## 1. A History of the Concept



The concept *religion* did not originally refer to a social
genus or cultural type. It was adapted from the Latin term
*religio*, a term roughly equivalent to
"scrupulousness". *Religio* also approximates
"conscientiousness", "devotedness", or
"felt obligation", since *religio* was an effect of
taboos, promises, curses, or transgressions, even when these were
unrelated to the gods. In western antiquity, and likely in many or
most cultures, there was a recognition that some people worshipped
different gods with commitments that were incompatible with each other
and that these people constituted social groups that could be rivals.
In that context, one sometimes sees the use of *nobis religio*
to mean "our way of worship". Nevertheless,
*religio* had a range of senses and so Augustine could consider
but reject it as the right abstract term for "how one
worships God" because the Latin term (like the Latin terms for
"cult" and "service") was used for the
observance of duties in both one's divine and one's human
relationships (Augustine *City of God* [1968: Book X, Chapter
1, 251-253]). In the Middle Ages, as Christians developed
monastic orders in which one took vows to live under a specific rule,
they called such an order *religio* (and
*religiones* for the plural), though the term continued to be
used, as it had been in antiquity, in adjective form to describe those
who were devout and in noun form to refer to worship (Biller 1985:
358; Nongbri 2013: ch. 2).



The most significant shift in the history of the concept is when
people began to use *religion* as a genus of which Christian
and non-Christian groups were species. One sees a clear example of
this use in the writings of Edward Herbert (1583-1648). As
the post-Reformation Christian community fractured into literal
warring camps, Herbert sought to remind the different protesting
groups of what they nevertheless had in common. Herbert identified
five "articles" or "elements" that he proposed
were found in every religion, which he called the Common Notions,
namely: the beliefs that


1. there is a supreme
 deity,[2]
2. this deity should be worshipped,
3. the most important part of religious practice is the cultivation
of virtue,
4. one should seek repentance for wrong-doing, and
5. one is rewarded or punished in this life and the next.



Ignoring rituals and group membership, this proposal takes an
idealized Protestant monotheism as the model of religion as such.
Herbert was aware of peoples who worshipped something other than a
single supreme deity. He noted that ancient Egyptians, for instance,
worshipped multiple gods and people in other cultures worshipped
celestial bodies or forces in nature. Herbert might have argued that,
lacking a belief in a supreme deity, these practices were not
religions at all but belonged instead in some other category such as
superstition, heresy, or magic. But Herbert did include them, arguing
that they were religions because the multiple gods were actually
servants to or even aspects of the one supreme deity, and those who
worshiped natural forces worshipped the supreme deity "in His
works".



The concept *religion* understood as a social genus was
increasingly put to use by to European Christians as they sought
to categorize the variety of cultures they encountered as their
empires moved into the Americas, South Asia, East Asia, Africa, and
Oceania. In this context, fed by reports from missionaries and
colonial administrators, the extension of the generic concept was
expanded. The most influential example is that of anthropologist
Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) who had a scholarly interest in
pre-Columbian Mexico. Like Herbert, Tylor sought to identify the
common denominator of all religions, what Tylor called a
"minimal definition" of religion, and he proposed that the
key characteristic was "belief in spiritual beings" (1871
[1970: 8]). This generic definition included the forms of life
predicated on belief in a supreme deity that Herbert had classified as
religion. But it could also now include--without Herbert's
procrustean assumption that these practices were really directed to
one supreme being--the practices used by Hindus, ancient
Athenians, and the Navajo to connect to the gods they revere, the
practices used by Mahayana Buddhists to connect to Bodhisattvas, and
the practices used by Malagasy people to connect to the cult of the
dead. The use of a unifying concept for such diverse practices is
deliberate on Tylor's part as he sought to undermine assumptions
that human cultures poorly understood in Christian
Europe--especially those despised ones, "painted black on
the missionary maps" (1871 [1970: 4])--were not on the very
same spectrum as the religion of his readers. This opposition to
dividing European and non-European cultures into separate categories
underlies Tylor's insistence that all human beings are
equivalent in terms of their intelligence. He argued that so-called
"primitive" peoples generate their religious ideas when
they wrestle with the same questions that all people do, such as the
biological question of what explains life, and they do so with the
same cognitive capacities. They may lack microscopes or telescopes,
but Tylor claims that they seek to answer these questions in ways that
are "rational", "consistent", and
"logical". Tylor repeatedly calls the Americans, Africans,
and Asians he studies "thinking men" and
"philosophers". Tylor was conscious that the definition he
proposed was part of a shift: though it was still common to describe
some people as so primitive that they had no religion, Tylor complains
that those who speak this way are guilty of "the use of wide
words in narrow senses" because they are only willing to
describe as religion practices that resemble their own expectations
(1871 [1970: 3-4]).



In the twentieth century, one sees a third and last growth spurt in
the extension of the concept. Here the concept *religion* is
enlarged to include not only practices that connect people to one or
more spirits, but also practices that connect people to
"powers" or "forces" that lack minds, wills,
and personalities. One sees this shift in the work of William James,
for example, when he writes,



> 
> 
> Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest
> and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the
> belief that there is an unseen order, and our supreme good lies in
> harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. (1902 [1985: 51]; cf.
> Proudfoot 2000)
> 
> 
> 



By an "unseen order", James presumably means a structure
that is non-empirical, though he is not clear about why the term would
not also include political, economic, or other invisible but
human-created orders. The same problem plagues James's
description of "a MORE" operating in the universe that is
similar to but outside oneself (1902 [1985: 400], capitalization in
the original). The anthropologist Clifford Geertz addresses this
issue, also defining *religion* in terms of an
"order" but specifying that he means practices tied to
conceptions of "a *general* order of existence",
that is, as he also says, something whose existence is
"fundamental", "all-pervading", or
"unconditioned" (1973: 98, emphasis added). The practices
that are distinctly religious for Geertz are those tied to a
culture's metaphysics or worldview, their conception of
"the overall shape of reality" (1973: 104). Like James,
then, Geertz would include as religions not only the forms of life
based on the theistic and polytheistic (or, more broadly, animist or
spiritualist) beliefs that Herbert and Tylor recognized, but also
those based on belief in the involuntary, spontaneous, or
"natural" operations of the law of karma, the Dao in
Daoism, the Principle in Neo-Confucianism, and the Logos in Stoicism.
This expansion also includes Theravada Buddhism because dependent
co-origination (*pratityasamutpada*) is a conception
of the general order of existence and it includes Zen Buddhism because
Buddha-nature is said to pervade everything. This third expansion is
why non-theistic forms of Buddhism, excluded by the Herbert's
and Tylor's definitions but today widely considered religions,
can serve as "a litmus test" for definitions of the
concept (Turner 2011: xxiii; cf. Southwold 1978). In sum, then, one
can think of the growth of the social genus version of the concept
*religion* as analogous to three concentric circles--from
a theistic to a polytheistic and then to a cosmic (or
"cosmographic" [Dubuisson 1998]) criterion. Given the
near-automatic way that Buddhism is taken as a religion today, the
cosmic version now seems to be the dominant one.



Some scholars resist this third expansion of the concept and retain a
Tylorean definition, and it is true that there is a marked difference
between practices that do and practices that do not involve
interacting with person-like beings. In the former, anthropomorphic
cases, practitioners can ask for help, make offerings, and pray with
an understanding that they are heard. In the latter,
non-anthropomorphic cases, practitioners instead typically engage in
actions that put themselves "in accord with" the order of
things. The anthropologist Robert Marett marks this difference between
the last two extensions of the concept *religion* by
distinguishing between "animism" and
"animatism" (1909), the philosopher John Hick by
distinguishing between religious "personae" and religious
"impersonae" (1989: ch. 14-15). This difference
raises a philosophical question: on what grounds can one place the
practices based on these two kinds of realities in the same category?
The many *loa* spirits, the creator Allah, and the
all-pervading Dao are not available to the methods of the natural
sciences, and so they are often called "supernatural". If
that term works, then religions in all three concentric circles can be
understood as sets of practices predicated on belief in the
supernatural. However, "supernatural" suggests a two-level
view of reality that separates the empirically available natural world
from some other realm metaphorically "above" or
"behind" it. Many cultures lack or reject a distinction
between natural and supernatural (Saler 1977, 2021). They believe that
disembodied persons or powers are not in some otherworldly realm but
rather on the top of a certain mountain, in the depths of the forest,
or "everywhere". To avoid the assumption of a two-level
view of reality, then, some scholars have replaced supernatural with
other terms, such as "superhuman". Hick uses the term
"transcendent":



> 
> 
> the putative reality which transcends everything other than itself but
> is not transcended by anything other than itself. (1993: 164)
> 
> 
> 



In order to include *loa*, Allah, and the Dao but to exclude
nations and economies, Kevin Schilbrack (2013) proposes the neologism
"superempirical" to refer to non-empirical things that are
also not the product of any empirical thing. Wouter Hanegraaff (1995),
following J. G. Platvoet (1982: 30) uses "meta-empirical".
Whether a common element can be identified that will coherently ground
a substantive definition of "religion" is not a settled
question.



Despite this murkiness, all three of these versions are
"substantive" definitions of *religion* because
they determine membership in the category in terms of the presence of
a belief in a distinctive kind of reality. In the twentieth century,
however, one sees the emergence of an importantly different approach:
a definition that drops the substantive element and instead defines
the concept *religion* in terms of a distinctive role that a
form of life can play in one's life--that is, a
"functional" definition. One sees a functional approach in
Emile Durkheim (1912), who defines *religion* as whatever
system of practices unite a number of people into a single moral
community (whether or not those practices involve belief in any
unusual realities). Durkheim's definition turns on the social
function of creating solidarity. One also sees a functional approach
in Paul Tillich (1957), who defines *religion* as whatever
dominant concern serves to organize a person's values (whether
or not that concern involve belief in any unusual realities).
Tillich's definition turns on the axiological function of
providing orientation for a person's life.



Substantive and functional approaches can produce non-overlapping
extensions for the concept. Famously, a functional approach can hold
that even atheistic forms of capitalism, nationalism, and Marxism
function as religions. The literature on these secular institutions as
functionally religions is massive. As Trevor Ling says,



> 
> 
> the bulk of literature supporting the view that Marxism is a religion
> is so great that it cannot easily be set aside. (1980: 152)
> 
> 
> 



On capitalism as a religion, see, e.g., McCarraher (2019); on
nationalism, see, e.g., Omer and Springs (2013: ch. 2). One
functionalist might count white supremacy as a religion (Weed 2019;
Finley et al. 2020) and another might count anti-racism as a religion
(McWhorter 2021). Here, celebrities can reach a religious status and
fandom can be one's religious identity (e.g., Lofton 2011;
Lovric 2020). Without a supernatural, transcendent, or superempirical
element, these phenomena would not count as religious for Herbert,
Tylor, James, or Geertz. Conversely, interactions with supernatural
beings may be categorized on a functional approach as something other
than religion. For example, the Thai villager who wears an apotropaic
amulet and avoids the forest because of a belief that malevolent
spirits live there, or the ancient Roman citizen who takes a bird to
be sacrificed in a temple before she goes on a journey are for
Durkheim examples of magic rather than religion, and for Tillich
quotidian rather than ultimate concerns.



It is sometimes assumed that to define *religion* as a social
genus is to treat it as something universal, as something that appears
in every human culture. It is true that some scholars have treated
religion as pan-human. For example, when a scholar defines
*religion* functionally as the beliefs and practices that
generate social cohesion or as the ones that provide orientation in
life, then *religion* names an inevitable feature of the human
condition. The universality of religion that one then finds is not a
discovery but a product of one's definition. However, a social
genus can be both present in more than one culture without being
present in all of them, and so one can define *religion*,
either substantively or functionally, in ways that are not universal.
As common as beliefs in disembodied spirits or cosmological orders
have been in human history, for instance, there were people in the
past and there are people in the present who have no views of an
afterlife, supernatural beings, or explicit metaphysics.


## 2. Two Kinds of Analysis of the Concept



The history of the concept *religion* above shows how its
senses have shifted over time. A concept used for scrupulous devotion
was retooled to refer to a particular type of social practice. But the
question--what type?--is now convoluted. The cosmic version
of the concept is broader than the polytheistic version, which is in
turn broader than the theistic version, and the functional definitions
shift the sense of the term into a completely different register. What
is counted as religion by one definition is often not counted by
others. How might this disarray be understood? Does the concept have a
structure? This section distinguishes between two kinds of answer to
these questions. Most of the attempts to analyze the term have been
"monothetic" in that they operate with the classical view
that every instance that is accurately described by a concept will
share a defining property that puts them in that category. The last
several decades, however, have seen the emergence of
"polythetic" approaches that abandon the classical view
and treat *religion*, instead, as having a prototype structure.
For incisive explanations of the classical theory and the prototype
theory of concepts, see Laurence and Margolis (1999).


### 2.1 Monothetic approaches



Monothetic approaches use a single property (or a single *set*
of properties) as the criterion that determines whether a concept
applies. The key to a monothetic approach is that it proposes
necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in the given class.
That is, a monothetic approach claims that there is some
characteristic, or set of them, found in every religion and that if a
form of life has it, then that form of life is a religion. Most
definitions of the concept *religion* have been of this type.
For example, as we saw above, Edward Tylor proposes *belief in
spiritual beings* as his minimal definition of religion, and this
is a substantive criterion that distinguishes religion from
non-religion in terms of belief in this particular kind of entity.
Similarly, Paul Tillich proposes *ultimate concern* as a
functional criterion that distinguishes religion from non-religion in
terms of what serves this particular role in one's life. These
are single criterion monothetic definitions.



There are also monothetic definitions that define religion in terms of
a single set of criteria. Herbert's five Common Notions are an
early example. More recently, Clifford Geertz (1973: ch. 4) proposes a
definition that he breaks down into five elements:


1. a system of symbols
2. about the nature of things,
3. that inculcate dispositions for behavior
4. through ritual and cultural
 performance,[3]
5. so that the conceptions held by the group are taken as real.



One can find each of these five elements separately, of course: not
all symbols are religious symbols; historians (but not novelists)
typically consider their conceptions factual; and so on. For Geertz,
however, any religious form of life will have all five. Aware of
functional approaches like that of Tillich, Geertz is explicit that
symbols and rituals that lack reference to a metaphysical
framework--that is, those without the substantive element he
requires as his (2)--would be secular and not religious, no
matter how intense or important one's feelings about them are
(1973: 98). Reference to a metaphysical entity or power is what marks
the other four elements as religious. Without it, Geertz writes,
"the empirical differentia of religious activity or religious
experience would not exist" (1973: 98). As a third example,
Bruce Lincoln (2006: ch. 1) enumerates four elements that a religion
would have, namely:


1. "a discourse whose concerns transcend the human, temporal,
and contingent, and that claims for itself a similarly transcendent
status",
2. practices connected to that discourse,
3. people who construct their identity with reference to that
discourse and those practices, and
4. institutional structures to manage those people.



This definition is monothetic since, for Lincoln, religions always
have these four features "at a minimum" (2006:
 5).[4]
 To be sure, people constantly engage in practices that generate
social groups that then have to be maintained and managed by rules or
authorities. However, when the practices, communities, and
institutions lack the distinctive kind of discourse that claims
transcendent status for itself, they would not count for Lincoln as
religions.



It is worth noting that when a monothetic definition includes multiple
criteria, one does not have to choose between the substantive and
functional strategies for defining *religion*, but can instead
include both. If a monothetic definition include both strategies,
then, to count as a religion, a form of life would have to refer to a
distinctive substantive reality and also play a certain role in the
participants' lives. This double-sided approach avoids the
result of purely substantive definitions that might count as religion
a feckless set of beliefs (for instance, "something must have
created the world") unconnected from the believers'
desires and behavior, while also avoiding the result of purely
functional definitions that might count as religion some universal
aspect of human existence (for instance, creating collective
effervescence or ranking of one's values). William James's
definition of religion ("the belief that there is an unseen
order, and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves
thereto") is double-sided in this way, combining a belief in the
existence of a distinctive referent with the spiritual disciplines
with which one seeks to embody that belief. Geertz's definition
of religion also required both substantive and functional aspects,
which he labelled "worldview" and "ethos"
(1973: ch. 5). To treat religion as "both/and" in this way
is to refuse to abstract one aspect of a complex social reality but
instead recognizes, as Geertz puts it, both "the dispositional
and conceptual aspects of religious life" (1973:
 113).[5]



These "monothetic-set definitions" treat the concept of
religion as referring to a multifaceted or multidimensional complex.
It may seem *avant garde* today to see religion described as a
"constellation", "assemblage",
"network", or "system", but in fact to treat
religion as a complex is not new. Christian theologians traditionally
analyzed the anatomy of their way of life as simultaneously
*fides*, *fiducia*, and *fidelitas*. Each of
these terms might be translated into English as "faith",
but each actually corresponds to a different dimension of a social
practice. *Fides* refers to a cognitive state, one in which a
person assents to a certain proposition and takes it as true. It could
be translated as "belief" or "intellectual
commitment". Beliefs or intellectual commitments distinctive to
participation in the group will be present whether or not a religious
form of life has developed any authoritative doctrines. In contrast,
*fiducia* refers to an affective state in which a person is
moved by a feeling or experience that is so positive that it bonds the
recipient to its source. It could be translated as "trust"
or "emotional commitment". Trust or emotional commitment
will be present whether or not a religious form of life teaches that
participation in their practices aims at some particular experience of
liberation, enlightenment, or salvation. And *fidelitas* refers
to a conative state in which a person commits themselves to a path of
action, a path that typically involves emulating certain role models
and inculcating the dispositions that the group considers virtuous. It
could be translated as "loyalty" or
"submission". Loyalty or submission will be present
whether or not a religious form of life is theistic or teaches moral
rules. By the time of Martin Luther, Christian catechisms organized
these aspects of religious life in terms of the "three
C's": the creed one believed, the cult or worship one
offered, and the code one followed. When Tillich (1957: ch. 2) argues
that religious faith is distorted when one treats it not as a complex
but instead as a function of the intellect alone, emotion alone, or
the will alone, he is speaking from within this tradition. These three
dimensions of religious practices--symbolically, the head, the
heart, and the hand--are not necessarily Christian. In fact,
until one adds a delimiting criterion like those discussed above,
these dimensions are not even distinctively religious. Creed, cult,
and code correspond to any pursuit of what a people considers true,
beautiful, and good, respectively, and they will be found in any
collective movement or cultural tradition. As Melford Spiro says, any
human institution will involve a belief system, a value system, and an
action system (Spiro 1966: 98).



Many have complained that arguments about how *religion* should
be defined seem unresolvable. To a great extent, however, this is
because these arguments have not simply been about a particular aspect
of society but rather have served as proxy in a debate about the
structure of human subjectivity. There is deep agreement among the
rival positions insofar as they presuppose the
cognitive-affective-conative model of being human. However, what we
might call a "Cartesian" cohort argues that cognition is
the root of religious emotions and actions. This cohort includes the
"intellectualists" whose influence stretches from Edward
Tylor and James Frazer to E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Robin Horton, Jack
Goody, Melford Spiro, Stewart Guthrie, and J. Z. Smith, and it shapes
much of the emerging field of cognitive science of religion (e.g.,
Boyer
 2001).[6]
 A "Humean" cohort disagrees, arguing that affect is what
drives human behavior and that cognition serves merely to justify the
values one has already adopted. In theology and religious studies,
this feelings-centered approach is identified above all with the work
of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Rudolf Otto, and with the tradition
called phenomenology of religion, but it has had a place in
anthropology of religion since Robert Marett (Tylor's student),
and it is alive and well in the work of moral intuitionists (e.g.,
Haidt 2012) and affect theory (e.g., Schaefer 2015). A
"Kantian" cohort treats beliefs and emotions regarding
supernatural realities as relatively unimportant and argues instead
that for religion the will is
 basic.[7]
 This approach treats a religion as at root a set of required actions
(e.g., Vasquez 2011; C. Smith 2017). These different approaches
disagree about the essence of religion, but all three camps operate
within a shared account of the human. Thus, when William James
describes religion as



> 
> 
> the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual [people] in their
> solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to
> whatever they may consider the divine. (1902 [1985: 34])
> 
> 
> 



he is foregrounding an affective view and playing down (though not
denying) the cognitive. When James's Harvard colleague Alfred
North Whitehead corrects him, saying that "[r]eligion is what a
person *does* with their solitariness" (1926: 3, emphasis
added), Whitehead stresses the conative, though Whitehead also insists
that feelings always play a role. These are primarily disagreements of
emphasis that do not trouble this model of human subjectivity. There
have been some attempts to leave this three-part framework. For
example, some in the Humean camp have suggested that religion is
essentially a particular feeling with zero cognition. But that
romantic suggestion collapses under the inability to articulate how an
affective state can be noncognitive but still identifiable as a
particular feeling (Proudfoot 1985).



Although the three-sided model of the true, the beautiful, and the
good is a classic account of what any social group explicitly and
implicitly teaches, one aspect is still missing. To recognize the
always-presupposed material reality of the people who constitute the
social group, even when this reality has not been conceptualized by
the group's members, one should also include the contributions
of their bodies, habits, physical culture, and social structures. To
include this dimension mnemonically, one can add a "fourth
C", for community. Catherine Albanese (1981) may have been the
first to propose the idea of adding this materialist dimension. Ninian
Smart's famous anatomy of religion (1996) has seven dimensions,
not four, but the two models are actually very similar. Smart calls
the affective dimension the "experiential and emotional",
and then divides the cognitive dimension into two ("doctrinal
and philosophical" and "narrative and
mythological"), the conative into two ("ethical and
legal" and "ritual"), and the communal into two
("social and institutional" and "material").
In an attempt to dislodge the focus on human subjectivity found in the
three Cs, some have argued that the material dimension is the source
of the others. They argue, in other words, that the cognitive,
affective, and conative aspects of the members of a social group are
not the causes but rather the effects of the group's structured
practices (e.g., Asad 1993: ch. 1-4; Lopez 1998). Some argue
that to understand religion in terms of beliefs, or even in terms of
any subjective states, reflects a Protestant bias and that scholars of
religion should therefore shift attention from hidden mental states to
the visible institutional structures that produce them. Although the
structure/agency debate is still live in the social sciences, it is
unlikely that one can give a coherent account of religion in terms of
institutions or disciplinary practices without reintroducing mental
states such as judgements, decisions, and dispositions (Schilbrack
2021).



Whether a monothetic approach focuses on one essential property or a
set, and whether that essence is the substance or the function of the
religion, those using this approach ask a Yes/No question regarding a
single criterion. This approach therefore typically produces
relatively clear lines between what is and is not religion. Given
Tylor's monothetic definition, for instance, a form of life must
include belief in spiritual beings to be a religion; a form of life
lacking this property would not be a religion, even if it included
belief in a general order of existence that participants took as their
ultimate concern, and even if that form of life included rituals,
ethics, and scriptures. In a famous discussion, Melford Spiro (1966)
works with a Tylorean definition and argues exactly this: lacking a
belief in superhuman beings, Theravada Buddhism, for instance, is
something other than a
 religion.[8]
 For Spiro, there is nothing pejorative about this classification.



> 
> 
> Having combatted the notion that "we" have religion (which
> is "good") and "they" have superstition (which
> is "bad"), why should we be dismayed if it be discovered
> that that society *x* does not have religion as we have defined
> the term? (1966: 88)
> 
> 
> 


### 2.2 Polythetic approaches



That a concept always corresponds to something possessing a defining
property is a very old idea. This assumption undergirds Plato's
*Euthyphro* and other dialogues in which Socrates pushes his
interlocutors to make that hidden, defining property explicit, and
this pursuit has provided a model for much not only of philosophy, but
of the theorizing in all fields. The traditional assumption is that
every entity has some essence that makes it the thing it is, and every
instance that is accurately described by a concept of that entity will
have that essence. The recent argument that there is an alternative
structure--that a concept need not have necessary and sufficient
criteria for its application--has been called a "conceptual
revolution" (Needham 1975: 351), "one of the greatest and
most valuable discoveries that has been made of late years in the
republic of letters" (Bambrough 1960-1: 207).



In discussions of the concept *religion*, this
anti-essentialist approach is usually traced to Ludwig Wittgenstein
(1953, posthumous). Wittgenstein argues that, in some cases, when one
considers the variety of instances described with a given concept, one
sees that among them there are multiple features that "crop up
and disappear", the result being "a complicated network of
similarities overlapping and criss-crossing" (Wittgenstein 1953,
SS68). The instances falling under some concepts lack a single
defining property but instead have a family resemblance to each other
in that each one resembles some of the others in different ways. All
polythetic approaches reject the monothetic idea that a concept
requires necessary and sufficient criteria. But unappreciated is the
fact that polythetic approaches come in different kinds, operating
with different logics. Here are three.



The most basic kind of polythetic approach holds that membership in a
given class is not determined by the presence of a single crucial
characteristic. Instead, the concept maps a cluster of characteristics
and, to count as a member of that class, a particular case has to have
a certain number of them, no particular one of which is required. To
illustrate, imagine that there are five characteristics typical of
religions (call this the "properties set") and that, to be
a religion, a form of life has to have a minimum of three of them
(call this the "threshold number"). Because this
illustration limits the number of characteristics in the properties
set, I will call this first kind a "bounded" polythetic
approach. For example, the five religion-making characteristics could
be these:


1. belief in superempirical beings or powers,
2. ethical norms,
3. worship rituals,
4. participation believed to bestow benefits on participants,
and
5. those who participate in this form of life see themselves as a
distinct community.



Understanding the concept *religion* in this polythetic way
produces a graded hierarchy of
 instances.[9]
 A form of life that has all five of these characteristics would be a
*prototypical* example of a religion. Historically speaking,
prototypical examples of the concept are likely to be instances to
which the concept was first applied. Psychologically speaking, they
are also likely to be the example that comes to mind first to those
who use the concept. For instance, robins and finches are prototypical
examples of a bird, and when one is prompted to name a bird, people
are more likely to name a robin or a finch than an ostrich or a
penguin. A form of life that has only four of these characteristics
would nevertheless still be a *clear* example of a
 religion.[10]
 If a form of life has only three, then it would be a
*borderline* example. A form of life that has only two of these
characteristics would not be included in the category, though such
cases might be considered "quasi-religions" and they might
be the most interesting social forms to compare to religions (J. E.
Smith 1994). A form of life that only had one of the five
characteristics would be unremarkable. The forms of life that had
three, four, or five of these characteristics would not be an
unrelated set but rather a "family" with multiple shared
features, but no one characteristic (not even belief in superempirical
beings or powers) possessed by all of them. On this polythetic
approach, the concept *religion* has no essence, and a member
of this family that only lacked one of the five
characteristics--*no matter which one*--would still
clearly be a
 religion.[11]
 As Benson Saler (1993) points out, one can use this non-essentialist
approach not only for the concept *religion* but also for the
elements within a religion (sacrifice, scripture, and so on) and to
individual religions (Christianity, Hinduism, and so on).



Some have claimed that, lacking an essence, polythetic approaches to
*religion* make the concept so vague that it becomes useless
(e.g., Fitzgerald 2000: 72-3; Martin 2009: 167). Given the
focused example of a "bounded" approach in the previous
paragraph and the widespread adoption of polythetic approaches in the
biological sciences, this seems clearly false. However, it is true
that one must pay attention to the parameters at work in a polythetic
approach. Using a properties set with only five elements produces a
very focused class, but the properties set is simply a list of
similarities among at least two of the members of a class, and since
the class of religions might have hundreds of members, one could
easily create a properties set that is much bigger. Not long after
Wittgenstein's death, a "bounded" polythetic
approach was applied to the concept *religion* by William
Alston who identified nine religion-making
 characteristics.[12]
 Southwold (1978) has twelve; Rem Edwards (1972) has fourteen and
leaves room for more. But there is no reason why one might not work
with a properties set for *religion* with dozens or even
hundreds of shared properties. Half a century ago, Rodney Needham
(1975: 361) mentions a computer program that sorted 1500 different
bacterial strains according to 200 different properties. As J. Z.
Smith (1982: ch. 1) argues, treating the concept *religion* in
this way can lead to surprising discoveries of patterns within the
class and the co-appearance of properties that can lead to explanatory
theories. The second key parameter for a polythetic approach is the
threshold number. Alston does not stipulate the number of
characteristics a member of the class has to have, saying simply,
"When enough of these characteristics are present to a
sufficient degree, we have a religion" (1967: 142). Needham
(1975) discusses the sensible idea that each member has a
*majority* of the properties, but this is not a requirement of
polythetic approaches. The critics are right that as one increases the
size of the properties set and decreases the threshold number, the
resulting category becomes more and more diffuse. This can produce a
class that is so sprawling that it is difficult to use for empirical
study.



Scholars of religion who have used a polythetic approach have
typically worked with a "bounded" approach (that is, with
a properties set that is fixed), but this is not actually the view for
which Wittgenstein himself argues. Wittgenstein's goal is to
draw attention to the fact that the actual use of concepts is
typically *not* bound: "the extension of the concept is
not closed by a frontier" (Wittgenstein 1953, SS67). We can
call this an "open" polythetic approach. To grasp the open
approach, consider a group of people who have a concept they apply to
a certain range of instances. In time, a member of the group
encounters something new that resembles the other instances enough in
her eyes that she applies the concept to it. When the linguistic
community adopts this novel application, the extension of the concept
grows. If their use of the concept is "open", however,
then, as the group adds a new member to the category named by a
concept, properties of that new member that had not been part of the
earlier uses can be added to the properties set and thereby increase
the range of legitimate applications of the concept in the future. We
might say that a bounded polythetic approach produces concepts that
are fuzzy, and an open polythetic approach produces concepts that are
fuzzy *and evolving*. Timothy Williamson calls this "the
dynamic quality of family resemblance concepts" (1994: 86). One
could symbolize the shift of properties over time this way:




|  |  |  |  |  |  |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| *Religion 1*: | A | B | C | D | E |
| *Religion 2*: | B | C | D | E | F |
| *Religion 3*: | C | D | E | F | G |
| *Religion 4*: | D | E | F | G | H |
| *Religion 5*: | E | F | G | H | I |
| *Religion 6*: | F | G | H | I | J |
| ... |



Wittgenstein famously illustrated this open polythetic approach with
the concept *game*, and he also applied it to the concepts of
*language* and *number* (Wittgenstein 1953,
SS67). If we substitute our concept as Wittgenstein's
example, however, his treatment fits *religion* just as
well:



> 
> 
> Why do we call something a "religion"? Well, perhaps
> because it has a direct relationship with several things that have
> hitherto been called religion; and this can be said to give an
> indirect relationship to other things we call the same
> name. (Wittgenstein 1953, SS67)
> 
> 
> 



Given an open polythetic approach, a concept evolves in the light of
the precedents that speakers recognize, although, over time, what
people come to label with the concept can become very different from
the original use.



In the academic study of religions, discussions of monothetic and
polythetic approaches have primarily been in service of developing a
definition of the
 term.[13]
 How can alternate definitions of *religion* be assessed? If
one were to offer a lexical definition (that is, a description of what
the term means in common usage, as with a dictionary definition), then
the definition one offers could be shown to be wrong. In common usage,
for example, Buddhism typically is considered a religion and
capitalism typically is not. On this point, some believe erroneously
that one can correct a definition by pointing to some fact about the
referents of the term. One sees this assumption, for example, in those
who argue that the western discovery of Buddhism shows that theistic
definitions of *religion* are wrong (e.g., Southwold 1978:
367). One can correct a real or lexical definition in this way, but
not a stipulative definition, that is, a description of the meaning
that one assigns to the term. When one offers a stipulative
definition, that definition cannot be wrong. Stipulative definitions
are assessed not by whether they are true or false but rather by their
usefulness, and that assessment will be purpose-relative (cf. Berger
1967: 175). De Muckadell (2014) rejects stipulative definitions of
*religion* for this reason, arguing that one cannot critique
them and that they force scholars simply to "accept whatever
definition is offered". She gives the example of a problematic
stipulative definition of *religion* as "ice-skating
while singing" which, she argues, can only be rejected by using
a real definition of *religion* that shows the ice-skating
definition to be false. However, even without knowing the real essence
of religion, one can critique a stipulative definition, either for
being less adequate or appropriate for a particular purpose (such as
studying forms of life across cultures) or, as with the ice-skating
example, for being so far from a lexical definition that it is
adequate or appropriate for almost no purpose.



Polythetic definitions are increasingly popular today as people seek
to avoid the claim that an evolving social category has an ahistorical
 essence.[14]
 However, the difference between these two approaches is not that
monothetic definitions fasten on a single property whereas polythetic
definitions recognize more. Monothetic definitions can be
multifactorial, as we have seen, and they can recognize just as many
properties that are "common" or even "typical"
of religions, without being essential. The difference is also not that
the monothetic identification of the essence of *religion*
reflects an ethnocentrism that polythetic approaches avoid. The
polythetic identification of a prototypical religion is equally
ethnocentric. The difference between them, rather, is that a
monothetic definition sorts instances with a Yes/No mechanism and is
therefore digital, and a polythetic definition produces gradations and
is therefore analog. It follows that a monothetic definition treats a
set of instances that all possess the one defining property as
*equally* religion, whereas a polythetic definition produces a
gray area for instances that are more prototypical or less so. This
makes a monothetic definition superior for cases (for example, legal
cases) in which one seeks a Yes/No answer. Even if an open polythetic
approach accurately describes how a concept operates, therefore, one
might, for purposes of focus or clarity, prefer to work with a closed
polythetic account that limits the properties set, or even with a
monothetic approach that limits the properties set to one. That is,
one might judge that it is valuable to treat the concept
*religion* as structurally fuzzy or temporally fluid, but
nevertheless place boundaries on the forms of life one will
compare.



This strategy gives rise to a third kind of polythetic approach, one
that stipulates that one property (or one set of properties) is
required. Call this an "anchored" polythetic definition.
Consistently treating concepts as tools, Wittgenstein suggests this
"anchored" idea when he writes that when we look at the
history of a concept,



> 
> 
> what we see is something constantly fluctuating ... [but we might
> nevertheless] set over against this fluctuation something more fixed,
> just as one paints a stationary picture of the constantly altering
> face of the landscape. (1974: 77)
> 
> 
> 



Given a stipulated "anchor", a concept will then possess a
necessary property, and this property reintroduces essentialism. Such
a definition nevertheless still reflects a polythetic approach because
the presence of the required property is not sufficient to make
something a religion. To illustrate this strategy, one might stipulate
that the only forms of life one will consider a religion will
include



(A)
a belief in superempirical beings or powers


(thereby excluding nationalism and capitalism, for example), but the
presence of this property does not suffice to count this form of life
as a religion. Consider the properties set introduced above that also
includes



(B)
ethical norms,
(C)
worship rituals,
(D)
participation believed to bestow benefits on participants,
and
(E)
those who participate in this form of life see themselves as a
distinct community.


If the threshold number is still three, then to be a religion, a form
of life would have to have three of these properties, one of which
must be
 (A).
 An anchored definition of religion like this would have the benefits
of the other polythetic definitions. For example, it would not produce
a clear line between religion and nonreligion but would instead
articulate gradations between different forms of life (or between
versions of one form of life at different times) that are less or more
prototypically religious. However, given its anchor, it would produce
a more focused range of
 cases.[15]
 In this way, the use of an anchor might both reflect the contemporary
cosmological view of the concept *religion* and also address
the criticism that polythetic approaches make a concept too vague.


## 3. Reflexivity, Reference, and Skepticism



Over the past forty years or so, there has been a reflexive turn in
the social sciences and humanities as scholars have pulled the camera
back, so to speak, to examine the constructed nature of the objects
previously taken for granted as unproblematically "there".
Reflexive scholars have argued that the fact that what counts as
religion shifts according to one's definition reflects an
arbitrariness in the use of the term. They argue that the fact that
*religion* is not a concept found in all cultures but rather a
tool invented at a certain time and place, by certain people for their
own purposes, and then imposed on others, reveals its political
character. The perception that *religion* is a politically
motivated conceptual invention has therefore led some to skepticism
about whether the concept picks out something real in the world. As
with instrumentalism in philosophy of science, then, reflection on
*religion* has raised doubts about the ontological status of
the referent of one's technical term.



A watershed text for the reflexive turn regarding the concept
*religion* is Jonathan Z. Smith's *Imagining
Religion* (1982). Smith engages simultaneously in comparing
religions and in analyzing the scholarly practice of comparison. A
central theme of his essays is that the concept *religion* (and
subcategories such as *world religions*, *Abrahamic
faiths*, or *nonliterate traditions*) are not scientific
terms but often reflect the unrecognized biases of those who use these
concepts to sort their world into those who are or are not "like
 us".[16]
 Smith shows that, again and again, the concept *religion* was
shaped by implicit Protestant assumptions, if not explicit Protestant
apologetics. In the short preface to that book, Smith famously
says,



> 
> 
> [*T*]*here is no data for religion*. Religion is solely
> the creation of the scholar's study. It is created for the
> scholar's analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of
> comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence
> apart from the academy. (1982: xi, italics in original)
> 
> 
> 



This dramatic statement has sometimes been taken as Smith's
assertion that the concept *religion* has no referent. However,
in his actual practice of comparing societies, Smith is not a
nonrealist about *religion*. In the first place, he did not
think that the constructed nature of *religion* was something
particular to this concept: *any* judgement that two things
were similar or different in some respect presupposed a process of
selection, juxtaposition, and categorization by the observer. This is
the process of imagination in his book's title. Second, Smith
did not think that the fact that concepts were human products
undermined the possibility that they successfully corresponded to
entities in the world: an invented concept for social structures can
help one discover religion--not "invent"
it--even in societies whose members did not know the
 concept.[17]
 His slogan is that one's (conceptual) map is not the same as
and should be tested and rectified by the (non-conceptual) territory
(J. Z. Smith 1978). Lastly, Smith did not think that scholars should
cease to use *religion* as a redescriptive or second-order
category to study people in history who lacked a comparable concept.
On the contrary, he chastised scholars of religion for resting within
tradition-specific studies, avoiding cross-cultural comparisons, and
not defending the coherence of the generic concept. He writes that
scholars of religion should be



> 
> 
> prepared to insist, in some explicit and coherent fashion, on the
> priority of some generic category of religion. (1995: 412; cf. 1998:
> 281-2)
> 
> 
> 



Smith himself repeatedly uses *religion* and related technical
terms he invented, such as "locative religion", to
illuminate social structures that operate whether or not those so
described had named those structures themselves--social
structures that exist, as his 1982 subtitle says, from Babylon to
Jonestown.



The second most influential book in the reflexive turn in religious
studies is Talal Asad's *Genealogies of Religion* (1993).
Adopting Michel Foucault's "genealogical" approach,
Asad seeks to show that the concept *religion* operating in
contemporary anthropology has been shaped by assumptions that are
Christian (insofar as one takes *belief* as a mental state
characteristic of all religions) and modern (insofar as one treats
religion as essentially distinct from politics). Asad's
Foucauldian point is that though people may have all kinds of
religious beliefs, experiences, moods, or motivations, the mechanism
that inculcates them will be the disciplining techniques of some
authorizing power and for this reason one cannot treat religion as
simply inner states. Like Smith, then, Asad asks scholars to shift
their attention to the concept *religion* and to recognize that
assumptions baked into the concept have distorted our grasp of the
historical realities. However, also like Smith, Asad does not draw a
nonrealist
 conclusion.[18]
 For Asad, *religion* names a real thing that would operate in
the world even had the concept not been invented, namely, "a
coherent existential complex" (2001: 217). Asad's critical
aim is not to undermine the idea that religion exists qua social
reality but rather to undermine the idea that religion is essentially
an interior state independent of social power. He points out that
anthropologists like Clifford Geertz adopt a hermeneutic approach to
culture that treats actions as if they are texts that say something,
and this approach has reinforced the attention given to the meaning of
religious symbols, deracinated from their social and historical
context. Asad seeks to balance this bias for the subjective with a
disciplinary approach that sees human subjectivity as also the product
of social structures. Smith and Asad are therefore examples of
scholars who critique the concept *religion* without denying
that it can still refer to something in the world, something that
exists even before it is named. They are able, so to speak, to look at
one's conceptual window without denying that the window provides
a perspective on things outside.



Other critics have gone farther. They build upon the claims that the
concept *religion* is an invented category and that its modern
semantic expansion went hand in hand with European colonialism, and
they argue that people should cease treating *religion* as if
it corresponds to something that exists outside the sphere of modern
European influence. It is common today to hear the slogan that there
is no such "thing" as religion. In some cases, the point
of rejecting thing-hood is to deny that *religion* names a
category, all the instances of which focus on belief in the same kind
of object--that is, the slogan is a rejection of substantive
definitions of the concept (e.g., Possamai 2018: ch. 5). In this case,
the objection bolsters a functional definition and does not deny that
*religion* corresponds to a functionally distinct kind of form
of life. Here, the "no such thing" claim reflects the
unsettled question, mentioned above, about the grounds of substantive
definitions of "religion". In other cases, the point of
this objection is to deny that *religion* names a defining
characteristic of any kind--that is, the slogan is a rejection of
all monothetic definitions of the concept. Perhaps *religion*
(or a religion, like Judaism) should always be referred to in the
plural ("Judaisms") rather than the singular. In this
case, the objection bolsters a polythetic definition and does not deny
that *religion* corresponds to a distinct family of forms of
life. Here, the "no such thing" claim rejects the
assumption that religion has an essence. Despite their negativity,
these two objections to the concept are still realist in that they do
not deny that the phrase "a religion" can correspond to a
form of life operating in the world.



More radically, one sees a denial of this realism, for example, in the
critique offered by Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1962). Smith's
thesis is that in many different cultures, people developed a concept
for the individuals they considered pious, but they did not develop a
concept for a generic social entity, a system of beliefs and practices
related to superempirical realities. Before modernity, "there is
no such entity [as religion and] ... the use of a plural, or with
an article, is false" (1962: 326, 194; cf. 144). Smith
recommends dropping *religion*. Not only did those so described
lack the concept, but the use of the concept also treats
people's behavior as if the phrase "a religion"
names something in addition to that behavior. A methodological
individualist, Smith denies that groups have any reality not explained
by the individuals who constitute them. What one finds in history,
then, is religious people, and so the *adjective* is useful,
but there are no religious entities above and beyond those people, and
so the *noun* reifies an abstraction. Smith contends that



> 
> 
> [n]either religion in general nor any one of the religions ... is
> in itself an intelligible entity, a valid object of inquiry or of
> concern either for the scholar or for the [person] of faith. (1962:
> 12)
> 
> 
> 



More radical still are the nonrealists who argue that the concepts
*religion, religions,* and *religious* are all
chimerical. Often drawing on post-structuralist arguments, these
critics propose that the notion that religions exist is simply an
illusion generated by the discourse about them (e.g., McCutcheon 1997;
2018; Fitzgerald 2000; 2007; 2017; Dubuisson 1998; 2019). As Timothy
Fitzgerald writes, the concept *religion*



> 
> 
> picks out nothing and it clarifies nothing ... the word has no
> genuine analytical work to do and its continued use merely contributes
> to the general illusion that it has a genuine referent ....
> (2000: 17, 14; also 4)
> 
> 
> 



Advocates of this position sometimes call their approach the
"Critical Study of Religion" or simply "Critical
Religion", a name that signals their shift away from the
pre-critical assumption that *religion* names entities in the
world and to a focus on who invented the concept, the shifting
contrast terms it has had, and the uses to which it has been
 put.[19]
 Like the concept of witches or the concept of biological races (e.g.,
Nye 2020), *religion* is a fiction (Fitzgerald 2015) or a
fabrication (McCutcheon 2018), a concept invented and deployed not to
respond to some reality in the world but rather to sort and control
people. The classification of something as "religion" is
not neutral but



> 
> 
> a political activity, and one particularly related to the colonial and
> imperial situation of a foreign power rendering newly encountered
> societies digestible and manipulable in terms congenial to its own
> culture and agenda. (McCutcheon & Arnal 2012: 107)
> 
> 
> 



As part of European colonial projects, the concept has been imposed on
people who lacked it and did not consider anything in their society
"their religion". In fact, the concept was for centuries
the central tool used to rank societies on a scale from primitive to
civilized. To avoid this "conceptual violence" or
"epistemic imperialism" (Dubuisson 2019: 137), scholars
need to cease naturalizing this term invented in modern Europe and
instead historicize it, uncovering the conditions that gave rise to
the concept and the interests it serves. The study of religions
outside Europe should end. As Timothy Fitzgerald writes, "The
category 'religion' should be the object, not the tool, of
analysis" (2000: 106; also 2017: 125; cf. McCutcheon 2018:
18).



Inspired by the post-structuralist critiques that *religion*
does not apply to cultures that lack the concept, some historians have
argued that the term should no longer be used to describe any
premodern societies, even in Europe. For example, Brent Nongbri
(2013), citing McCutcheon, argues that though it is common to speak of
religions existing in the past, human history until the concept
emerged in modernity is more accurately understood as a time
"before religion". His aim is "to dispel the
commonly held idea that there is such a thing as 'ancient
religion'" (2013: 8). Citing Nongbri, Carlin Barton and
Daniel Boyarin (2016) argue that the Latin *religio* and the
Greek *threskeia* do not correspond to the modern
understanding of *religion* and those studying antiquity should
cease translating them with that concept. There was no "Roman
religious reality", they say (2016: 19). These historians
suggest that if a culture does not have the concept of *X*,
then the reality of *X* does not exist for that culture.
Boyarin calls this position "nominalism", arguing that
religion is



> 
> 
> not in any possible way a "real" object, an object that is
> historical or ontological, before the term comes to be used. (2017:
> 25)
> 
> 
> 



These critics are right to draw attention to the fact that in the mind
of most contemporary people, the concept *religion* does imply
features that did not exist in ancient societies, but the argument
that religion did not exist in antiquity involves a sleight of hand.
None of these historians argues that people in antiquity did not
believe in gods or other spiritual beings, did not seek to interact
with them with sacrifices and other rituals, did not create temples or
scriptures, and so on. If one uses Tylor's definition of
*religion* as belief in spiritual beings or James's
definition of *religion* as adjusting one's life to an
unseen order--*or any of the other definitions considered in
this entry*--then religion *did* exist in antiquity.
What these historians are pointing out is that ancient practices
related to the gods permeated their cultures*.* As Nongbri puts
it,



> 
> 
> To be sure, ancient people had words to describe proper reverence of
> the gods, but ... [t]he very idea of "being
> religious" requires a companion notion of what it would mean to
> be "not religious" and this dichotomy was not part of the
> ancient world; (2013: 4)
> 
> 
> 



there was no "discrete sphere of religion existing prior to the
modern period" (2019: 1, typo corrected). And Barton and
Boyarin:



> 
> 
> The point is not ... that there weren't practices with
> respect to "gods" (of whatever sort) but that these
> practices were not divided off into separate spheres .... (2016:
> 4)
> 
> 
> 



Steve Mason also argues that religion did not exist in antiquity since
religion is "a voluntary sphere of activity, separate in
principle" from politics, work, entertainment, and military
service (2019: 29). In short, what people later came to conceptualize
as religion was in antiquity not a freestanding entity. The nominalist
argument, in other words, adds to the definition of the concept
*religion* a distinctively modern feature (usually some version
of "the separation of church and state"), and then argues
that the referent of this now-circumscribed concept did not exist in
antiquity. Their argument is not that religion did not exist outside
modernity, but that modern religion did not exist outside
modernity.



These post-structuralist and nominalist arguments that deny that
religion is "out there" have a realist alternative.
According to this alternative, there is a world independent of human
conceptualization, and something can be real and it can even affect
one's life, whether or not any human beings have identified it.
This is true of things whose existence does not depend on collective
agreement, like biochemical signaling cascades or radioactive beta
particles, and it is equally true of things whose existence does
depend on collective agreement, like kinship structures, linguistic
rules, and religious commitments. A realist about social structures
holds that a person can be in a bilateral kinship system, can speak a
Uralic language, and can be a member of a religion--even if they
lack these concepts.



This realist claim that social structures have existed without being
conceptualized raises the question: if human beings had different ways
of practicing religion since prehistoric times, why and when did
people "finally" create the taxon? Almost every scholar
involved in the reflexive turn says that *religion* is a modern
 invention.[20]
 The critique of the concept *religion* then becomes part of
their critique of modernity. Given the potent uses of
*religion*--to categorize certain cultures as godless and
therefore inferior or, later, to categorize certain cultures as
superstitious and therefore backwards--the significance of the
critique of *religion* for postcolonial and decolonial
scholarship is undeniable. Nevertheless, it is not plausible that
modern Europeans were the first to want a generic concept for
different ways of interacting with gods. It is easy to imagine that if
the way that a people worship their gods permeates their work, art,
and politics, and they do not know of alternative ways, then it would
not be likely that they would have created a concept for it. There is
little need for a generic concept that abstracts a particular aspect
of one's culture as one option out of many until one is in a
sustained pluralistic situation. The actions that today are
categorized as religious practices--burial rites, the making of
offerings, the imitation of divinized ancestors--may have existed
for tens of thousands of years without the practitioners experiencing
that diversity or caring to name it. Nevertheless, it is likely that a
desire to compare the rules by which different people live in relation
to their gods would have emerged in many parts of the world long
before modernity. One would expect to find people developing such
social abstractions as cities and then empires emerged and their
cultures came into contact with each other. From this realist
perspective, it is no surprise that, according to the detailed and
example-filled argument of Barton and Boyarin (2016), the first use of
*religion* as a generic social category, distinct from the
concept of *politics*, for the ways that people interact with
gods is not a product of the Renaissance, the Reformation, or modern
colonialism at all, but can be found in the writings of Josephus
(37-c. 100 CE) and Tertullian (c. 155-c. 220
 CE).[21]
 From the realist perspective, it is no surprise to see the
development of analogous terms in medieval China, centuries before
interaction with Europeans (Campany 2003, 2012, 2018) and in medieval
Islam (Abbasi 2020, 2021). The emergence of social kinds does not wait
on language, and the development of language for social kinds is not
only a Western project. If this is right, then the development of a
concept for religion as a social genus is at least two thousand
years old, though the social reality so labeled would be much
older.