Key Factors Influencing Religious Experiences

What actually shapes a religious experience? Is it purely the individual’s mental state – their openness, their faith, their psychological readiness? Or does the social world around them play just as powerful a role? These are not simple questions, and philosophers, sociologists, and theologians have been wrestling with them for well over a century. From Richard Swinburne’s analytical approach to Rudolf Otto’s phenomenology of the holy, several major thinkers have mapped out the key factors that make religious experiences what they are. Together, their insights reveal that such experiences are shaped by a rich, layered interplay of psychological, sociological, and theological forces.

What counts as a religious experience? 🔗

Before examining the factors that shape religious experiences, it helps to be clear about what the term means. A religious experience is generally understood as a moment in which a person seems to encounter something divine, sacred, or transcendent – a higher power, a presence beyond ordinary reality, or a profound spiritual truth. These moments can be dramatic and visionary, or quiet and contemplative. They can be intensely private, or shared collectively by an entire congregation. What distinguishes them is their apparent significance: they tend to leave a deep mark on those who have them and often reorient a person’s life, beliefs, or sense of self.

Richard Swinburne, one of the most influential contemporary philosophers of religion, defines religious experience as a conscious mental event that seems to the experiencer to involve an encounter with a supernatural reality – such as God, an angel, or another spiritual being. That word “seems” is philosophically important: Swinburne is careful to note that the experience itself, rather than its verified truth, is what the analysis begins with.

Swinburne’s contribution: categorising religious experience 🔗

Swinburne’s first major contribution is taxonomic – he works out a clear classification of the different forms religious experiences can take. According to Swinburne, there are five distinct types, divided into public and private categories. Public experiences involve perceiving the divine through an ordinary object – such as sensing God through the beauty of a sunset – or through an extraordinary public event that seems to violate natural law, like Moses encountering the burning bush. Private experiences, meanwhile, can involve describable spiritual visions (such as hearing an angel speak), sensations that resist ordinary description (perceived through what Swinburne calls a spiritual “sixth sense”), or even encounters with the divine that involve no sensations at all, where the person simply feels aware of a supernatural presence without any perceptual content to point to.

This typology matters because it identifies different kinds of factors at play – from the sensory and perceptual, to the entirely interior and non-sensory.

The principle of credulity 🔗

Swinburne’s second major contribution concerns how we should evaluate religious experiences. He argues that religious experiences carry evidential weight through what he calls the Principle of Credulity. The idea is straightforward: if something appears to be the case to a person, we have good reason to believe it probably is the case, unless there is specific evidence to the contrary. Swinburne’s position is that we ought to treat experiences as reliable “unless and until we have evidence that we are mistaken” – applying the same standard of rational trust we extend to ordinary sense perception. If someone claims to have perceived the presence of God and there is no reason to think they were deluded, intoxicated, or dishonest, that experience stands as legitimate evidence for what it appears to report.

He pairs this with a Principle of Testimony: just as we routinely trust others’ reports of their perceptual experiences, we should also extend that trust to those who report religious encounters, absent specific reasons for doubt. Together, these principles make the psychological and perceptual state of the individual a foundational factor – one that determines whether a religious experience can be taken seriously as evidence at all.

Martin Buber and the psychology of the I-Thou encounter 🔗

While Swinburne focuses on the epistemology of religious experience, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber turns attention to its relational quality. In his 1923 work I and Thou, Buber distinguishes between two fundamental modes of engaging with the world. The I-It relationship treats the other – whether a person or an object – as a thing to be used, analysed, or categorised. The I-Thou relationship, by contrast, is a mode of genuine, undivided encounter in which the other is met fully and personally, not as a means to an end.

For Buber, a genuine religious experience is only possible in the I-Thou mode. When a person turns toward the divine with complete openness – not seeking something from the encounter, not treating God as a concept to be examined – the possibility of real spiritual meeting arises. A shallow or transactional orientation forecloses this possibility. This places a person’s psychological disposition at the heart of the religious encounter: the depth and authenticity of the experience depends directly on the quality of presence and openness the individual brings to it.

Importantly, Buber’s account also contrasts with Rudolf Otto’s (discussed below). Where Otto emphasises the radical otherness and impersonal awesomeness of the divine, Buber insists on personal relationship as the defining feature of genuine religious encounter. For Buber, the divine is not an overwhelming force that dwarfs the person, but a presence that calls the person into genuine dialogue.

The sociological dimension: Weber and Durkheim 🔗

Not all factors shaping religious experience are internal to the individual. Sociologists have consistently argued that the social environment – rituals, community, institutional structures, and collective symbols – plays a constitutive role in how religious experiences arise and what form they take.

Max Weber: charisma and social structures 🔗

Max Weber’s contribution to the sociology of religious experience centres on the concept of charismatic authority. Weber observed that religious experiences are often catalysed or shaped by charismatic religious leaders – figures whose personal authority, perceived divine connection, and capacity to inspire give followers access to intense spiritual states they might not reach on their own. The religious experience of the follower is thus not purely individual; it is mediated by social and institutional structures. Weber also noted that as religions become institutionalised, the raw, immediate quality of original religious experience tends to be formalised and routinised – a process he called the routinisation of charisma. This has direct implications for the kinds of religious experiences available within a given tradition at a given time.

Durkheim: collective effervescence and the sacred 🔗

Émile Durkheim went further in grounding religious experience in social life. In his landmark 1912 work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim argued that religion is fundamentally a social phenomenon. For Durkheim, the sacred is not something supernatural but rather a concentrated expression of collective social power – society itself, experienced as something greater than and apart from the individual. What we feel in religious moments of awe or transcendence, Durkheim argued, is the reality of our deep social bonds rendered emotionally vivid.

Central to this account is what Durkheim called collective effervescence – the intense emotional energy that arises when people gather together in shared ritual. According to Durkheim, group members during such rituals experience a dissolution of individual boundaries and a sense of unity with something larger than themselves; this is the experiential core of what religions call encountering the divine. Shared rituals, sacred objects, and communal worship are therefore not merely expressions of pre-existing belief – they are the conditions that generate religious experience in the first place.

Georg Simmel: the individual within social forms 🔗

Georg Simmel offered a more nuanced sociological perspective. Where Durkheim emphasised the collective, Simmel focused on how individual religious experience is shaped by the specific social forms and structures within which a person exists. For Simmel, religion is not simply a product of collective ritual; it is also a form of individual inner life that takes on religious character when a person relates to the transcendent in a way that mirrors the deepest bonds of human society. The social environment does not dictate the content of religious experience, but it provides the conditions of possibility – the relational context and symbolic vocabulary through which experience becomes meaningful and religious in character.

Joachim Wach and the typology of religious experience 🔗

The scholar of comparative religion Joachim Wach – himself significantly influenced by Otto – made a systematic effort to classify religious experiences and identify what conditions support their depth and authenticity. Wach argued that religious experience is never a purely subjective phenomenon; it always expresses itself in three forms: theoretical (doctrine and belief), practical (ritual and worship), and sociological (community and fellowship). These three expressions are not separate from the experience itself – they are the forms through which it becomes real and transmissible.

For Wach, this means that factors like a person’s level of theological formation, their denominational tradition, and their level of active participation in communal religious life all directly shape the depth and character of their religious encounters. Knowledge, practice, and community are not just consequences of religious experience; they are also among its enabling conditions.

Rudolf Otto and the structure of the holy 🔗

Perhaps the most influential account of the intrinsic structure of religious experience comes from the German theologian Rudolf Otto. In his 1917 masterwork Das Heilige (published in English as The Idea of the Holy), Otto introduced the concept of the numinous – derived from the Latin numen, meaning divine spirit – to describe a category of experience that he argued lies at the heart of all religion and cannot be reduced to ethical, aesthetic, or rational categories.

For Otto, the numinous is encountered as the ganz Andere – the “wholly other” – something entirely beyond ordinary experience and rational comprehension. Otto characterised this encounter through the Latin phrase mysterium tremendum et fascinans: the divine presents itself simultaneously as a tremendous, daunting mystery and as something deeply attractive and fascinating.

The two poles of the numinous 🔗

The tremendum refers to the overpowering, awe-inspiring dimension of the holy – the sense of being in the presence of something vastly greater than oneself, which produces feelings of humility, creaturely smallness, and a kind of sacred dread. Otto analyses the tremendum as consisting of “awefulness,” “overpoweringness,” and what he calls “energy” or urgency – the impression of immense, compulsive force. This is not ordinary fear; it is the specific emotional register of confronting absolute otherness.

The fascinans, on the other hand, is the attractive, captivating pole – the sense that this same overwhelming presence is also deeply good, gracious, and compelling. As Otto describes it, the fascinans draws the person into the experience, producing something akin to spiritual joy or bliss. The mystery does not merely terrify; it enchants. These two poles are not contradictory but inseparable – together, they constitute the distinctive emotional texture of genuine religious encounter.

Otto’s account points to a factor that neither psychological openness nor sociological context can fully explain: the intrinsic character of the divine as it presents itself to human consciousness. The numinous, on Otto’s view, is irreducibly sui generis – self-generated and unique, not reducible to any other category of human thought or emotion. This is why Otto’s work has remained central to the phenomenology of religion and has influenced thinkers from Carl Jung and Mircea Eliade to C.S. Lewis.

Putting it together: a multidimensional picture 🔗

What emerges from these thinkers is that religious experiences are genuinely complex – shaped by factors operating at multiple levels simultaneously. At the individual level, one’s psychological state, quality of attention, and relational orientation toward the divine (Swinburne, Buber) all play constitutive roles. At the social level, rituals, community structures, charismatic authority, and shared symbolic systems (Weber, Durkheim, Simmel) condition what experiences are possible and how they are interpreted. At the level of practice and formation, one’s theological tradition, doctrinal understanding, and active participation in religious life (Wach) deepen the experiential capacity. And at the level of the sacred itself, the intrinsic character of the divine as tremendous and fascinating mystery (Otto) provides the ultimate object toward which all these factors orient.

No single factor is sufficient on its own. Religious experience, as these thinkers collectively show us, is not merely a psychological projection, nor purely a social product, nor simply a response to divine intervention – it is all of these things in conversation with one another.

What do you think? Does the depth of a religious experience depend more on the inner psychological disposition of the individual – as Buber suggests – or on the external social and ritual conditions that surround it, as Durkheim argued? And if Rudolf Otto is right that the numinous is truly beyond rational comprehension, what does that mean for philosophy’s ability to explain religious experience at all?

References

1. https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2025/03/14/swinburne-on-religious-experience/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_religious_experience
3. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/buber/
4. https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/the-sage-encyclopedia-of-sociology-of-religion/chpt/collective-effervescence
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_effervescence
6. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Georg-Simmel
7. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rudolf-Otto
8. https://www.britannica.com/topic/mysterium-tremendum-et-fascinans
9. https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2025/05/24/otto/
10. https://www.magiscenter.com/blog/mysterium-tremendum-et-fascinans-numen
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numinous