An introduction to religious and spiritual experience

Contemporary Research
An excellent overview of the subject is to be found in 
Religious Experi-
ence Today
by David Hay. He gives a comprehensive account of research 

---

Religious and Spiritual Experience
234
into spiritual experience from the early years and his own work in 
Nottingham as well as that undertaken in America. He also tells the story 
of Sir Alister Hardy and the setting up of the Religious Experience 
Research Unit.
Dr Hay gives details of his research and examples of different types 
of spiritual experience and looks into the implications for education, 
organized religion and society in general. What comes out of the research 
is evidence that the phenomenon is widespread, found among people of 
all types, and in no way confined to those of limited education who might 
be suspected of succumbing to a simple credulity. Far from reflecting a 
Marxist view of religion as merely the opium of the masses, Hay found 
that not only do these experiences occur across social classes, they are 
even more prevalent among the better educated. In David Hay’s survey in 
1978 he found that over a third of all adults in Britain would answer the 
Hardy question in the affirmative.
218
In a later survey, in 1986, the Alister Hardy Research Centre survey 
using Gallup Poll found that almost half of the population claimed to 
have had an experience of a religious kind and if premonitions were 
included, this rose to two-thirds. So, depending on the question, between 
half and two-thirds of the population felt that they had had a meaningful, 
spiritual experience.
In 1998 Olga Pupynin and Simon Brodbeck took a random sample of 
people in London, simply by accosting them on the street and found that 
about 65% answered in the affirmative to the question ‘Have you ever 
had an experience that you would describe as sacred, religious, spiritual, 
ecstatic, paranormal or mystical?’
219