How each person framed their experience in religious or cultural terms, drawn from self-description in the account, not from categories they were asked to choose.
Tradition framing was assessed from the language each person used, how they described what happened, what framework they reached for, and how they understood their experience afterwards. It reflects their self-understanding, not their formal religious affiliation. Someone who was nominally Church of England but described their experience in purely secular terms was coded secular, not Christian.
This means the tradition data is an artefact of the archive's composition. The archive drew primarily on British adults in the 1970s and 1980s responding to newspaper appeals. Christian framing dominates because Christianity was the cultural context, not because religious experience is inherently Christian. The archive includes accounts from people who had no prior religious faith and acquired none, and their experiences were often indistinguishable in quality from those of committed believers.
17 accounts (17) did not contain enough framing language to assign a tradition. Percentages below are of the 2,080 accounts with known tradition.
Accounts framed in explicitly Christian terms, Jesus, God the Father, the Holy Spirit, prayer, Scripture, church, salvation. Spans the full range from evangelical to Catholic to High Anglican to those with only a vague Protestant background. Many of the most theologically sophisticated accounts in the archive come from Christian respondents; so do many of the simplest and most direct. Christian framing is by far the most common in the archive, reflecting the cultural setting of British adults in the 1970s and 1980s.
Accounts that drew on more than one tradition, or used language from multiple frameworks without settling on one. Includes people who had moved between traditions, people who took what they found useful from several, and people who described their experience in both religious and non-religious terms in the same account. The syncretic category is the second largest, consistent with findings from other large archives suggesting that experience often overflows its inherited categories.
Accounts describing genuine religious experience while explicitly rejecting organised religion or creedal framing. These people affirm that something real happened, something beyond the ordinary, but refuse to name it in institutional terms. The experience itself is often as rich and clearly delineated as in strongly religious accounts; what differs is the conceptual framework brought to bear on it. Hardy regarded this as one of the most significant categories: evidence that the capacity for religious experience was not dependent on prior belief.
Accounts from people who identified as secular, atheist, or agnostic, for whom the experience was profoundly puzzling because it conflicted with their prior worldview. Many describe having to struggle to find any language at all for what happened. These accounts are philosophically important: the fact that the experience occurred despite active disbelief in anything that could produce it is exactly the kind of data that is difficult to dismiss as wish-fulfilment or cultural conditioning.
Accounts framed in Buddhist terms, meditation, emptiness, non-self, the Dharma. Small in absolute terms, reflecting both the composition of the archive's respondent base (predominantly British adults of Christian or post-Christian background) and the fact that formal Buddhist practice was less widespread in Britain in the period when most accounts were written.
Accounts using Jewish religious framing, God, Torah, prayer in Jewish forms, Jewish life-cycle contexts. Very small numbers in this archive, again reflecting the archive's sampling base. The quality and structure of the experiences in these accounts is consistent with the archive as a whole.
Accounts framed in Hindu or other Eastern religious traditions. Extremely small in this archive, Hardy's respondents were overwhelmingly from British Christian culture. These accounts are included here for completeness, but no statistical conclusions should be drawn from such small numbers.