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There are pragmatic theistic arguments different from Pascal's Wager. Some of these pragmatic arguments are found in James Beattie, J. S. Mill, William James, and Jules Lachelier. Some of these arguments support the propriety of hoping that theism is true, while others are arguments in support of theistic belief being rational. The permissibility conditions of hope differ from those of belief, and that is a topic of this chapter.

This chapter examines three important strands of progressive thought in the late nineteenth century to reveal the tensions between ideas about progress, religion, and science, and resulting predictions about America's religious future. This chapter first delineates a populist‐secular group of thinkers, exemplified by Robert Ingersoll, “the great agnostic” proponent of freethinking, whose prophecies blended the older jeremiad form with a heightened emphasis on atheistical science and Enlightment rationality. The second strand of thought explored in this chapter came from the ranks of progressive intellectuals, represented in part by the powerful pragmatic philosophy of religion developed by William James in his book, Varieties of Religious Experience. Finally, this chapter argues for a third diverse group comprised largely of ministers and social gospel activists, such as Walter Rauschenbusch, who attempted to reform the nation along explicitly Christian lines.

An examination is made of a genealogy of pluralist approaches to multiplicity and difference in the twentieth century, starting with William James (1976 [1912], 1977 [1909]), who began his study of pluralism with a ‘radical empiricism’ that is opposed to a more singular, monist position. James argued that our experiences of empirical events diverge, and one explanation could never encompass all of those experiences; other political pluralists (Arthur Bentley, Ernest Barker, Harold Laski, Mary Parker Follett) took James’s critique of absolutism and applied it to the state. Post-Second World War pluralists used the concept of heterogeneity in a much more constricted sense to defend and promote self-interested interest groups. However, more recently, there has been a return to multiplicities, and Donna Haraway’s (1988) description of ‘situated knowledges’ and ‘embodied objectivity’, in which she argues for ‘epistemologies of location’ where claims of knowledge can only be considered partial, resurrects James. The argument here is that a return to such original notions of pluralism helps validate the diversity of experiences and knowledges that grow out of the variety of ways we are all situated in any number of experiences, including environmental degradation.

This chapter presents a comparative reading of W. K. Clifford's 1877 treatise, “The Ethics of Belief,” and William James' 1897 essay, “The Will to Believe.” It provides an interpretation of each in the distinctive contexts of England in the 1870s and New England in the 1890s. It argues that Clifford displayed more sensitivity than James did to the consequences of belief. This is an ironic reversal of roles in the story of a great pragmatist who insisted that “the whole defense of religious faith hinges upon” the action that faith requires or inspires. James' “The Will to Believe” should be understood not only as an artifact of its author's agony about the fate of Christianity in the age of science, but also as a product of his political complacency. Clifford had a much more modern understanding than James did of the function of belief systems in society and politics.

This chapter interprets William James' entire career in the light of his affinity with the liberal Protestant elite of his time and place on the one hand, and his devotion to the calling of modern science on the other. It takes seriously his many references in Pragmatism to religious searching and indeed to “salvation,” so often left out of account by secular students of his thought. It reads Varieties of Religious Experience as the pivotal point in James' turn from a “separate spheres” defense of religion to an effort to mobilize a community of inquiry willing to test religious claims by experience. Against scholars who prefer to read James' corpus as a synchronic whole, the chapter shows that the meaning of his various works is best grasped when his career is approached diachronically, with each text analyzed according to the stage it marks in the development over time of his preoccupation with religion's relation to science.

This chapter defines pragmatism and pragmatic religious naturalism through a reading of pragmatists William James, John Dewey, and George Santayana. It shows how Du Bois constructs crucial notions of black identity, double consciousness, and black peoplehood with anti-essentialist pragmatist tools such as James's radical empiricism. It goes on to show how Du Bois's religious voice is fully inhabited by four key characteristics of pragmatic religious naturalisms: 1) skepticism of supernatural revelation; 2) conceiving of religion's powers as coming from finite human trusts; 3) finding religion's genius in its pairing of the real with the ideal; and finally 4) a meliorism in which hopefulness only emerges from a frank confrontation with real struggle and loss.

Sartre’s early essay, “The Emotions”, was a frontal attack on the two most prominent theories of emotion in the early 20th century, those of William James and Sigmund Freud. This chapter examines Sartre’s arguments against James and Freud and discusses and criticizes Sartre’s own analysis of emotions as “magical transformations of the world”.

Six kinds of Pascal's Wager are explored via a look at decision theory and the logic of pragmatic arguments. Of these six, one version dubbed ‘the Jamesian Wager’, in honour of William James's argument in his 1896 essay The Will to Believe, is the focus of an extended treatment throughout the book. It is a primary contention of the book that the Jamesian Wager provides a sound argument in support of theistic belief.

Following James — and using his notion of a ‘genuine option’ — it is proposed that doxastic ventures are permissible provided the issue is ‘forced’, of sufficient importance, and essentially evidentially undecidable. This Jamesian fideism is supra-evidential and contrasts with irrationalist fideism. A ‘degrees of belief’ challenge is considered: practical reasoning never presents a forced choice, since propositions may be given partial belief according to the extent to which the evidence renders their truth probable. In response, it is suggested that theistic framework principles may be of highest-order, and thus present options that are forced and persistently and necessarily unable to be settled by external evidence. Pace logical positivism, such principles may nevertheless be genuinely assertoric. The chapter concludes by formulating a restricted fideist thesis about the permissibility of faith-ventures, i.e., commitments under evidential ambiguity to faith propositions of the kind involved in theistic religion and relevantly similar contexts.

This chapter examines the significance of Max Weber's time in Pennsylvania, and particularly his experience of the Fifth Day Quaker service, to his thesis about the Protestant ethic. It first describes Max and Marianne Weber's itinerary in the District of Columbia before discussing Max Weber's two engagements: a meeting with the president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), Samuel Gompers; and an opportunity to observe the religious service of the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church. It then considers some of the main arguments put forward by Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, and how the Quakers' Fifth Day service influenced his written work. It also analyzes Weber's meeting with scholar William James in Cambridge, Massachusetts, along with their thoughts on two fundamental issues: the problem of the relationship between ideas and action, and the question of the “rationality” of experience.

Chapter 4 examines the impact that Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species and its demonstration of probabilistic thinking had on William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (Varieties) and demonstrates the central role the conversion dynamic plays in James’s work, focusing on his development of a psychology of religious experience in the Varieties and of pragmatism as a philosophy whose claim that “truth is what happens to an idea” affirms the process of belief as conversional. Conversion finds a conceptual home in modern philosophy as James’s pragmatic hermeneutic, a habit of mind tying conversion to the process that drives consciousness. James characterizes conversion as the experience of the gap between a fact and its interpretation responsible for the ongoing work of establishing beliefs in the face of uncertainty. Through the gathering and arranging of countless testimonies in the Varieties James anchors the process of conversion and the constituting and reconstituting of beliefs and bodies of knowledge in discourse and various discursive communities. In doing so he foregrounds an individual’s continual efforts at reaching these “stages” of personal and cultural renewal through the adoption of the empirical method, which he claims encompasses all scientific and religious enquiries and is “founded in feeling.”

Chapter 2 broadens our understanding of Reconstruction to encompass the West and its “Chinese Question.” It builds upon the analytics for articulating racial difference—differential thinking—honed in U.S. race and ethnic studies to illuminate an early politics of comparative racialization. Chinese American activists and writers such as Wong Chin Foo and Yan Phou Lee struggled to disarticulate the powerfully racializing discourse of heathenism that helped sustain the dialectic of black inclusion/Chinese (and Native American) exclusion. Black writers such as James Williams and William H. Newby wrote against Chinese exclusion, representing it as an outgrowth of the racial proscriptions that they had faced during legalized slavery. In juxtaposing lesser-known figures from early African American and Asian American print histories, this chapter investigates the analogization of blacks and Chinese in popular discourse and how these writers negotiated and contested these homogenizing racial representations in oratory and print journalism.

This chapter sets out a model of (theistic) faith as doxastic venture — understood, not as believing ‘at will’, but rather as taking a proposition to be true in one's practical reasoning while recognizing its lack of adequate evidential support. This doxastic venture model is contrasted with alternative models of specifically Christian faith (such as those of Calvin and Aquinas) that locate the venture of faith elsewhere. The conceptual and psychological possibility of doxastic venture is defended by appeal to William James's notion of ‘passional’ causes for belief in The Will to Believe. The possibility, raised by Richard Swinburne amongst others, that faith may involve only sub-doxastic venture (acting on the assumption that God exists without actual belief) is also acknowledged.

This chapter explores the leverage that the body exerts on humanity's propensity toward religion. Recent research in the emotions, neurobiology, sexuality, pain, and the chemical components of thought or feeling all shed light on the varieties of human spirituality. Studying religion “in the flesh” furnishes a new set of critical terms that bring a fully interdisciplinary perspective to bear on understanding the most elusive forms of embodied experience.