The Humanity of the Gods: The Past and Future of Freud's Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Religion

Shortly after the publication of Sigmund Freud's “The Future of an Illusion” (1927), the poet T. S. Eliot (1929) gave it a negative review, emphatically stating, “it has little to do with the past or the present of religion, and nothing, so far as I can see, with its future” (p. 350). Eliot could not have been more mistaken. Indeed, a case can be made that no single thinker—not Marx, not Gandhi, not Billy Graham, not Pope John XXIII—has had a greater impact on the 20th century understanding of religion than Freud.

Freud's ideas have undoubtedly played a central animating role in the academic study of religion. But they have influenced religion outside the classroom as well. The popularization in literature and in film of Freudian theories about the human psyche, about sexuality, guilt, and the unconscious have played a transforming role in the way in which most of us in the modern Western world have come to think about the nature of the religious life. When atheists dismiss religion as a “crutch,” they are recapitulating in a terse shorthand form one level of a far more complex argument that Freud himself made about the function of religious beliefs and practices. Yet, curiously, even though Freud was an atheist, his views have also shaped the understanding of religion within faith communities decisively, especially among Jews and Christians. Prominent theologians have drawn on Freud's insights to deepen their own analyses of belief (Homans, 1970). Freudian ideas have made their way into Christian and Jewish culture through books, sermons, and new models of pastoral care. Finally, perhaps it was inevitable—as religious belief has grown increasingly personalistic or individualistic over the course of the twentieth century—that the psychology of religion would become a part of popular religious culture. In any case Freud has found a prominent place among both atheists and believers not only in the