Graduation Year
2026
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree
Ph.D.
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Degree Granting Department
Philosophy
Major Professor
Douglas Jesseph, Ph.D.
Co-Major Professor
Michael DeJonge, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Tori Lockler, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Jessica Williams, Ph.D.
Keywords
Emotion, Moral, Religious Experience, Religion, Sentimentalism
Abstract
This paper addresses the growing prevalence of reported religious experiences across diverse religious and spiritual traditions, alongside the persistent absence of such reports among many adherents within the same communities. This asymmetry poses a challenge for both supernaturalist and reductively skeptical accounts of religious experience. I develop a naturalistic constructivist framework to explain why some individuals choose to interpret and report some human experiences as religious experiences or report having religious experiences at all, while others do not. Drawing on a post-modern revision of moral theory, an account of constructive sentimentalism, I argue that religious experience is shaped by socially cultivated moral values that render the disclosure of such experiences morally praiseworthy. On this view, religious experiences do exist, contrary to critical critiques, but they are best understood as emotionally structured responses to a socially constructed religious sentiment rather than as perceptions of supernatural realities. This kind of religious sentiment motivates believers to classify particular experiences as religious experiences and to publicly report them, as far as doing so elicits positive moral emotions directed both toward oneself and toward others who affirm such experiences. Moreover, the motivational force of this sentiment may operate either reflectively or pre-reflectively: individuals may be consciously aware of the moral significance attached to reporting religious experiences, or they may be guided by noncognitive affective dispositions shaped by their religious communities. The proposed account offers a naturalistic explanation of the persistence of religious experience reports within shared contemporary religious and spiritual life.
Scholar Commons Citation
Candelario, Yvonne, "The Emotional Construction of Religious Experience: Senitmentalism and Moral Motivations" (2026). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/11256
