Wine and Religion: A Discussion with Bob Fuller

On 26 January 2026, I spoke to Robert (‘Bob’) C. Fuller over Teams. It was an exhilarating experience. He is a charismatic figure, with a broad smile, wearing a black tee-shirt and jacket and sitting in front of a bright, geometric painting.

As part of my research on wine and female cultures of drinking, I read his wonderful book, Religion and Wine: A Cultural History of Wine Drinking in the United States, so I was not surprised that he exudes enthusiasm for human foibles, conviviality, and wine.

His warm and friendly demeanour (one of the first things he said was that I was to feel free to publish anything he said, with or without acknowledgement. ‘Once I’ve written anything’, he insisted, ‘I have no possessiveness about it. The whole purpose is to communicate’) masks the fact that he is a distinguished scholar of religion and psychology, as well as contemporary religion in America more broadly. He is the Caterpillar Professor of Religious Studies at Bradley University. He has published Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls (1982); Spiritual, But Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (2001); and The Body of Faith: A Biological History of Religion in America (2013), and ten other books. But my main interest is his book on Religion and Wine (1996), which I greatly enjoyed.

This blog is a partial transcript of what we spoke about. We talked about his career (Part One), his approach to religion (Part Two); and his concept of ‘secular oenophilia’, which is my main interest (Part Three).

The conversation went like this:

PART ONE

[JB: Can you tell us who you are and your publications more broadly (we will come to your book Religion and Wine shortly).]

RF: My academic specialty is the psychology of religion. I consider myself a scholar of psychology, especially the branch they call cognitive science. But I have, historically, gone back to Freud and Jung. I’ve used concepts from major psychologists to understand religion. I’m not religious myself; I’m a ‘would-be mystic’! But as far as religion goes, I’m always curious: how can this otherwise intelligent person believe this stuff? How did they come to it? What’s their motivation to believe it? How does their brain construct it? And then, I became interested in the people who, while having no connexion to formal institutional religion, still have a type of spirituality or religiosity in their lives or are at least curious about those questions. So, my second field became the study of what I called ‘unchurched religion’, but some people call it ‘secular spirituality’.

And then there is my research on the psychology of religion, including experimental, laboratory-based, controlled experiments. This can be represented in a book I wrote called Wonder: From Emotion to Spirituality. It is about the experience of the sublime. The other book I get the most interest in is Spiritual, But Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America, but I probably get the most interest in Wonder or experiencing the sublime: a sense of ‘I don’t fully comprehend, but I’m drawn to this’. Some people use the expression ‘awe’ rather than ‘wonder’, but I typically use ‘wonder’. We can correlate what people who feel guilty versus people who feel wonder with inclinations to be religious.

Some people asked me about other substances. And so I wrote this book Stairways to Heaven: Drugs in American Religious History on drugs like marijuana, LSD, wine, but also coffee (The section on coffee is the best!). Because of my interest in the psychology of religion, I’m curious about altered states, whether that be hypnosis, dreaming, or drug-induced states – anything that takes from our everyday mindsets.

PART TWO

[JB: You are internationally renowned as a professor of religion and philosophy.  What are the chief characteristics of ‘religion’?]

RF: In my early career, religion meant experiencing something metaphysical that is beyond the sensory, the five physical senses; there is at least the subjective sensation that one is connecting with something more than physical. If you want to say supernatural, fine; I typically say metaphysical. That’s what spirituality meant to me. And then midway through my career, I became more interested in the natural sciences and the human brain as a product of evolution. We think through our organic brain; we feel through our organic brain. And I was reading E. O. Wilson, a biologist at Harvard University, and the most famous evolutionary biologist of the time. He wrote a whole book about how our genetics determine who we are – actually, he was writing about things other than humans. It was called sociobiology. He was interested us as a social species, but he did say that, from an evolutionary biologist standpoint, religion plays a role in bonding otherwise unrelated people together. Religion entices people to give up their self-centred, immediate personal interest for the good of the group.That would not have appealed to me as a definition of religion in my early academic years. I would have said: that’s maybe a secondary thing, not the core of religion. Over the course of time, I’ve come more to agree more with Wilson.

It is useful to look at concepts of the vertical and the horizontal. In Western religion, the vertical is connecting with something supernatural: heaven, God. The first function of religion is to induce people into a sense that they are in some way connecting with the sacred, the holy. Now in Western religiosity, this is usually thought of vertically: something up in the heavens, up there, out there,

I prefer the word ‘sublime’ because that’s a word we can use for listening to certain kinds of music. Aesthetics and art sometime trigger a sense of the sublime, something beyond our ordinary physicality: a universe, sensing something that’s just beyond. Religion fosters those momentary experiences, a felt sensation of connecting with something beyond the self. Then the second sensation is bringing us into a group, feeling a sense of solidarity, feeling a sense of community: celebrating and bringing individuals into a cohesive group.

From E. O. Wilson’s standpoint, it has served a biological survival purpose and, hence, carrot sticks, bad karma, good karma, going to heaven, going to hell. Religion has techniques to get us to sacrifice individual interests for the good of the group.

We talk about the gradual secularising of Western society; the diminishing role of institutional religion. It happens intellectually because, post-Darwin, biblical religion as a source of truth became problematic. And religion started to get edged out as an intellectual authority. At a social level, when we lived in small villages, a religious institution had a great deal of ability to monitor us – they know whether you’ve been out too late at night or they hear yelling from your house or certain kinds of things. There’s monitoring. But we live in such an anonymous society now where no one religious congregation can truly monitor the lives and bring approval and disapproval to bear by shunning or other mechanisms. So religion has begun to dissipate. The whole point of my unchurched spirituality is to show that religion, despite having receded at the grand institutional level, still flourishes – meditation classes or practices, Buddhist mindfulness or whatever.

PART THREE:

[JB: This allows us to talk about your wonderful book Religion and Wine (1996). One of the things I found most intriguing about Religion and Wine (1996) is your argument about ‘secular oenophilia’. Crucially, you argue that wine festivals, seminars, and tastings, as well as awed visits to outdoor cathedrals to Dionysus such as Napa Valley in California or Barossa Valley in South Australia provide wine lovers with a sense of spirituality and purpose. In your words, these rituals, like religious services, are ‘designed to give rise to a felt sense of the holy’. Through ‘a series of ritualized behaviors’, people are brought ‘face to face with that which is deemed perfect or exquisite’. Can you tell us about this connection between religion and wine?]

RF: First of all, the pleasures of wine have a lot of it has to do with the physiology of alcohol consumption. A lot of substances, including coffee, marijuana, and alcohol release dopamine, which provides a wonderful feeling, brings a sense of subjective enrichment, fullness, and pleasure. So when you are gathering in a small group, this creates a strong sense of identity, closeness. People feel freer to talk about something that might be on their minds or that they know could be concerning, perhaps, but they know they’re in a situation that is less judgmental. When they’re drinking wine, they feel less inhibited in sharing parts of their lives and their thoughts or feelings.

Drinking can give an elated subjectivity, but in a way that lets go of the instrumental, manipulative sense; there’s more of a sense of connectedness. This is true at a physiological level, a psychological level, and even a social level all, at once. That’s really why small group community is so important and the things that facilitate that small group community, because you can let go. I, the acting subject who’s trying to manipulate the world around me, that becomes tiring. It can even become crippling. And those excursions into moments where there isn’t this rigid separation of inner self from outer world. There’s something precious, and precious also means sacred, holy, sublime. It’s a continuum there.

[JB: In my [draft] book on Wine and Women, I quote that wonderful philosopher/psychologist William James. I noticed that you use the same quotation! The quote goes like this:

‘the sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticism of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with the truth’.]

RF: Yes, exactly. I’m A William James scholar of sorts. I’ve literally read everything he’s ever written, including correspondence.

This is part of a series of interviews I have conducted with influential academics who explore cultures of alcohol-drinking. They include an interview in this series of blogs with Professor Robin Room.