Religion

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Religion is the category under which an enormous spread of human phenomena — gods and rites, scriptures and priesthoods, prayer, taboo, pilgrimage, doctrine — is gathered and treated as instances of a single kind of thing. The word feels self-evident in everyday use: one points to a temple, a creed, a holy book, a Sabbath, and the label seems already to fit. Much of the last century of scholarship has been an argument over whether it names anything stable at all — whether the category is a feature of the world it sorts, or a frame the sorter brings.

A Roman word that did not mean belief

The term descends from the Latin religio, but the Roman word did not mean what the modern one does. In classical usage it pointed to scruple, to awe before what is owed, to binding obligation and the careful, correct performance of due rites — closer to duty than to a system of belief, and tied to no single conviction about the divine. A Roman was religiosus who tended the household gods at the right hours, observed the omens, kept the calendar of offerings; the word marked an attitude of exacting care, not membership in a confession one might have chosen otherwise.

Even the ancients argued about where the word came from. Cicero, in De Natura Deorum, derived religio from relegere — to go over again, to re-read, to retrace — so that the religiosi were those who scrupulously rehearsed the lore of cult, as the diligent (diligens) gather and the intelligent (intellegens) discern. Three centuries later the Christian apologist Lactantius proposed instead religare, to bind fast: religion as the bond that fastens a person to God. Augustine at first floated yet another root, religere, the recovering of a God lost through neglect, then in his later Retractations abandoned it for Lactantius’s binding. The two derivations carry two whole theories of the thing — exact ritual performance against the soul’s tether to the divine — and the philology has never settled which the Romans heard.

Ancient and pre-modern cultures had gods, temples, sacred law, and liturgy in abundance. What most of them did not have was a word marking off “religion” as a discrete compartment of life, set against a secular remainder. Sacrifice, kingship, law, harvest, war, and the tending of the dead were braided together; the line a modern speaker draws between the sacred department and everything else was not theirs to draw. That partition — religion here, the rest of life there — is comparatively recent, and it carries assumptions that the older arrangements did not share.

Forging a generic concept

The modern concept took shape in early modern Europe, under two pressures at once. Inwardly, the fracture of Latin Christendom into rival confessions after the Reformation made it newly urgent to speak of “the Christian religion” as one species among possible others — Catholic and Protestant each claiming the true form of a thing that could, evidently, take more than one. Outwardly, the voyages and missions that opened the wider world to European catalogers pressed thinkers toward a generic notion: a class of which Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and the newly inventoried traditions of Asia and the Americas were all members. The plural — the religions — and the abstract singular — religion in general — entered common speech together, and with them the idea of a genus that particular faiths instantiate.

On one reading the category was forged in this particular history and then projected outward, so that peoples who had never sorted their own practices into a “religious” bin found themselves possessed of a “religion,” a “scripture,” a “creed,” fitted out with European furniture they had not built. To call the rites of a distant culture its “religion,” on this view, is already to reshape them in the image of post-Reformation Christianity — to ask of them a doctrine, a founder, a book, a clergy, an interior faith, where the culture itself recognized relations of an altogether different shape. Against this, others answer that every comparative concept is built somewhere, that no analytic category drops from nowhere, and that the alternative to an imperfect comparison is no comparison at all — a thousand incommensurable particulars and nothing to say across them.

The definitions that will not hold still

Defining the thing has proved no easier than placing it. Two broad strategies divide the field, and each breaks on a different rock.

Substantive definitions fix on content — on what religion is about. The anthropologist Edward Tylor, in 1871, proposed a deliberately minimal core: belief in spiritual beings. Others set the bar at belief in a god, or in the transcendent, or in a sacred order beyond the ordinary world. The trouble is that traditions sit awkwardly inside any such fence. The non-theistic strands of Buddhism, which can dispense with a creator-god and even with an enduring self, slip past a definition keyed to spiritual beings; certain currents of Confucianism and of philosophical Hinduism press the same difficulty. Tighten the content-criterion to exclude the marginal cases and one risks excluding paradigm religions too; loosen it and it ceases to mark anything.

Functional definitions fix instead on what religion does — on the work it performs in a life or a society. It binds a community into one moral body; it orders ultimate concern; it answers death, suffering, and the question of how to live. Émile Durkheim built his sociology on a definition of this kind, religion as the system that gathers a people around the sacred and so makes them a single collective. The cost runs the other way: a functional net cast wide enough to catch every tradition also catches nationalism, the cult of a leader, a totalizing political creed, a devoted following of a sport or a star. If whatever orders a person’s ultimate concern is religion, then the boundary that the word was meant to draw dissolves.

Faced with this double failure, a widely adopted proposal sets the search for a single defining essence aside. On the family-resemblance model — borrowed from the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and developed for religion by scholars who paired it with the biologists’ notion of polythetic classification — religion is not a thing with a hidden essence but a web of overlapping traits. Belief in gods, ritual, scripture, priesthood, a moral code, a community, the experience of awe, a concern with what lies beyond death: a tradition counts as a religion by sharing enough of these, no single one of them required, none sufficient alone. The members resemble one another the way kin do, by crisscrossing likenesses rather than a common mark. The model gains in flexibility what it loses in sharpness: it draws no clean line and was never meant to.

Is religion real, or a lens?

The dispute is not merely terminological. Behind the definitions sits a harder question: whether “religion” is a real feature of the world or a lens the modern West grinds and then looks through. A line of scholars has pressed the second answer hard. Wilfred Cantwell Smith argued in 1962 that the modern mind has reified religion — taken what was once an inner orientation and frozen it into an objective, systematic entity, a “thing” with members and boundaries, and that this reified concept has no counterpart in pre-modern Christian thought or in cultures untouched by Western influence; he proposed retiring the noun in favor of the living pair of cumulative tradition and personal faith. Three decades later Talal Asad, working in a genealogical key, contended that the very ambition to define religion across all times and places is itself a product of secular modernity — that there can be no universal essence of religion because the demand for one belongs to a particular history, the same history that split religion off from power and politics and treated the split as natural. Jonathan Z. Smith pushed the point to its edge, holding that religion has no independent existence apart from the academy — that it is the scholar’s own creation, assembled out of comparison for the purposes of study.

These are not arguments that the gods are unreal, or that the rites do nothing, or that the traditions are illusions. They are arguments about the container, not the contents. The temples stand; the prayers are prayed; the lineages of priest and teacher run unbroken. What is in question is whether gathering all of it under one Latin-derived abstraction illuminates or distorts. The matter touches the projection arguments of figures like Ludwig Feuerbach, for whom the content of religion was the human essence cast outward and worshipped as other; it touches the positivist verdict that consigned both theology and metaphysics to an outgrown stage; and it touches the comparative project itself, the impulse — gathered at places like the Eranos circle — to read the mysticisms of the world as variations on shared inner themes, which presumes the very commonality the category-critics doubt.

The scholarship on the category

The reflexive turn — religion the field studying religion the concept — has its own literature, and the field now teaches its founding term as a problem rather than a given. The genealogy of the modern noun is set out most influentially in Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s The Meaning and End of Religion (1962), the work that made reification the keyword of the debate (Cambridge: HTR symposium on Smith). The constructivist case was sharpened by Talal Asad’s Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), whose opening chapter argues that no transhistorical definition is possible because the demand for one is itself historical (Project MUSE); and by Jonathan Z. Smith’s Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (University of Chicago Press, 1982), which located religion in the work of the scholar’s study (University of Chicago Press).

The definitional taxonomy — substantive against functional, monothetic against the family-resemblance and polythetic alternatives — is mapped, with its lineage from Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) through Durkheim and Wittgenstein to the present, in Kevin Schilbrack’s survey The Concept of Religion in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Tylor’s animist minimum is treated in the standard accounts of his Primitive Culture, and the philosophical machinery of overlapping traits in the literature on family resemblance. The classical sense of the word, and the rival ancient etymologies that already divided ritual care from the soul’s binding, are gathered in the scholarship on Roman religio.

What turns on it

The dispute over the category is not confined to seminar rooms. Law must decide what counts as a religion to extend or withhold protection — free exercise, exemption, conscientious refusal, the tax status of a body that claims the name; courts have had to rule on whether a conviction held with religious seriousness but no god behind it qualifies. Politics rests a great deal on the religious-secular line — which matters of conscience the state must leave alone, which it may govern — a line that the category-critics insist is not found in the world but drawn by a particular tradition and then universalized. And the academic study of religion, having grown up around the assumption that its object was real and singular, now spends much of its energy examining the lens it once took for granted, theology and the history of religions alike unable to proceed without first asking what they study.

Among the things gathered under the name are the traditions this collection follows — the Hellenistic schools where philosophy and worship were not yet divided, the currents that called what saves knowing (gnosis) rather than belief, the scholastic systems that pressed faith into ordered argument. The word arrives late to them, and sits on them imperfectly. That it sits imperfectly is part of what makes the traditions worth reading on their own terms.

→ Related: Positivism · Scholasticism · Priest · Gnosis · Theology · Ritual · Cult · Mysticism · Ludwig Feuerbach · Comparative Religion Eranos