response is not, ‘this proves there is no god,’ but, ‘we didn’t have enough faith.’ How can you prove this one way or the other?
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