Religious experience is more common in research and clinical populations than most professional training acknowledges, and the Hardy Archive, now systematically analyzed at scale for the first time, offers a dataset built for the professionals who encounter it.
The systematic study of religious experience has historically been constrained by dataset size. Most published analyses work with samples small enough that prevalence estimates are unreliable and sub-group comparisons are impractical. The Hardy Archive changes this. At cross-validated accounts, spanning multiple decades, multiple religious backgrounds, and multiple types of experience, patterns that would be noise in a smaller dataset become structure.
This analysis does not address the truth of religious claims. It addresses the empirical question of what people report, how often, in what circumstances, and with what lasting effects. Those are questions that researchers and clinicians can use regardless of their metaphysical commitments.
Religious experience presents in clinical contexts more often than it is recognized, rarely as "I had a religious experience," more often as an identity shift, an unusual sense of certainty, or a changed relationship to death. The archive provides a detailed picture of what these experiences look like, what qualities they have, and what they tend to leave behind.
The accounts were tagged using a consistent schema applied across five analytical dimensions, with cross-model validation (Claude and a second AI model) and adjudication for disagreements. The methodology is fully documented, including known limitations and inter-rater statistics.
The independent researcher behind this site, Andy Johns, is available for conversation with clinicians and researchers who want to discuss the archive, the methodology, or the broader landscape of professional work in this area. If you are building something in this space, or working with a population where these experiences are showing up, he would be glad to hear from you.