What is religion, anyway?

Imagine you and a group of fellow enquirers have to agree on an adequate definition of “religion”, in an attempt to answer this post’s question. You will probably be able to sort through a number of examples and decide “what counts” as religion and what doesn’t. You may need to discuss the usual limit cases: self-help and meditation, secular monks, fandom phenomena, popular devotion for politics or football… But unless you were more successful than a long series of reputable scholars before you, you would be at pains to arrive at a precise definition, though you could at best recognise “religious stuff” when you see it.

This is the dilemma that opens Brent Nongbri’s Before Religion. A History of a Modern Concept, a provocative and ambitious book that I have just finished reading and that gives me the perfect excuse to embark on a discussion of “fundamentals” for this blog.

Nongbri’s thesis, as the title suggests, is that our concept of religion is a recent invention. Originally patterned after Christian categories (especially those of Protestant Christianity), this elusive term has expanded in the last few centuries to cover the most diverse cultural phenomena. The typically modern and Christian undertones of the concept can be heard in Nongbri’s attempts at giving a definition: religion is an “inner disposition”, a “privatized, apolitical interiority”, a “system of privately held beliefs about how individuals attain salvation” … “without direct political relevance”.

Of course the word “religion” (from Latin, religio) has been around for a long time. But Nongbri’s project is to show that we will fail to find it used in this sense before the advent of modern times. Particularly, the author is targetting the widespread notion of the “World Religions”: a world divided up into geographical areas where the major “faith traditions” have spread (sometimes with its accompanying map, highlighting these areas in different colours). This academic fashion would see in each of these the expression of a universal human instinct. “Individual religions may vary through time and geographically, so the story goes, but there is an element that we call religion to be found in all cultures in all time periods”. This misconception, Nongbri claims, dissolves under historical scrutiny.

Key moments in the history of “religion”

Such a subversive thesis, not least for the field of religious studies, requires some degree of sustained argument and historical proof. But this is exactly what Nongbri sets out to achieve, armed with no paucity of evidence — the footnotes and the bibliography together take up a third of the book. Let us briefly survey some of the turning points in this history.

Late Middle Ages, eve of the Reformation. We are surprised to encounter the word “religion” (Latin religio, religiones) used for the array of monastic and mendicant orders: monks, nuns, sisters, friars, canons… In a sense completely alien to ours, “religion” means a publicly expressed act of worship, sometimes entailing the consecration of one’s entire life to God. Thus the English fourteenth-century translation of the Roman de la Rose, often attributed to Chaucer, could say:

Sometime I am religious,
Now like an Anker in an hous.
Sometime am I Prioresse,
And now a Nonne, and now Abbesse,
And go through all regiouns,
Seeking all religiouns.

Flashforward to the seventeenth century. The Reformation has splintered Christendom; the various shards are now called “religions” or “sects”. John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) gives voice to the new sensibility:

The care of Souls cannot belong to the Civil Magistrate, because his Power consists only in outward force; but true and saving Religion consists in the inward perswasion of the Mind.

This “inward persuasion of the mind” leads individuals to freely and voluntarily associate themselves into churches, united by common creeds and sacred writings. Locke uses “religion” to refer to Christians and Muslims, but also to the variants of Christianity that emerged from the Reformation. This plurality is to be tolerated, provided it does not disturb the government and remains a private affair. “Religion” begins to appear as a realm distinct from politics, economy or science.

Nineteenth-century. India under British colonial rule. Nongbri recounts a bemused and somewhat comical exchange at the House of Commons between an employee of the British East India Company and the members of Parliament:

“A Hindoo may be a Christian?”
“He may … The word which hitherto had been in use was that of Hindoos. A Hindoo Christian is a Christian convert from Hindooism; a Hindoo is a person of the Hindoo faith.”
“But supposing the Christian was also a Hindoo, how could you say that a Christian was on one side and a Hindoo was on the other?”

Is “Hindoo” (Hindu) a geographical and ethnic name, or does it also describe a religion? Nongbri’s answer is clear: the Indian “religions” are a creation of the colonial period, when a variety of customs, ceremonies, laws, and especially sacred texts came to be regarded as part of a “religious” system of belief. Crucial to this were the efforts of a whole generation of European scholars popularising ancient Hindu literature in the West, culminating in Max Müller’s multi-volume Sacred Books of the East, edited between 1879 and 1910.

By this point, European colonial powers had been interacting with other cultures in America, Africa and Asia for centuries. The plural “religious map” of Europe expanded to include these new-found cultural manifestations and thus gave birth to our contemporary understanding of “religion”. In every case, it was (Protestant) Christianity that acted as a measuring rod for any given cultural phenomenon.

After religion

Nongbri’s thesis invites two conclusions, a weaker and a stronger one. The stronger conclusion is that we are not entitled to speak of “religion” properly outside of Christianity; perhaps we should even drop the term. Yet today we have become accostumed to call “religion” a wide variety of manifestations of the human spirit. There are whole academic departments devoted to “religious studies”, whereas in the Christian world, at any rate within Catholicism, the discipline of “theology of religions” flourishes — systematic reflection on how Christians may fruitfully engage with other spiritual and religious traditions.

Nongbri accepts that this stronger version of the argument may be unpalatable, and embraces instead a less stringent thesis: even if we cannot dispense with the label “religion”, we should at least acknowledge its Christian ancestry. Attempts at de-Christianising it will only be futile. Even though “religion” may have become a fundamental category of our understanding, we should not essentialise it nor forget its historical trajectory.

The author, however, does explicitly endorse the stronger conclusion in what concerns pre-modern times. Efforts at unearthing a Greek, Roman or Mesopotamian religion, for instance, only project an extraneous category onto our evidence. In the ancient world, the “religious” is inseparable from the “political”, the “economic” and so on. It is not that these are different “elements” merged together: there is no distinction to be made in the first place, from the point of view of the ancients. Similarly, disputes between Jews, Muslims and Christians in the Middle Ages were not driven by talk of differing “religions” but of “heresies”, rival and incompatible visions of the one true worship of God. These are substantive points and should make us reflect.

For example, if you come from a historically Catholic country, the suggestion that religion is “a set of privately held ideas with no direct political relevance” should strike you as implausible. After all, doesn’t the business of the Catholic Church seem to be to meddle in public affairs? But that is all to the good of Nongbri’s thesis. For the modern concept of religion is not only at odds with the ancient world, but is also incompatible precisely with that form of Christianity —Catholicism— that opposed the liberal project emerging from Protestantism.

Further, if you are Catholic theologian, the idea that there might be no such thing as a natural religion should also pose a challenge. Of course, there is no natural “religion” in Nongbri’s sense —a historical concept the origins of which can be traced to the early modern era. Yet Catholic theologians speak of every human soul’s “natural desire” for God. What may this look like, in a sense that does not presuppose the modern concept of “religion”?

The point that interests me most, however, is this: speaking of distinctively “religious” ideas and activities gives us the false impression that there is such a thing as a “non-religious” or “secular” sphere of life. It distracts us from attending to genuinely “religious” phenomena clad in unusual guise, and stultifies our discourse about what presents itself as explicitly religious. In this sense, I think, the contrast between “religious” and “non-religious” should simply be dropped. We may turn to more stimulating distinctions such as that between the “sacred” and the “profane”, we may ask ourselves what it is that an individual or a society “holds sacred”, what it “sets apart”, and how this impacts on every level of human life. But that is a reflection for another post.

Featured image: The Pictorial Missionary Map of the World (1861) by John Gilbert. National Library of Australia.