Note (2025-12-23 06:13)

“The Word ‘Religion’ Resists Definition but Remains Necessary”:

[The Romans’] notion of religio once meant something like scruples or exactingness, and then came to refer, among other things, to a scrupulous observance of rules or prohibitions, extending to worship practices. It was about doing the right thing in the right way.

To arrive at the modern category of religion, scholars now tend to think, you needed a complementary ‘secular’ sphere: a sphere that wasn’t, well, religious. That’s why the word’s modern, comparative sense wasn’t firmly established until the 17th century – Hugo Grotius’s De veritate religionis Christianae (1627) is one touchstone – at a time when European Christendom was both splintering and confronting unfamiliar worlds through exploration and conquest. Even as religion could be conceived as a special domain that might be isolated from law and politics, the traffic with ancient and non-European cultures forced reflection on what counted as ‘true religion’. It’s just that, when Europeans looked at India, Africa, China or the ancient Mediterranean, they sifted for Christian-like (and often Protestant-like) elements: a sacred text to anchor authority, a prophetic founder to narrate origins, a set of theological doctrines to sort out orthodoxy and heresy, and perhaps duties that offered a path to salvation. If a tradition didn’t provide these, scholars might helpfully supply them.

[T]he biblical writers do not stand before the universe feeling compelled to develop a worldview; they stand within a covenantal drama, entwining law, story and communal identity.

True, where science posited impersonal forces, traditional thought posited personal ones. But the underlying move from observed regularities to theoretical constructs was similar; what Europeans wanted to call religion was a pragmatic explanatory framework, reasonable given the available evidence, and part of the same conceptual space as folk biology, folk psychology and everyday causal reasoning.

[S]uccessful reference doesn’t depend on getting the description right. What matters is the causal connection between our words and the things they’re meant to denote. […] Causal theories of reference explain why our words can target the same class of object even when our conception of it shifts, and when the boundaries of the class shift, too.

‘Religion’, like many social kinds, functions in both ways. Anthropologists can use the term to describe practices that their participants would never call religions, yet, once the label circulates, it acquires a reflexive power: believers come to organise their self-understanding around it. In this respect, religion is a product of classification that helps to shape the reality it describes.

The map may not be the territory, but we’d be lost without it.