In 1947, a Gallup poll asked the British public if they believed in life after death. Of the 49% who did, 3% thought it took the form of reincarnation. In contrast, some current polls show that 33% of believers in life after death support reincarnation.
This sharp increase has not been explained, but must owe something to Asian immigration, general public exposure to Buddhism and Hinduism, and the emergence of the New Age movement from older groups like Spiritualism and Theosophy.
However, in July 1997 the main UK spiritualist group, which has 382 churches, warned its exponents that reincarnation was not part of their beliefs and should not feature in platform addresses.
Past lives
The use of hypnotic regression to past 'lives' has also been well publicised. It is not generally realised that this was being practised by a Frenchman, De Rochas, before the First World War. To the American public, the Bridey Murphy case in the 1950s opened up the issue. Today there are hypnotic regressionists, often without medical qualifications, in every large city.
Sometimes the 'lives' are investigated and found to be spurious, long after television programmes and other media publicity, and traced, for example, to historical fiction in the public library. So far as our memories are concerned, we may be partly what we have read. (See Ian Wilson's Mind out of time, 1981, paperback title of Reincarnation?.) And there is other evidence that we may internally reshape 'memories' over time, which is relevant to the whole question of hypnotic retrieval.
Nevertheless, during the last generation, psychical researchers have become much more willing to take reincarnation evidence seriously, largely due to one man. What Darwin was to natural selection, Ian Stevenson, born 1918, is to reincarnation research.
Stevenson's research
American Christian writers sometimes mention Stevenson, a psychiatrist based at the University of Virginia. His books are only published in the United States, however, mainly by his university press, so he is little known to the British public. He eschews publicity, and declines to argue outside academic channels.
Stevenson's research since 1960 is the longest parapsychology project in the world. Without employing hypnosis, he studies children who claim to remember previous lives. Typically this involves travelling to South East Asia, interviewing the child, the family and neighbours, checking written records, and seeking to verify the statements made about the previous life.
There are now hundreds of these cases on file, and they constitute a body of evidence suggestive of reincarnation that has to be reckoned with. The weaknesses of the evidence, however, have often been pointed out, not least by Stevenson.
Weaknesses
1) most of the cases are in societies that believe in reincarnation. Although the articulation of such 'memories' is not always encouraged, the influence of the culture cannot be ignored. The past life claimed is often in a higher caste. Most children lose such 'memories' by the age of eight.
2) where normal sources of information have been ruled out, there is the possibility of extrasensory perception or (more plausibly) some kind of obsession.
3) the primary investigator in most cases is Stevenson, assisted by local researchers, and often using interpreters. The subtleties of these other societies may not be fully understood.
4) there are a few 'overlap' cases where the child claims to be someone who was still alive when the child was born, and it is not unknown for two children to claim to be the reincarnation of the same person. In societies where it is believed no change of sex occurs, none is reported.
5) on the positive side, there is a group of birthmark cases in which the location of the marks apparently correlates with fatal injuries received in the 'previous' life. Stevenson has written of how as a child he read esoteric literature, then called 'New Thought', and Christians may portray him as a spiritually blinded man led into delusions. But in two respects his findings offer no comfort to New Agers. The average interval between lives reported is less than three years, and there is little evidence of any moral (as they would say, karmic) link between the lives.
Stevenson is on record as warning that it is too soon to reach conclusions. But is the whole subject ruled out in advance for Christians?
The Bible
New Agers misuse some gospel references (such as John the Baptist's relationship with Elijah) to suggest the Lord Jesus endorsed reincarnation, and they exaggerate the fringe support for pre-existence by Origen and Alexandrian theologians into a general reincarnation belief in the early church.
I would suggest, however, that more needs to be said than just quoting the first part of that foundation sentence in Hebrews 9.27ff.
There are of course liberal churchmen who are sympathetic to reincarnation. Stevenson's books were first made available in Britain by Mary Peto, who also published Dr. Leslie Weather-head's booklet on reincarnation. Reincarnation also forms part of the worldview of the Rev. Dr. Martin Israel who has exercised considerable influence in the Church of England and beyond.
Just as a creationist scholar expects to have to study what evolutionist biologists (like Dawkins or Gould) have to say, so writers on the Christian hope ought to read Stevenson and his critics.
Among the critics are Skeptics (with a capital and a 'k'!) - those associated with the humanist critique of all that does not fit into the secular worldview, for example, Paul Edwards Reincarnation: a critical examination (Prometheus, 1996, £24.00).
There are also Roman Catholic critics, such as Ian Wilson; para-psychologists like Dr. Chari of Christian College, Madras, who was a Hindu - and Stevenson himself, who has written special studies of fraudulent cases.
There are also more positive assessments, of which the most detailed is Past life memory studies by James Matlock, included in Volume 6 (1990) of the book serial Advances in para-psychological research. Differing weights will be given to all these.
There is a valuable British journal Reincarnation International (annual subscription £12.00, from PO Box 10839, London, SW13 0ZG), which, from the Christian perspective, is insufficiently critical of the reincarnation enthusiasm, but which tries to report the progress of the subject. You won't find it with the 'X-Files' glossies in the newsagents. The November 1995 issue told me how Leonard Angel, a philosopher, has sharply criticised Stevenson for sloppy methodology in a book Enlightenment East and West (Suny Press, 1994) and that Stevenson's reply, which they summarised, was available direct from him.
Paranormal?
What are we to make of all this? The Skeptics (once again, these are usually members of the Humanist party, though there is a scattering of Christians) would like to explain the data without reference to anything paranormal, but most readers will conclude that the apparent memories are, on occasion, related in some way to the previous personality.
Before they can be accepted by the scientific community, the findings will have to be replicated by other workers. Although Jurgen Keil (Psychology Department, University of Tasmania), for example, has investigated 112 cases, mainly in Turkey, and suggested that a paranormal factor is involved, there is still insufficient fieldwork apart from the Stevenson team. It is of course expensive to travel to remote places.
Reincarnation forms no part of the Christian hope; rather its whole thrust subverts much of the gospel. But adult Christian leaders ought to familiarise themselves with the debate about Stevenson. This work, rather than the hypnotic regression so fashionable among the New Agers, receives scientific attention, and requires an apologetic response.
Leslie Price is an associate editor of Theosophical History.
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