The history of ‘religion’

Making the leap from mountains to cultures, this chapter invites readers to consider not just religion as an aspect of wider cultural practices, but the very fact that we think such things as religions exist – that some of us even use the word ‘religion’ – itself to be a cultural artifact. We therefore begin by acquainting ourselves with the history of the very concept ‘religion’, keeping in mind that knowing the history, development, and limitations of our concepts may come in handy when we try to use them to name, organize, and move around within our worlds. Like all items of culture , words and the concepts they are thought to convey have a history (such as the classification of, and the various associations and value judgments that we make when we hear, the name ‘Mount Everest’); not only spelling and pronunciation but meanings and usages change (sometimes dramatically) over time and place. So too, ‘religion’, and the assumption that the world is neatly divided between religious and nonreligious spheres (i.e., Church and State ), can be understood as a product of historical development and not a brute fact of social life. Today, long after the modern usage of the word ‘ religion ’ was first coined, it is no longer obvious how it was understood in the past or how we ought to use it today. In fact, it is not altogether clear that scholars should continue to use it when studying human behavior.