Religion in the Making

1. Introduction

Religion in the Making (1926) is a short but programmatic statement of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of religion. Based on the Lowell Lectures delivered in Boston, it presents religion as a reality that is itself “in the making”: historically evolving, internally developing, and inseparable from broader cultural and scientific change.

Rather than treating religion primarily as a set of propositions or institutions, Whitehead analyzes it as a mode of experience centered on the apprehension of value, order, and purpose in the world. He links this experiential core to a speculative metaphysics in which reality is fundamentally process—a continuous becoming rather than a fixed structure of substances.

The work is often situated between Whitehead’s earlier contributions to logic and natural philosophy and his later, more systematic metaphysical writings. It offers an intermediate statement of his mature themes—such as the relational character of reality and a process conception of God—using examples drawn largely from Western religious history, especially Christianity, while aiming at a general account of religion as a human and cosmic phenomenon.

Because of this combination of concision and conceptual ambition, Religion in the Making has been read both as an accessible gateway to process thought and as a distinctive contribution to the 20th‑century philosophy of religion in its own right.

2. Historical Context and Publication

2.1 Intellectual and Cultural Background

Religion in the Making emerges from the early 20th‑century context of:

Within this milieu, many thinkers sought either to defend religion by revising doctrine or to restrict religion to ethics or emotion. Whitehead’s lectures participate in these debates by proposing a renewed, but speculative, metaphysics that could incorporate scientific advances while taking religious experience seriously.

2.2 The Lowell Lectures and Book Publication

Whitehead delivered the four Lowell Lectures at King’s Chapel, Boston, in early 1926. The Lowell Institute was known for public lectures that introduced advanced scholarship to educated audiences, a setting that influenced the relatively compact and expository form of the work.

The lectures were quickly revised for print and published in 1926 by Macmillan (London) and by Cambridge University Press (New York). Later reprints by Cambridge, often with scholarly introductions, have become standard reference editions. There is no complex manuscript tradition; the text is preserved primarily through these published versions.

3. Author and Composition

3.1 Whitehead’s Trajectory up to 1926

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was trained as a mathematician and logician, co‑authoring Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell. Before turning to religion, he had already developed a philosophy of nature and an emerging process metaphysics in works such as Science and the Modern World (1925).

By the time he composed Religion in the Making, Whitehead had moved from Cambridge and London academic contexts to Harvard University (from 1924), where he broadened his focus from mathematics and science to metaphysics and religion. Scholars often describe the book as belonging to a “transitional” phase between his earlier philosophy of nature and the more elaborate system of Process and Reality (1929).

3.2 Aims and Composition of the Lectures

The Lowell Lectures were prepared with an audience that included both clergy and laypeople, which likely shaped the relative brevity and the concrete historical references. Whitehead appears to have aimed at:

• Clarifying the nature of religion in light of modern knowledge.
• Sketching a metaphysical framework within which religious experience could be interpreted.
• Addressing tensions between personal religious life, institutional forms, and scientific culture.

Commentators suggest that some central ideas—such as the distinction between the primordial and consequent natures of God—are foreshadowed here in a less technical vocabulary and were further developed during his concurrent or subsequent Harvard lectures that fed into Process and Reality.

4. Structure and Central Arguments

4.1 Overall Structure

The work consists of four lectures, each with a distinct but interrelated focus:

4.2 Central Arguments

Across these lectures, several core argumentative lines can be identified:

• Religion as personal orientation: Whitehead characterizes religion primarily as an individual response in solitariness, prior to public formulations, though he acknowledges that dogmas preserve and distort this response.

• Historical development of religion: He argues that religions evolve from tribal, ritualized practices toward more universal, ethically demanding forms. This development is presented as contingent and ongoing rather than inevitable.

• Mutual dependence of religion and metaphysics: The work claims that religious experience implicitly raises metaphysical questions about reality’s structure and purpose, while metaphysical speculation, in turn, is tested and enriched by the depth of religious experience.

• Integration with science: Whitehead contends that science and religion seek coherent understanding of the same world, though with different emphases—empirical regularities for science, ultimate value and meaning for religion. He criticizes reductive materialism and proposes a process ontology that could reconcile scientific method with religious intuition.

• Process conception of God: The final lecture introduces God as the supreme instance of process, with distinct aspects (often later termed primordial and consequent), in order to make sense of religious confidence in a universe oriented toward value without returning to a static, absolutist deity.

5. Key Concepts and Famous Passages

5.1 Key Concepts

5.2 Famous Passages

One of the most cited lines appears in Lecture I:

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“Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.”

— Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making, Lecture I

Commentators typically interpret this as foregrounding personal orientation and decision rather than public conformity as the core of religion.

Another notable formulation in Lecture III links religious vision to the nature of reality:

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Religion is described as the “vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things.”

— Paraphrase of Whitehead’s formulation in Religion in the Making, Lecture III

Readers have often taken this as a succinct expression of how religious apprehension points to an ultimate depth or pattern in the world’s processes.

In Lecture IV, Whitehead’s characterization of the twofold divine nature—later canonized in process theology—has become a touchstone for discussions of non‑classical theism, though in this work it is presented in less technical language than in his later metaphysical writings.

6. Legacy and Historical Significance

6.1 Place in Whitehead’s Oeuvre

Scholars generally view Religion in the Making as a pivotal text that:

• Consolidates themes from Science and the Modern World.
• Anticipates key structures of Process and Reality.
• Offers one of Whitehead’s clearest early expositions of a process view of God and religion.

It has thus functioned both as a standalone treatise on religion and as an interpretive bridge to his more difficult metaphysical system.

6.2 Influence on Philosophy of Religion and Theology

The work has had a particular impact on 20th‑century process theology. Thinkers such as Charles Hartshorne and John B. Cobb Jr. drew heavily on its portrayal of God’s relational, non‑omnipotent power and its insistence on religion’s historical and experiential character.

Beyond explicitly process‑oriented circles, the book contributed to broader debates about:

• The compatibility of scientific cosmology and theism.
• The role of historical consciousness in understanding religious traditions.
• Non‑foundationalist yet metaphysically serious accounts of religious experience.

6.3 Ongoing Assessment

Contemporary assessments highlight both its originality and its limitations. Many view it as historically important for opening new possibilities for constructive theism in an age of science. Others regard its largely Western, Christian examples and its speculative metaphysics as restrictive or problematic. Despite these debates, Religion in the Making continues to be treated as a central reference point for discussions of process thought, the philosophy of religion, and the attempt to reconceive God and religion within a dynamic, evolutionary universe.