Is analytical psychology a religion? Rationalist and romantic approaches to religion and modernity

The relationship between analytical psychology and religion is part of the larger issue of the relationship between modernity and religion. There are three main views on the issue. The fundamentalist position sets religion ag ainst modernity and opts for religion over modernity. What I call the 'rati onalist' position likewise sets religion against modernity but opts for mod ernity over religion. By contrast to both views, what I call the 'romantic' position reconciles religion with modernity. Rationalists maintain that re ligion can exist only in so far as it serves as an explanation of the physi cal world, which the rise of science now precludes. Romantics maintain that religion, while serving as an explanation of the physical world till dislo dged by science, is at heart anything but an explanation. The toppling of t he religious explanation by the scientific one, far from dooming religion, prods religion into making explicit what it has in fact been all along. By this categorization, Jung is overwhelmingly a romantic. For him, the functi on of religion has always been more psychological than explanatory, and the rise of science does not preclude the continuing existence of religious my ths as a psychological rather than an explanatory phenomenon. For those for whom science does spell the demise of religion, secular myths can replace religious ones, and those secular myths are more secular versions of religi ous myths than secular alternatives to religious myths. Yet even if for Jun g religion can still exist today because religion is in fact psychology, it does not follow that psychology is therefore a religion.