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The Development of the Concept of Religion and the Discipline of Religious Studies

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The Development of the Concept of Religion and the Discipline of Religious Studies introduction The Development of the Concept of Religion and the Discipline of Religious Studies Contemporary debates on the concept of “religion,” as well as the establish- ment of religion as an academic discipline, have unfolded as attempts—largely centered in the United States—at a self-critique of Western religious studies. The roots of the debates go back to Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s pioneering The Meaning and End of Religion (1962) regarding the concept of religion, and Eric Sharpe’s groundbreaking Comparative Religion: A History (1975). According to Smith, the concept of “religion” arose in the seventeenth and eighteenth centu- ries during the European Enlightenment.1 He concluded that the word referred to the outward or formal features of organized religion—what he called the “cumulative tradition”—and ultimately he found the term inappropriate for the analysis of religious phenomena of non-Western societies. Instead, Smith proposed the term “faith,” used to refer to the inner beliefs of individuals. Sharpe provided a survey of the history of the study of religion ranging from ancient Greece to the present day. Comparative religion was a turning point, he said, the starting point of modern religious studies (the academic study of religion). Sharpe’s view was that religious studies reflected the Western attempt to harmonize several disparate interests: scientific rationality linking the Enlightenment and the theory of evolution; Romanticism imbued with personal religious experience; and the awareness that was gained through colonialism of the religious experience of the non-West. Sharpe also took into account the additional factor of secularization, that is, the permeation of reli- gion into civil society. This fundamental understanding involving the founda- tion of religious studies remains valid today. Later debates on the concept of religion and the emergence of the disci- pline of religious studies were grounded in the work of these two scholars. After Smith and Sharpe, publications on the history of the concept of religion include Michel Despland’s La religion en Occident: évolution des idées et du 1 Vallée 1992, pp. 4–5. In that volume, Ernst Feil, in contrast to W. C. Smith, traces the estab- lishment of the concept of religion back to fourteenth-century humanism, while Despland follows it back to the appearance of the philosophy of religion around the year 1800. Smith’s contributions have been invaluable, but it can also be said that full investigation of the estab- lishment of the concept of religion has only just begun. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004�7�68�_��� 2 introduction vécu (1979) in France, and Ernst Feil’s Religio: die Geschichte eines neuzeitlichen Grundbegriffs vom Frühchristentum bis zur Reformation (1986) in Germany. Winston L. King, too, pointed out the Eurocentric nature of the concept of religion in his entry on the subject in the Encyclopedia of Religion edited by Mircea Eliade (1987). “Religion” in the West By around the beginning of the 1990s the debate surrounding the concept of religion had begun to come to real grips with the issues. Byrne’s Natural Religion and the Essence of Religion: The Legacy of Deism (1989) and Peter Harrison’s “Religion” and the Religious Thought of the English Enlightenment (1990) were at the forefront of the developments. Using the methodologies of intellectual his- tory, they endeavored to grasp the processes by which the concept of religion had become established, especially by focusing on “natural religion” during the period of European Enlightenment thought. Following the seminal work of Byrne and Harrison, other scholars, particularly Talal Asad, in his article on “Religion, the Democratic State, and Populism” (1999), for example, and Arie Molendijk in his introduction to Religion in the Making: The Emergence of the Sciences of Religion (1998), have continued to point out the close connections between the development of the concept of religion and the emergence of European Enlightenment thought that also provided for the idea of the sepa- ration of church and state. The peak of such studies came in the early 1990s with the publication of The Notion of “Religion” in Comparative Research: Selected Proceedings of the XVI IAHR Congress (1994), edited by Ugo Bianchi, and Religion in History: The Word, the Idea, the Reality (1992), edited by Michel Despland and Gérard Vallée. The Bianchi volume was a record of the 1990 conference of the International Association for the History of Religions, the last panel of which, “Religious Studies: Rethinking the Past and Imagining the Future,” grappled with the dis- cipline itself, looking critically at discourse on the concept of religion as it had been employed by scholars in the field,2 and attracting significant attention. The American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting in 1997, for instance, fea- tured the theme “The Appearance of ‘Religion’ in Enlightenment Thought and Poststructuralism.” Religion in History is an international collection of essays 2 The term discourse used in this book is based on Michel Foucault’s concept in his work The Archaeology of Knowledge: the power-reflecting framework of epistemological rules operat- ing at any given time in the individual subjects of a society..
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