James’s point in The Varieties of Religious Experience

"James is the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, the founding text of the modern study of religion, a book so pervasive in religious studies that one hears occasional mutterings in the schools about King James—and they don’t mean the Bible. James’s point in this book is that religious authority resides not in books, bibles, buildings, inherited creeds, or historical prophets, not in authoritative figures—whether parish ministers, popes, or saints—but in the actual religious experiences of individuals. Such experiences have some features in common; they also vary from person to person and from culture to culture. The Varieties of Religious Experience is also, and not least, the acknowledged inspiration for the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. It is James’s understanding of conversion that AA has found especially helpful.16"

"Wendell Holmes had said that the life of the law had not been logic, it had been experience. James now said, similarly, that the life of religion is not theology, it is experience."

"James further refuses what he bluntly calls “medical materialism,” the view that the spiritual authority of a Saint Teresa can be undermined by classing her as a hysteric, that of a Saint Francis by calling him a hereditary degenerate, that of a George Fox by pointing to his disordered colon. “In the natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to anyone to try to refute opinions by showing up their author’s neurotic constitution . . . It should be no otherwise with religious opinions.”9 None of the reductive explanations of medical materialism can stand up to actual experience on its own ground. James moves on briskly to say, “Immediate luminousness. . .philosophical reasonableness and moral helpfulness [his italics] are the only available criteria” for judging religious experience. The continuing authority of James’s own work comes in large part from his steady insistence on asking what the effect is of this or that religious belief on our own lives. His mantra is “By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.” Religion, like medicine or chemistry or anything else, must be evaluated by its results or outcomes, its effect on people’s lives."

"...the practical result of presenting a wide sampling of voices is to give these lectures an authority no logical argument could match for immediacy, conviction, personal intensity, and sheer range of articulated experience. Fifty-five different sources are cited or quoted in the mysticism lecture alone, for instance, and forty-seven in the two lectures on the religion of healthy-mindedness. Such a mass of testimony is not easily talked down by general propositions."

"William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism" by Robert D. Richardson: https://a.co/ceqtrDp