Three decades of the Polish psychology of religion (1989–2020)

Introduction: positioning the paper

The year 2019 was special for the Polish psychology of religion. The International Association for the Psychology of Religion (IAPR) held its conference in Poland for the first time—in Gdańsk, a city with long tradition of multiculturalism, of religious plurality and freedom fighting, because it was here that the “Solidarity” movement was born. The Solidarity movement is known internationally for ending the communist regime in Poland, and it is that moment—the year 1989—that marks the start of the three decades described in this article. As for 2019, it also marks the first time that a woman, Polish professor Halina Grzymała-Moszczyńska, was elected chair of the International Association for the Psychology of Religion board (Brandt, 2019). Together with the conference organized by the Institute of Psychology at the University of Gdańsk (IAPR, 2019), this fact may mean that Polish psychology of religion will be of more interest to scholars in the future, both members of the Association and psychologists of religion in general. Therefore, now may be a good moment to consider the history of the discipline in Poland, its relations with its sister disciplines (especially other branches of psychology and religious studies), as well as the cultural idiosyncrasies of Polish scholars, their research and theoretical perspectives.

There is proof that the Polish milieu has already made its presence recognizable: during the IAPR congress in 2017 in Istanbul, one member observed during the gala dinner that there existed a socio-gastronomic phenomenon of the “Polish Table.” The observer, not Polish himself, asked how could he join that formation, commenting that “you Poles can stick together.” This anecdote hints at the stance taken in this paper, a hermeneutic perspective of a historian of the discipline, which the author should explain before passing to a proper analysis of the subject. This paper, due to its author and narrator being a cultural and disciplinary insider, is closer to an emic perspective—an insider’s point of view on a phenomenon, or an indigenous approach to Polish psychology of religion. In psychology, the indigenous approach is gaining popularity as a research field but also as a method. Interest in cultural psychology of religion is growing among the IAPR members, probably partly because of Jacob Belzen’s widely discussed book (Belzen, 2010; Belzen & Lewis, 2010) as well as the various thoughts expressed in the Archive for the Psychology of Religion (Ladd, 2019; however, it can also be considered, as a “rediscovery” of cultural approach, since those themes were present in psychology since the disciple’s inception, Pankalla & Stachowski, 2011). The indigenous approach is rarely applied for studying Western cultures, which is understandable, given that one of the founding ideas of that current of psychology is expanding research beyond the WEIRD sample. Nevertheless, as Smyer Yü (2007) has noticed already, the indigenous approach sometimes forgets about “Western indigeneity”—the fact, that the cultures which dominate the psychological literature can also be studied from the indigenous perspective. What’s more, it is possible to perform psychological research, including psychology of religion, using the indigenous perspective, while being a member of a Western culture, by adopting the aforementioned insider stance, taking into consideration cultural conditions and differences, and using one’s own deeper insight into one’s own culture, while trying to maintain an observer’s perspective (anthropologists K. Fox names this kind of approach “anthropology at home,,” Fox, 2014). In Polish psychology of religion, this stance is proposed by, for example, Andrzej Pankalla and Konrad Kośnik, who point out that Polish psychology of religion can have its own characteristics, its nomenclature, tools and methodology; a fact that—according to the precepts of the indigenous paradigm—makes it more credible when exploring culturally characteristic phenomena as compared to psychology “delivered from the outside,” mostly Americanized (Pankalla & Kośnik, 2019). At this point, it could be worth noting that the countries that have experienced communism and isolation behind the Iron Curtain may have a tendency to look toward the West as a source of all knowledge, and to idealize the West in general and the achievements of “foreign academics” in particular. This paper will examine the way in which historical Polish psychology of religion could be considered as “indigenous,” and how some of its recent works could be interpreted in the context of (often unconscious or unintentional) “indigenization.” Cultural changes brought about by these 30 years, especially the change of the political system, will be an important factor here, as will be their psychological influence on psychologists.

Unfortunately, aside one paper in English (Grzymała-Moszczyńska, 1991b), all previous works on the subject were published in Polish and did not venture in their scope into 21st century, hence the aim of the article is to present this historical period in Polish psychology of religion to an international reader. Polish literature up to date has mostly offered a perspective of scholars who were direct witnesses of political processes which took place in the first of the titular three decades (e.g. Doktór, 2001; Socha, 2001a; Szmyd, 2002) and often in earlier historical events as well, because all of those authors are from a generation which started its academic career somewhere in the 1970s.

Thematically, the paper will focus on presenting Polish literature of the subject, its important books, ¹ as well as important organized events and research trends. Thus, as an analysis of psychology of religion’s history, this paper focuses on “concrete products of scientific inquiry” (Nelson, 2012, p. 656) taking into account the context in which they emerged during interpretation. It is impossible to present a complete picture of Polish psychology of religion in all its complexity within a single article, due to wordcount. Therefore, in this article, I have decided to present main monographic works of Polish authors of the last three decades that are affiliated with Polish universities, both state and private—Catholic, ² and to discuss in a summative manner some recent studies published by Polish scholars in the discipline’s five leading journals in order to show their current research focus. I have also decided on a chronological order, corresponding to this overview approach, while I have another article in preparation, in which theoretical perspectives and approaches as well as empirical research will be presented in a thematic order. This narrowing down of the scope of interest allows the paper to have a rational volume, but it means that some matters will be broached only partially or even omitted. This paper can therefore serve as both an introduction and a summary: an analysis of the three decades of Polish psychology of religion from the moment when the first anglophone article on the subject appeared in The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion; an article published by the present chairwoman of the IAPR (Grzymała-Moszczyńska, 1991b), therefore Polish scholars have been present in that journal since volume 1.

A problematic inheritance: Polish psychology of religion after 1989

During the communist regime in Poland, so before 1989, psychology of religion functioned, both from an institutional and scholarly point of view, mostly as part of theology, philosophy or pastoral psychology studies conducted in academic centers established by the Roman Catholic Church. On the other hand, religious studies also paid some attention to research, theory and methodology of a psychological approach to religion. This, however, was often “Marxist religious studies,” strongly shaped by ideology, aiming not only at a hermeneutically precise analysis of religious phenomena which should be the aim of the discipline, but also at (or primarily at) their criticism, dispraising institutionalized religiosity. Nevertheless, Marxist religious scholars did “notice” confessional scholars, if only because of their vocal participation in the academic discourse on religion, especially in psychology of religion. For example, Zygmunt Poniatowski (1962) noted that “this discipline is fairly developed in Poland, especially by Catholic theorists.” (p. 271). Still, one has to agree with Paweł Socha when he says that being a psychologist of religion in Poland was, at the time, a binary affair: one could either be a confessional “psychologist for religion” or a critical “psychologist against religion.” When making that observation, Socha (2001a) himself speaks of “psychologies” and not of “psychologists,” (pp. 235–236) but it would seem that a personal factor is important here, especially since taking a stance in this matter was also a political declaration, or at least an ideological one. The potential dominance of the power discourse—politics (ideology) and religion—thus influenced the supposedly most important discourse, one that should uniformly rule psychology: the scientific discourse. This situation was also undoubtedly affected by the tension between the Polish Society for the Study of Religions (founded 1958, and in operation till present day), whose Marxist-oriented members were often against religion, and the Catholic milieu (Grzymała-Moszczyńska & Hoffmann, 1998). On the other hand, this binary character of the discipline was often related to personal choices, and some scholars tried to avoid taking either stance, at least in publications, while others later maintained that their anti-religious, Marxist stance was just a declaration made for political reasons (Hoffmann, 2015, p. 107) which can of course also be seen as an excuse, or an attempt to change the team in the last minute of the match. Religion in the communist era was certainly a “sensitive” topic, but we cannot say that there was no value-neutral research into religion at the time (as proposed by, for example, Horyna, 2001). It should also be noted that a specific theoretical perspective is not a reason to invalidate a study or an author, provided that the perspective is clearly expressed. Thus, one is moved to agree with Bubik and Hoffmann (2015), who say that Eastern Europe during the communist era saw valuable works emerge on both sides of the divide. In this context, Szyjewski (1995) explains the approach of Jagiellonian University’s Institute of Religious Studies:

We should also mention the program discussions, ongoing since the 1973/74 academic year [. . .] taking shape on the basis of that program, the Institute in Kraków became the only academic institution in Poland conducting secular religious studies modelled after the Western schools and therefore distinct from both Marxist religious studies and the confessional model [. . .]. (p. 6)

This was no easy task, considering the officially disseminated ideology and its institutional backing. The Western thought in its newest form of the time was not unknown to Polish academia. In the field of psychology of religion, we should mention the two-volume publication of foreign articles, translated into Polish for education and research-support purposes (Grzymała-Moszczyńska, 1984, 1986). What’s more, some Polish works on the psychology of religion published since the 1980s, either by authors affiliated with secular or Catholic universities, could easily have appeared beyond the Iron Curtain and be part of the European academic discourse, being value-neutral studies conducted within the discipline’s spirit.

There is a special presence visible in this line of conducting value-neutral studies on religion, that of the academics affiliated at the Department of Psychology of Religion from the mentioned Institute of Religious Studies, Jagiellonian University at that period. Socha (2001a) goes as far as to say that there were two distinct currents of Polish psychology of religion functional since the late 1970s: one tied to the Catholic universities and seminaries, and one to the Kraków’s Jagiellonian University (p. 239). It would seem that Kraków’s scholars strove to be part of the European and American psychology of religion, which was a pioneer task in the Communist Era and required great financial and intellectual resources (including knowledge of English language, which is rather obvious today), determination, and—importantly—a clear vision of the discipline’s future. There is no exaggeration in saying that it was their work prepared the scientific ground in accordance with the changes taking place in Poland, aimed at opening up to Western academia. Nevertheless it has been, and still is, a special case in the disciplinary sense, rarely found in Western countries, that psychology of religion is included to a greater extent in religious studies’ curriculum. The Jagiellonian psychology of religion was part of the discipline of religious studies and teaching program since the Institute’s inception. Yet internationally psychology of religion is rather distant from religious studies, as noticed by, for instance, Michael Stausberg (2013), who pointed to the methodological differences and to the parallel development of the two disciplines. Nowadays, the subject undertaken by psychology of religion—analysis of religious experiences, individual aspects of religion, morphology of religious experiences, and so on,—are of course of interest to religious studies, but more as part of its cognitive studies of religion sub-discipline. So it was probably for the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, where psychology of religion was and is associated mostly with psychology scholars. The religious studies in Kraków, up to 2010 the only standalone religious studies study course in Poland (the University of Gdańsk became the second, but offering only BA level), are then quite unique, because psychology of religion has always existed there as a separate research and education field within religious studies (Socha, 2018). This may partly be due to the “troubled past” of religious studies in the Communist Era, when psychology of religion was considered one of the important currents, along with comparative history of religion, general religious studies, sociology and geography of religion (Poniatowski, 1962, pp. 158–168).

The year 1989, then, found Polish psychology of religion divided among the Catholic scholars and the developing Kraków’s religious studies milieu, oriented toward the North-Western Europe and US approaches, while those currents that concentrated on promoting secular viewpoints or on reductionist analysis of religion were definitely retreating due to political changes. The end of isolation and borders opening for travel again allowed the Polish psychologists of religion to participate in international discourse, and to invite foreign scholars to the country. In 1990, Grzymała-Moszczyńska’s work led to the first international conference for the psychology of religion in Kraków—the “Religion, Mental Health, Mental Pathology” conference (Socha, 1992a) which was visited by famous psychologists of religion from Europe (mostly from Scandinavia, Netherlands and Belgium) and the United States. The conference also resulted in an edited monograph (Grzymała-Moszczyńska & Beit-Hallahmi, 1996). There were also Polish conferences for psychology of religion, like the Polish Symposium for Psychology of Religion held in Kraków (1995) and organized by Socha, or the second symposium in Warsaw (1998) organized by Doktór and Franczak (Socha, 2014a). Grzymała-Moszczyńska and Hoffmann (1998) say that the Kraków conference caused the academics from public Universities and the scholars connected to the Catholic Church to cooperate more closely (pp. 358–359). This cooperation can be also seen in the fact that the Jesuit Papal Theological Department Bobolanum, Warsaw University and the Polish Association for the Study of Religions held a symposium in Warsaw (Doktór & Franczak, 2000, p. 5). We should also mention the many subsequent symposia held by the Psychology Section of the Episcopal Conference of Poland which, included such themes as “Loneliness and Isolation” (Lublin, 1989), “Sources of interpersonal prejudice” (Wrocław, 1990) “Dynamism of the value system” (1992), “Priesthood and psychology” (Pelpin, 1995) “Psychological aspects of cult membership” (Łowicz, 1996) (Jagiełło, 2000). The first three titles seem especially interesting, reflecting perhaps the darker side of the political transformation of the period. Poland opening to the value pluralism of the West is also a country leaving the world of clearly marked boundaries, government-opposition, us-them, where suddenly there should only be “us-Poles.” Unfortunately, despite the passage of time, the prejudice left by that time is still present in Polish politics and society, perpetuated by the generation that still remembers it, but also, disturbingly, handed down to younger generations.

The 1990s are a time of intensified publication activity among Polish psychologists of religion. Three important books appear almost simultaneously, all giving a synthesis of the discipline’s main precepts, all later treated as basic handbooks in teaching: one by Grzymała-Moszczyńska (1991a), one by Stanisław Kuczkowski (1991) SJ and one by Jan Szmyd (1992a, 1992b), a two-volume collection of his earlier works. Another book offering an introduction to theory and methodology of the discipline appears a few years later: Psychological Aspects of Studying the Religious Phenomenon by Józef Król, from the Theology Department of the University of Opole (Król, 1999). The questions of religion and religiosity also appeared in the psychology handbook for theologians edited by Józef Makselon (1990). In her book, Grzymała-Moszczyńska gives a short introduction to the discipline and its history, before passing to the questions related to religiosity dynamics, both individual (developmental and clinical aspects, conversion, religious experiences) and group (new religious movements). Szmyd’s book is oriented toward the history of psychology of religion in Poland and throughout the world, also discussing some chosen theoretical matters. Kuczkowski’s book (second issue in 1993, renewed in 1998) is diverse in subject matter, describing sources of religiosity, children’s image of God, religious development, religious experiences and attitudes, conversion, religion & psychopathology and—importantly—psychological bases for atheist worldviews, as well as an addendum: psychoanalysis of atheism based on Ignace Lepp’s (1961) Psychoanalyse de l’athéisme moderne. Nevertheless, the title of the fundamental, textbook for Polish psychology of religion belongs to yet another book: a translation of David Wulff’s Psychology of Religion, made by Socha, Sacha-Piekło and Jabłoński, published in 1999, which mostly supplanted the books mentioned above as an education manual, and probably still remains the main textbook used on many psychology of religion courses in Poland. It is possible that its broad scope, immersive narrative style and frequent references to broadly known and recognized classics of psychology of religion made it more accessible to wider audience in Poland. The author himself during his Opening Lecture at the conference in Gdańsk (2012), that lead eventually to the development of the Polish Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, joked that his book is probably more popular in Poland than in the United States.

The first decade after the political transformation also gives us important, mostly empirical, monographs. The one by Władysław Chaim (1991), CSsR, of the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Kraków, shows results of empirical research—a psychological analysis of the phenomenon of “inconsistent religiosity,” mentioned in the book’s title. This monograph belongs to the field of psychology of religiosity, and the theses given therein concern the factors influencing a subjective preference for religious convictions and include a psychological description and operationalization of what is known as “selective religiosity.” Socha (1992b), in his work Development of Religious and Worldview Orientation, used such tools as D. Batson’s Religious Life Inventory on a large sample (462) with an analysis of religiosity development in mind. There was also a translation of Allport-Ross Scale done by Socha and an adaptation of Batson’s Scale to Polish language by A. Latała & P.M. Socha (Socha, 1991, pp. 85–87, see also Socha, 1999). A book by Stanisław Głaz (1995), SJ, entitled The Question of Religious Experience gives a summative look on the religious experience, from Christian mystics and scholars, through the large non-Christian religions and ending with an analysis of the elements of a religious experience. There is also the work of Jerzy Szymołon (1999), Fear and Fascination. Personality Correlates of Fear and Fascination in a Religious Experience, which tries to operationalize psychologically the classical terms borrowed from Rudolph Otto’s sacrum morphology, and the works of Henryk Krzysteczko on psychological attitudes toward confession and pastoral counseling, using Carl Rogers’s theory (Krzysteczko, 1998a, 1998b). In addition, the 1990s in Poland saw a growing interest in new religious movements (due to contact with Western ideas) which was also reflected in subject literature. While most works on them came from sociologists and anthropologists, psychologists also had something to say. Tadeusz Doktór (deceased in 2007) of the University of Warsaw was an important figure in Polish academia studying the subject, a pioneer in research on new religious movements (cf Doktór, 2000; Doktór, 2002); his book Cult-like Movements: a Psychological Analysis of Members was one of the first works on the subject in Polish psychology of religion (Doktór, 1991). He also published many works on the psychological and social characteristics of alternative religious and spiritual movements (Doktór, 1999) and was the editor for the Movements on the Edge of Religion and Science as a Socio-Psychological Phenomenon series, which appeared between 1984 and 1996. In 1997 appears a short book by a famous psychology historian and an expert on alternative psychological anthropologies from the Jagiellonian University, Bartłomiej Dobroczyński (1997), about New Age. In 1994, Dobroczyński was also the editor of a thematic issue of the Sign monthly, a periodical created by Catholic intellectuals of Kraków in 1946 which published, among others, Polish Nobel prize laureates Wisława Szymborska, Czesław Miłosz and Olga Tokarczuk. This thematic issue, called Psychology and Religion, published such essays as Homo Psychologicus versus Homo Religiosus (Dobroczyński, 1994), Psychology and Religion—Sic et Non (Kłoczkowski, 1994), The Routes and the Wilderness of the Psychology of Religion (Gałdowa, 1994) and The Limits of Psychology in Buddhism (Trzciński, 1994).

As for new perspectives for the discipline at the time, three ideas come to the fore. In 1991 appears a book by a Polish psychologist working at the University of Warsaw, Józef Kozielecki, With God or Without God. Psychology of Religion: a New View. In it, Kozielecki (1991) proposes to use his transgression theory in psychology of religion. Seeing the human being as innately prone to various transgressions, he states that religiosity can be analyzed as part of studying transgression mechanisms. He also stresses the importance of motivational, regulation- and experience-related factors in religious life. The second idea foreshadowed the interest in spirituality, which was to come to psychology of religion later; pioneers of psychological analysis of spirituality include Socha (1995), whose 1995 publication shows possible perspectives of psychological analysis of spirituality, which was supposed to go beyond the religion research traditional at the time. He also argued for a “cohesive psychological concept of spirituality and its studies.” One year later, Halina Romanowska-Łakomy (1996) from the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn published her work, Psychology of Spiritual Experiences, which straddles philosophical anthropology and theoretical psychology and presents her ideas on the nature of spirituality, spiritual experiences and “the spiritual I.” Last, but not least, Grzymała-Moszczyńska argued in the nineties for “a change in the psychology of religion paradigm” (Grzymała-Moszczyńska, 1995), and spoke about it to international audience as well (Jabłoński & Grzymała-Moszczyńska, 1994). This change was to be a contextual turn toward cultural factors, and their inclusion in psychological research on religion—an approach which today is called cultural psychology of religion.

A brief summary of the 1990s in Polish psychology of religion could, therefore, be “a time of many publications.” Three textbooks issued in three academic institutions almost simultaneously, another one a few years later, then a translation of Wulf, giving us five educational works and many monographs presenting results of empirical research. A characteristic trait of the Polish academia, especially liberal arts and social sciences, is that monographs (and edited volumes) have been and still are an important medium of scientific communication. They often result from years of research performed to obtain a title, including published PhD and habilitation theses (a type of higher doctorate which, until 2019, was a condition sine qua non for obtaining an associate professorship, and still is so for full professorship). If a foreign reader, especially anglophone, were to learn the Polish language and read some of those psychological works, especially the older ones, they could be surprised by their highly specialized vocabulary and schematic structure reminiscent of a treatise. This is caused by the Polish academic culture which, as already mentioned, differs from some of the Western publishing customs, where some publishers even warn outright that they “do not publish PhD dissertations,” hoping to attract a wider audience.

The publication boom of the 1990s is no surprise, given that Polish psychology of religion has been developing dynamically since the mid-1970s, so the foundations for entering the world of free academic thought were prepared (Socha, 2001a, pp. 237–238), thus the books are a tangible result. Another factor is the social context—religion and the Catholic Church gained importance during the political transformation, and were accorded more space to function. Various “innovations” came from the West, too, in the form of new religious movements. Scholars are active observers of a society’s life and respond to their times, and the quicker they do so, the better, because innovation and marking new territories is part of their ethos, determines their existence, and, of course, improves self-esteem. One could say that, being a scholar of humanities in Poland in the 1990s, one had to be interested in religion and religiosity, nolens volens.

Turn of the millennium and its first decade (2000 – 2012)

The first decade of the 21st century is a time of two main development directions for Polish psychology of religion: first, intense international activity, with a growing number of international publications and frequent participation in foreign conferences, and second, more works by psychologists not related either to the religious studies of Kraków or the Catholic institutions appear on the publishing market. European psychology of religion was also energized in the “noughties,” publication-, conference- and organization-wise (Belzen, 2002, 2004). Such initiatives came to Poland somewhat later, but given the work of the 1990s, Polish psychology of religion was ready for them. An analysis of PsychInfo and Google Scholar databases shows that between 2005 and 2012 there was a large increase in indexed publications from Poland (Śliwak et al., 2017a, p. 14). There was an important event, which had to influence this international cooperation but also the overall public spirit and intellectual conditions, especially for young scientists, those who were students or postgraduates at the time. On the 1 May 2004, Poland joined the European Union, and the process was preceded by long preparations not only political, but also educational, aiming to support and promote the unity and integration of multicultural Europe.

The literature of the subject at the time saw many interesting works. Those published at the turn of the millennium are another sign of the 1990s “renaissance” in Polish psychology of religion, since many of them were then being prepared for publication. Among those is a collection of works on the spiritual development, under Socha’s (2000) edition, Zdzisław Kroplewski’s (2002) monograph Rationality of Religious Reasoning. Cognitive Model, an edited monograph on psychological-religious counseling (Makselon, 2001), a book by Damian Janus (2004) about mental disorders and religion and empirical works, such as Interpersonal Conditions of Religiosity (Jarosz, 2003), a study of relationships between harmony, conflict and religiosity Harmony and Conflicts: an Empirical Verification of the Base Paradigm of Pastoral Psychology (Jaworski, 2004), The Role of the Image of God in Ecclesiogenic Neurosis (Molenda, 2005), a book based on experimental exploration called Persuasion in Religio-Moral Message (Krok, 2005), a book about the religiosity of artists Religious Experiences of Artistically Gifted Youths (Radoń & Głaz, 2006) or one analyzing current and vital for Poland religious events, Religious Experiences and Student Attitudes in the Context of Death of John Paul II (Soiński, 2006). In that time, Głaz publishes his works on the various aspects of the religious experiences, strengthening his position as Poland’s main expert on analyzing the phenomenon (Głaz, 2000, 2001; Głaz & Ferfecki, 2002). Some other works are published on outskirts topics (psychology of myth, worldview and spirituality psychology), and they form an important turn, because they show the discipline’s development direction—an expanding field of study and a growing interest in psychology of religion among psychologists connected to other than “traditional” in psychology of religion Kraków or Lublin scientific institutions, for example, Poznań or Gdańsk’s universities (Pankalla, 2000; Skrzypińska, 2002). International collaboration between researchers also further develops, for example, in the field of psychology of spirituality (Hay & Socha, 2005; Saucier & Skrzypińska, 2006).

Polish authors of summative textbooks did not slow down, either. In 2004 appears Religion and Culture: Some Questions of Cultural Psychology of Religion (Grzymała-Moszczyńska, 2004), offering a review of subject questions (history, theoretical concepts, operationalization of religiosity, religious conversion & experiences, research methods, the relationship between religion and mental health, and a chapter on—innovative not only for Poland—models of acculturating religion) based on a cultural perspective. In 2006 appears another important textbook, Fundamental Questions in Psychology of Religion (Głaz, 2006), a work of many authors and varied subjects (history of psychology of religion, the concept of religiosity, religious development, religious experiences, religion and psychotherapy, media and health), written by Polish experts in the field, and thus similar to introductory publications such as Blackwell’s “A Companion to. . .” cycle. These two works, together with a translation of one by Bernhard Grom (2009) SJ, and the aforementioned Wulff, are still a staple on psychology of religion courses at Polish universities today. Among the summative works, Czesław Walesa’s (2005) publication and Szmyd’s supplemented edition of his two-volume work of the ’90s (Szmyd, 2002), deserve a mention as well.

The following years are equally busy—new works appear, analyzing important questions within the scope of psychology of religion. Their topics can be identified as classical, given the discipline’s history. Polish academics were then especially interested in analyzing religious experiences (Doktór, 2007; Głaz, 2009), religiosity and personality (Głaz, 2011; Soiński, 2010), religiosity and life quality (Krok, 2009) or the developmental aspects in psychology of religion (Piątek, 2008; Rydz, 2012). Some culturally-oriented works appear, such as a summative work Dreaming Brain, Awakened Mind. Cultural Psychology Studies on Dreaming (Anczyk, 2011) or an in-depth study of a phenomenon—Gynophobia in Hindu Culture. The Fear of Women in Anthropological and Psychoanalytic Discourse (Sacha, 2011). The number of publications on spirituality slowly increases as well, and though most of them are sociological works, some psychologists get interested in the subject as well (Skrzypińska, 2012; Socha, 2014b). Among those is the book by Kazimierz Obuchowski, a noted Polish clinical and personality psychologist The Spiritual Dimension of Existence, a result of a conference on spirituality held in the city of Łódź (Obuchowski & Stasiak, 2010). Other conferences dedicated to psychology of religion are then organized, to name two meetings of students and experts in the Kraków’s Jagiellonian University, “Spirituality and Therapy” (2011, 2013) or “Personality and Religion” conference in Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw, resulting with post-conference publications (Gasiul & Wrocławska-Warchala, 2009). “Nomos,” a religious studies quarterly periodical (1991–2011) publishes special issues on psychology of religion: Essays on Psychology of Religion (Socha, 2001b) In Search of Spirituality (Socha, 2003), and Known and Forgotten: Psychology of Religion Traditions (Socha, 2008). Another magazine “EITHER or. Psychology and Culture Problems” (until 1998 issued under the title “EITHER or. Jungian Inspirations”) also publishes special issues. It was created by Polish Jungian psychologists and scholars in culture studies as an interdisciplinary journal. Psychology of religion makes an appearance in the magazine, in the form of articles, thematic issues (such as Cults and Sects. Initiations, Transformations, Heresies, 2001) or issues given wholly to the subject (Psychology of Religion. The Soul and the God Archetype, 2003). In 2011 appears a book important for Polish quantitative-oriented psychology of religion, Psychological Measurement of Religiosity. It collects the tools used by the researchers connected to the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, but also those widely used by other Polish psychologists of religion (Jarosz, 2011). The book contains both originally created tools (Scales for the Centrality and Intensity of Religious stance and Religious Crisis by Prężyna; Scale for Cohesiveness of Religious Conviction, by Chaim; Scale for Anxiety and Fascination by Szymołon; Scale for Personal Relationship with God by Jarosz; Scale for a Relationship with God by Matys and Bartczuk and Scale for the Religious System of Meanings by Krok) as well as adaptations of foreign tools (Hutsebaut, Huber, Brief RCOPE and RCOPE). One year later appears another summative textbook, Adam A. Zych’s Between Faith and Doubt. Introduction to Psychology of Religion (Zych, 2012).

What has not been achieved during that time, and in fact still remains a problem for Polish psychology of religion (not just Polish, though) is a weak connection (or even no connection) to mainstream psychology. It would seem that the biggest (or the only) success on that front was achieved by the Catholic institutions, where psychology of religion was a part of their students’ curriculum and their scholars’ research. Beyond the walls of these faculties, psychology of religion was not doing that well, or rather was not doing at all, because it was practically absent. Entering the EU turned Poland toward the West, the ideas of which were not just uncritically embraced by theorists, but also often directly, bodily copy-pasted into practice. Development trends in psychology had their influence on research directions: there was a turn toward social psychology (quantitative and experimental research), cognitive psychology and neuropsychology, the drive to see psychology as more of a hard science than a part of humanities. ³ In practice, Polish psychology is shifting toward research in those fields, and toward approaches usual for them, thus making religion-related research rather a part of sociology or of the humanities portfolio. Low popularity of religion as a subject is also due to lack of interest among psychologists themselves. It could be said that psychology of religion is a “side-discipline” for social psychology, where religion is seen as part of society, and religiosity as one of the factors that can be included in research. Social psychologists, therefore, do not delve into psychology of religion itself on a daily basis, sometimes not even thinking about it as an independent branch of psychology, with its own tools, methods and theories. Thus, the Polish academia has also “psychologists that study religion (often, as already said, as a side-dish)” who are not necessarily “psychologists of religion” from the point of view of the discipline’s historical heritage and current form, nor from the point of view of academic societies. There are some Polish scholars who talk about religion/religiosity analysis on social psychology congresses, but they have never appeared on any conference, local or international, on psychology of religion and spirituality nor they are members of academic societies focused on psychology of religion. This could change through consolidating the academic milieu, anchoring psychologists of religion institutionally and speaking about the discipline in one (polyphonic) voice. A drive for this started in 2012.

The world did not end: Polish psychology of religion after 2012

In April 2012 (24th to 25th) the University of Gdańsk held an international conference “Science Facing Human Religiosity and Spirituality,” organized by Katarzyna Skrzypińska (chair) and the postgraduate students of psychology at UG, Marta Boińska and Janina Nowak. The conference started with guest lectures by Wulff, Grzymała-Moszczyńska and Socha. The conference was also the site of a founder meeting of a new organization—the Polish Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. The Society currently has ~ 35 members and has organized various conferences, both country-wide and international, in two-year intervals: in Lublin (2014), Kraków (2016), and Opole (2018) with a fifth planned for 2021 in Szczecin. The governing bodies of the Society included Halina Grzymała-Moszczyńska (president), Katarzyna Skrzypińska (board member, general secretary) Marek Jarosz (board member), Adam Anczyk (treasurer, board member), Dariusz Krok (board member), Jacek Prusak (treasurer), Jacek Śliwak, Beata Zarzycka, Zofia Grudzińska (review board). Honorary members include as for 2020 (in alphabetical order): Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Arnold Bussing, René Hefti, Ralph Hood, Kevin Ladd, Christopher Lewis, Raymond Paloutzian, Ralph Piedmont and David Wulff. The Society has a website (Polskie Towarzystwo Psychologii Religii i Duchowości, 2020), a newsletter edited by Skrzypińska and issued the conference publication after its Kraków edition, Religion, Spirituality, Mental Health: Current Approaches in the Psychology of Religion (Anczyk, Grzymała-Moszczyńska, Krzysztof-Świderska, & Skrzypińska, 2018). Its members also participated in editing the Gdańsk conference publication (Skrzypińska et al., 2014), the bilingual special post-conference issue of the “Annals of Psychology” of Lublin (Śliwak et al., 2017b), and a special issue of the “Mental Health, Religion & Culture” (Lewis & Krok, 2020).

Another interesting organization was founded most recently, namely in 2018—the Pastoral Psychology Society (Pastoral Psychology Section of the Faith Commission of the Episcopal Conference of Poland), with Bogusław Soiński as president, Romuald Jaworski as vice president, Anna Wieradzka-Pilarczyk as general secretary & treasurer, and Dariusz Krok and Zdzisław Kroplewski as board members (Stowarzyszenie Psychologii Pastoralnej, 2020). It is worth mentioning here, that there is another society devoted to pastoral psychology in operation, namely the Society for Counseling and Pastoral Psychology in Poland, founded 2010 by the Association of Priests and Catechists of the Evangelical-Augsburg Church (Towarzystwo Poradnictwa i Psychologii Pastoralnej w Polsce, 2020). Both organizations focus on pastoral psychology, therefore they concentrate on issues in applied psychology and pastoral care. In that context we should also mention the ongoing research psychologists—therapists—clergy dialogue, as manifested in the series of conferences “Psychiatry and Spirituality” organized jointly in Kraków by the Jesuit University Ignatianum, Collegium Medicum of the Jagiellonian University and the Babiński Clinical Hospital (2017, 2018, 2019) or interdisciplinary research projects of the SWPS University in Katowice on psychological and clinical analyses of possession, depersonalization and derealization states (Pietkiewicz, 2017, 2018). The issue of religion and spirituality in psychotherapy is also a subject of interest of Polish psychologists of religion, like in the works of the expert on the subject Jacek Prusak (2016, 2020) SJ.

In this last period, the international cooperation of Polish psychologists of religion is advancing as well, as conferences organized by the Polish Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality attract researchers from abroad to present their papers and posters. Two important conferences of the international societies were organized in that period, IAPR congress in 2019 in Gdańsk and European Conference on Religion, Spirituality and Health (2016) in 2016 also in Gdańsk. ⁴ The first one was organized by the University of Gdańsk by the Host Committee (chair: K. Skrzypińska, members: A. Lewandowska-Walter, A. Rudnik, J. Michałek-Kwiecień, B. Kondratowicz, and honorable members: M. Bidzan, M. Lipowska, H. Grzymała-Moszczyńska, H. Brycz), and the latter was co-organized by University of Gdańsk and Nicolaus Copernicus University of Toruń (local chairs: K. Skrzypińska, P. Krakowiak, members: A. Janowicz, J. Nowak, M. Boińska) in cooperation with the Research Institute for Spirituality and Health, Lagenthal, Switzerland.

As for monographic works, aside from mentioned post-conference materials, other, thematically varied publications on psychology of religion appear, touching on such subjects as: the relationship between religion, culture and mental health (Anczyk & Grzymała-Moszczyńska, 2013), results of religiosity analyses in coherence processes (Zarzycka & Tychmanowicz, 2015), studies on psychological and pastoral aspects of the “virtual world” (Soiński & Wieradzka-Pilarczyk, 2017), or connection between spirituality and mental health (Tychmanowicz, 2017). There is the Homo Religiosus and Psychology article collection (Pankalla, 2015), works on religious coping with stress in adolescents (Talik, 2013), bibliodrama in psychological-pastoral perspective (Jaworski, 2017), Jungian psychology and Jung’s character myth (Zasuń, 2013) fundamentalism in psychological perspective (Zasuń, 2018), and the book Indigenous Psychology of Slavs (Pankalla & Kośnik, 2018) concerning the possibilities of using the indigenous perspective in Polish psychology. After almost a decade of absence, the subject of new religious movements returns to Polish literature and rouses psychological interest, manifested in an edited volume about modern religious phenomena in Poland and beyond (Anczyk & Grzymała-Moszczyńska, 2014) as well as a complete, summative analysis of the contemporary Druidry phenomenon (Anczyk, 2014). Further monographs appear as well, focused on specific questions in psychology of religion, such as Religious Struggles: Conditions and Functions (Zarzycka, 2017), Polish Homo Religiosus. Religious Experience in Casual Relations (Zimnica-Kuzioła, 2013), God of the Borders. Image of God in Persons with Borderline Personality Disorders (Krzysztof-Świderska, 2017), Cognitive Styles and Religiosity (Szydłowski, 2019), Transformation. Toward Spirituality Theory (Socha, 2014b), an overview of concepts and a presentation of an original psychological theory of spirituality supported by empirical research by Socha or Spiritual transcendence. A psychological perspective (Piotrowski, 2018), yet another important monograph in the field of spirituality studies. There are also Sławomir Rusin’s dialogues in book form: one with Zenon W. Dudek, a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst, called Psychosis or Possession. Jungian Psychology Versus Challenges of Civilization (Dudek & Rusin, 2017), and another with Jacek Prusak SJ, The Church on the Couch. Conversation about the Difficult Relationship of Psychology and Faith (Prusak & Rusin, 2020). That last title is especially interesting, in the light of current events in Polish religious life, namely the appearance on YouTube (premiered on 11 May 2019) of a documentary film “Tell No One” by Tomasz Sekielski (2019), a crowdfunded work examining the problem of pedophilia in the Catholic Church. The discussion on both the film (about 24 million views on YouTube as of October 2020) and the problem itself should in the future become a subject for psychology of religion.

There were also two other important books—collections of articles that followed the Polish traditions of jubilees (most often a celebration of a person’s 70^th birthday or a round anniversary, for example forty years of academic work), when academic acquaintances and disciples of the person in question present them with a Jubilee Book, which collects studies dedicated to them, a summary of their accomplishments and their full bibliography. Two such books were published in the second decade of the 21st century in Poland: Religion, Religiosity, Spirituality dedicated to P. Socha (Grzymała-Moszczyńska & Motak, 2015) and Psychology of Culture—Culture of Psychology dedicated to H. Grzymała-Moszczyńska (Anczyk, Grzymała-Moszczyńska & Krzysztof-Świderska, 2018). This pleasant custom shows that not only does Polish psychology of religion already have its own “classics,” but that it grows constantly, ensuring—to use a demographic term—generational replacement, as testified by a group of disciples involved in the aforementioned jubilee projects of their masters.

Current research themes and topics presented by Polish psychologists of religion in the leading journals of the discipline (2015–2020)

At the end of this synthetic presentation of the achievements of the last period of developing psychology of religion in Poland, we can turn our attention to contemporary research threads undertaken by academics from various centers in Poland. For this purpose, a review of articles from the last 5 years (2015–2020) published in journals related to the psychology of religion (The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, Archive for the Psychology of Religion, Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, Mental Health, Religion & Culture, Journal of Religion and Health) was conducted. In the context of international cooperation it is worth mentioning that Polish psychologists are present in the editorial boards of these journals: Grzymała-Moszczyńska (IJPR, APR, MHR&C), Krok (MHR&C), Skrzypińska (IJPR). ⁵ We will, of course, see only a fragment of the achievements of Polish psychologists of religion. The choice is arbitrary, the sample unrepresentative, but this short outline may give some view on the contemporary research interests of Polish scholars (and considering rigorous peer review and competition in these journals those studies may be identified as of high quality). Having in mind the profile of these journals one can expect the higher number of quantitative studies in terms of methodology, as well as those focused on mental well-being or health.

Researchers affiliated at Polish universities published 47 papers in the aforementioned journals in the given period (2015–2020, October), which is quite a substantial number. Most of the articles present results of empirical research, using quantitative (30 articles), qualitative (3 articles) or mixed research methods (1 article, Wroclawska-Warchala & Warchala, 2015). Alongside empirical works, methodological articles are also present (13), among these we can find articles presenting new theoretical perspectives/review papers (6) or presenting new/adapting research tools (7). In terms of research methods it is visible, that Polish psychologists of religion favor quantitative over qualitative, as 30 articles were connected to that way of doing research, which also may be influenced by journals’ publishing profiles. Nevertheless three qualitative studies present in this sample also reflect academic interests of Polish psychologists of religion, as they focused on help-seeking attitudes among secular clergy (Pietkiewicz & Bachryj, 2016), understanding spirituality among Polish mental health professionals (Charzyńska & Heszen-Celińska, 2020) and reception of the Catholic Church’s teachings on in-vitro fertilization (Radkowska-Walkowicz, 2018). Research samples in those 34 empirical studies were Polish citizens mostly (with a few exceptions, for example, Aghababaei et al., 2018), probably due to accessibility. Polish researchers do study other samples, especially when they cooperate with partners from abroad. One is to be noted, that Polish psychologist of religion study Catholics and Catholic religion mostly, sometimes Protestant or Orthodox denominations. Atheists and non-believers are interestingly understudied by psychologists of religion (with a few exceptions, for example, recently Anczyk & Grzymała-Moszczyńska, 2018; Kossowska, Szwed et al., 2017; Kossowska, Czernatowicz-Kukuczka et al., 2017; Socha, 2012), and they form the second group in terms of numbers in Poland. Non-Christian religions are studied by Polish psychologists of religion from rarely to never.

When we look at this set of articles, one is certain—Polish psychologists prefer explanations of universal regularities that govern the phenomena, and they relatively rarely study the question why religiosity and spirituality takes a specific form in a specific group of people in a specific cultural context (in other words the preference for nomothetic research over idiographic—in Graham Gibbs’s understanding of the terms, Gibbs, 2007—is visible). The prevalence of quantitative methods and correlational studies is understandable, concerning that this is probably the main trend within the discipline not only in Poland. However, qualitative approach is steadily gaining popularity in psychology of religion and spirituality. In Poland, the qualitative school of psychology of religion is basically formed by H. Grzymała-Moszczyńska and her collaborators (Psychology of Religion and Spirituality Lab, 2020), who were or currently are her PhD students (notably A. Anczyk, M. Ben Mrad, A. Górka, M. Kanal, A. Krzysztof-Świderska, A. Molenda, I. Pietkiewicz, J. Prusak), and are associated with the Jesuit University Ignatianum in Kraków, SWPS University in Katowice and the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.

The main research topics, that are a subject of investigation in these respective articles, revolve around psychometric properties of quantitative tools, religious coping, spirituality, meaning-making and the meaning of life, religion and well-being, values, religion and personality, religious experiences and cultural approach in the psychology of religion. The relative large number of psychometric works in this sample may be due to the publication of the MHR&C special issue in 2020 (Lewis & Krok, 2020), nevertheless the trend is observable—many Polish psychologists of religion specialize in this field, especially researchers affiliated with The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, which has a well-established research tradition in the field of quantitative research methods. Among those studies, there are propositions of new research tools like Readiness to Engage in Interreligious Dialogue Test (REIDT), (Rydz et al., 2020), Spiritual Coping Questionnaire (Charzyńska, 2015a) or Style of Religious Experience Scale (SRES), (Tatala & Walesa, 2020). Polish adaptations, validations or revisions of research tools are also made—like, for example, S. Huber’s Content of Prayer Scale (Bartczuk & Zarzycka, 2020) or the SpREUK Questionnaire (Büssing et al., 2016). Polish researchers also contribute to further validation of tools, like the ASPIRES scale (Piotrowski et al., 2019). Therefore, it is to be stated, that Polish psychology of religion not only stays updated in terms of quantitative research tools, but also presents its own propositions which fact has already established tradition in Polish psychology of religion and also psychology of spirituality (for spirituality see, for example, P.M. Socha’s Feeling of Sacredness Test, Socha, 2006, further developed in the form of SOHA—Scale Of Hierophanies: Advanced by Anczyk, 2019, or the Questionnaire of Spiritual Sphere by Skrzypińska & Karasiewicz, 2013).

As for other topics that are visibly present in the Polish psychologists of religion’s current works, it can be observed, that there are three main areas that are explored: first, studies that can be labeled as “basic” in psychology of religion, like relations of religiosity with personality, styles/modes of being religious (Szydłowski, 2018), developmental studies (Łowicki & Zajenkowski, 2020), links between religion and intelligence, including emotional intelligence (Łowicki et al., 2020; Łowicki & Zajenkowski, 2017), values and religious experiences and numinous constructs (Głaz, 2015, 2016, 2019; Piotrowski & Zemojtel-Piotrowska, 2020a), prayer and internal dialogue (Puchalska-Wasyl & Zarzycka, 2020), or the relation with God (Zarzycka, 2016) or divine figures (Niemyjska et al., 2018). The second thread that which is present, are studies connected with the notion of well-being, its relation with religiosity and spirituality, and ways of religious coping (Krok, 2015), conducted also in clinical contexts, like in the case of cancer patients (Krok et al., 2019), alcohol addicts (Charzyńska, 2015b) or people with chronic diseases (Büssing et al., 2015; Maier & Surzykiewicz, 2020). The third theme is formed by studies concentrated on various aspects of spirituality—the expanding field in global psychology of religion, and Poland is no exception here, as we observe growing number of papers on psychological aspects of spirituality published by Polish researchers during the last few years. Among the newest publications we can find empirical studies that explore various aspects of the phenomenon—such as spiritual struggles (Zarzycka & Puchalska-Wasyl, 2020), spiritual growth (Zarzycka & Zietek, 2019) or explore spirituality of chosen social groups—in that respect the latest study by Skrzypińska (2017) on women’s spirituality is worth mentioning. Theoretical perspectives on spirituality are also developed—the mentioned study by Skrzypińska (2012, 2014) was grounded in her Threefold Nature of Spirituality (TNS) concept, which is also connected to Socha’s cognitive-existential theory of spirituality (another development of Socha’s ideas is Culture-Bound Spiritualities theory, Anczyk, 2019), and her recently published theoretical work raises the topic of Spiritual Intelligence (Skrzypińska, 2020). Another important contribution to the field of psychology of spirituality are studies by J. Piotrowski on Spiritual Transcendence (Piotrowski & Zemojtel-Piotrowska, 2020b), by M. Obrębska and A. Pankalla’s (2020) edited volume on contemporary myths and an edited volume containing young researchers and students’ works edited by K. Skrzypińska (2020).

In the matter of theoretical and methodological aspects in psychology of religion recent Polish contributions concentrate on the topic of qualitative research and on the cultural approach. For example an article by Anczyk et al. (2019) raises a rarely discussed topic, namely the problem of replicability in qualitative research. In terms of qualitative researcher’s workshop, the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, used and developed by Pietkiewicz and his team (Pietkiewicz & Smith, 2014), is becoming more and more popular among scholars. The cultural approach, the postulate of conducting culturally sensitive research, or paying more attention cultural contexts, is yet another postulate of Polish psychologists of religion, especially those from the “Kraków school” (Anczyk et al., 2020), and also cross-cultural psychologists from the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw (e.g. Piotrowski, Żemojtel-Piotrowska). Last, but not least, it was in Poland that a new proposal appeared to extend the horizons of the psychology of religion to issues related to migration processes, thus conducting research within the discipline, taking into account the achievements of the psychology of migration and migration studies (Anczyk & Grzymała-Moszczyńska, 2020; Grzymała-Moszczyńska & Kanal, 2019). Certainly there are more studies on the subject of religion published by Polish psychologists in other leading psychological journals, authored both by scholars associated with the IAPR or the Polish Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, and academics—social psychologists mostly, but also researches in the field of cognitive study of religion—that are not specializing in psychology of religion/spirituality, but occasionally publish works that are somewhat connected to the field (e. g. Kossowska, Czernatowicz-Kukuczka et al., 2017; Sekerdej et al., 2018; Slyke & Szocik, 2020; Szocik, 2020; Talmont-Kaminski, 2018; Talmont-Kaminski & Wojcik, 2017). It is also to mention that Polish psychologists of religion contribute to other, socially important fields—c.f. for example R. Bartczuk’s participation the COVID-19 Epidemiological Model for Poland.

To sum up this short review, we can state that two main currents within Polish psychology of religion are to be distinguished, so they form, in a way, a continuation of the historical twofold division. Their consequent development till today is no surprise, taking into account the last decades of discipline’s advancement in Poland. The first one, larger—considering the number of recent publications and researchers—is quantitative and correlational, oriented toward Poles as respondents in the sample design, therefore often aimed at exploring various aspects of Catholic religiosity, paying attention to methodological issues and tools used in the research process. Historically its “home base” was (and probably still is) the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, and also some researchers from Warsaw, Opole and Poznań Universities or also Catholic seminaries could be ascribed to this mode of conducting research within psychology of religion. The second one is more qualitative-oriented in various research contexts (cultural psychology, clinical psychology, psychology of migration), samples are, in some cases, more religiously-diverse, the cultural setting of research also varies, and some studies published are more of theoretical nature. Historically it was associated with the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, and now is developed in the Jesuit University Ignatianum in Kraków and SWPS University in Katowice. Of course there are researchers that could be associated with both currents, or none of the above, nevertheless these two currents or approaches are the most recognizable ones. It is to note that Polish psychologists of religion do cooperate often, especially on the matter of organizing thematical conferences, and both currents form, considering the consequently raising number of publications in leading journal, an important contribution to the discipline’s advancement. Also these two currents share the same struggle, as both still occupy the margins of Polish psychology in general, which fact move us to the concluding part of this article.

Summary: a “suspicious,” “blessed,” “side” discipline?

In order to summarize the three decades presented above, we can return to the question posed at the beginning: how can we, using the indigeneity category, describe the last three decades of the Polish psychology of religion? Such a description can be made using the three attributes given in the section title, since those adjectives reflect the ways in which Polish scholars perceive, conceptualize and study the field.

Psychology of religion is sometimes “suspicious” due to its subject matter. Psychology of religion classics can be placed together with Nietzsche and Marx—as Freud was—among the “masters of suspicion” (Scott-Baumann, 2009), scholars skeptical toward religion, especially Christianity (Nelson, 2009, pp. 27–28). Polish religious studies during the Communist era was strongly influenced by the Marxist philosophy (hence the term used at the time, “Marxist religious studies”) and if this is combined with the quite distanced attitude of psychologists toward religion, (organized) one can reach a conclusion that the Polish psychology of religion can be a discipline encumbered with some prejudices. This is nicely illustrated by an anecdote—a certain psychologist was skeptical toward the Polish Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality because he found the very name “unscientific.” For some, the discipline may be a coincidentia oppositorum of sorts, something that “weirdly” surpasses the supposed dichotomy of religion and science. (In the cited anecdote, the first aspect being the dominant one, of course. What would such psychologists of religion do? Maybe it’s Catholic-leaning psychology in a disguise, or, worse, “some sort of New Age”?) Psychology of religion could, on one hand, be seen as part of Marxist religious studies and as such critical of religion and reductionist; on the other hand, for psychology, the subject matter itself could seem “suspicious” because it was atypical for psychology as an academic discipline and surpassed the competences of a psychologist educated at a Polish university, in which “Psychology of religion” courses did and do not form the psychologist’s study curriculum.

Thus, psychology of religion was mostly practiced as a “blessed” discipline, or, rather, one that had a blessing and the interest of the Catholic scholars. This blessing was mixed, however. The support of Catholic schools did a lot for the discipline’s development in Poland, but it could cause further estrangement from mainstream psychology through a connection with a specific religious organization. This is not the place for discussion about the non-/confessional stance in psychology of religion; suffice it to say that, following Kugelman’s reasoning, psychology of religion “the Catholic way” could be seen as one of the indigenous psychologies (Kugelmann, 2011, pp. 422–423), and that conclusion is probably valid for many Polish researchers. Indigenous psychology calls for more attention paid to context, understanding and using native categories, exploring subjects by “cultural experts” to avoid simplification and misunderstanding (Sundararajan, 2015). Psychologists connected to Catholic institutions who study the Catholic religion often have great knowledge of it, but also understand the studied phenomena in a more profound way. This is especially important in Polish cultural context, where Catholicism, in its different shades, is an important part of culture and identity (or its negotiation), therefore research done by such scholars (or at least part of it) could fit into the “indigenous psychology of religion” paradigm and thus respond to the demand for a more culturally-sensitive approach in modern psychology of religion and spirituality (Anczyk et al., 2020).

It would seem, however, that the political transformation in Poland led psychology of religion to become a “side” discipline for mainstream psychology, one that a psychologist would include in their portfolio, but not at the top. Probably not near the top, either, this space being reserved for “serious” disciplines such as cognitive or clinical psychology, personality, education, or personal differences psychology, social psychology, and so on. One of the reasons for this was the quite natural continuity of the dual tradition of the Communist era, meaning leaving psychology of religion as it was after the transformation, mostly practiced in Catholic universities and seminaries. The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin has well established tradition in this matter of conducting “classical” psychology of religion studies, tools developed and theories proposed. Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw also contributed in that matter to the field, as well as researchers from, for example, University of Opole, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań or University of Szczecin. The other reason is also historical in nature: beyond the walls of those schools, psychology of religion could only offer a small group of masters—people who could show the way to young psychologists, students and postgraduate students, people who could, simply put, make others interested in the field. Last, but not least, we can observe that many other thematic sub-disciplines of psychology are developing in a more dynamic way than psychology of religion is. It would seem that the topic of religion itself is “off” here. Perhaps this relatively small interest in religion, given the sheer number of psychologists in Poland, in a country with one of the highest religious affiliation scores in Europe is one of the signs of social changes? Or maybe it is the mainstream psychology that is “off,” if it is so reluctant to study religion and culture? This, of course, is a topic for another, probably quite long, study.

A more optimistic development route for psychology of religion was born at the Kraków’s Institute of Religious Studies, in its Department of Psychology of Religion, where it was understood that the discipline brings (together with sociology and anthropology) an important empirical component into the religious studies, an idea which was present in the minds of European religious studies classics like Ninian Smart (1973) but which turned out to be and still remains quite an original idea. This historical concept of strict cooperation between psychologists and scholars of religion—or rather religions, plural, seen as a diverse phenomenon—and including religiously affiliated academics as well, a concept, then, of cultural sensitivity and of including spirituality in research, was then transported chiefly from the Jagiellonian University, as researchers of the unit changed their workplace, to psychology of religion as practiced by the Jesuit University Ignatianum, and was present in the founding ideas of the Polish Society for The Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. ⁶

To conclude this article I would like to express my hope that I have left the reader in a state of deserved cognitive demand. Currently working on several, historical texts that will concentrate on presenting empirical research and theoretical approaches in psychology of religion unknown to non-native speakers, and reading—with the eye of a scholar already familiar with the works of Western authors through university education—about the research, theories, conclusions and hypotheses that emerged through the years, but were imprisoned in the Slavic language often ranked among the most difficult languages one can learn, I feel that this collection of thought should be, as the Polish poet Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński said, “saved from oblivion.”