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We tend to think of religion as an age-old feature of human existence. So it can be startling to learn that the very concept dates to the early modern era. Yes, you find gods, temples, sacrifices and rituals in the ancient Mediterranean, classical China, pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. What you don’t find is a term that quite maps onto ‘religion’.

What about the Romans, to whom we owe the word? Their 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. The Romans had other terms as well for customs, rites, obligations, reverence and social protocols, including cultus, ritus and superstitio. Yet they weren’t cordoned off into a realm that was separate from the workaday activities of public life, civic duty and family proprieties. What the Romans encountered abroad were, in their eyes, more or less eccentric versions of cultic life, rather than alien ‘religions’, in our sense. It was assumed that other localities would have other divinities; in times of war, you might even summon them, via evocatio, to try to get them to switch sides. But the local gods and rites of foreigners could be assessed without categorising them as instances of a single universal genus.

Even after the empire became officially Christian, you still don’t get our sense of ‘religions’. The Romans don’t start sorting the world into bounded systems analogous to ‘Christianity’, ‘Judaism’, ‘Manichaeism’, ‘Islam’ and so on. They have other, older sorting mechanisms, as Brent Nongbri elaborates in his terrific study Before Religion (2013). When Lactantius, in the 4th century, contrasts vera religio with falsae religiones, he means to distinguish right worship from wrong worship; he isn’t identifying other self-contained systems that might be lined up on a chart for comparison. The Christians of late antiquity didn’t view themselves as possessing one religion among many; they viewed themselves as possessing the truth.

The 1709 edition of De veritate religionis Christianae (1627) by Hugo Grotius. Courtesy the Internet Archive

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. In time, ‘world religions’ could be conjured up as bounded systems with creeds and essences, even when the local practices they subsumed were profoundly heterogeneous. Traditions with no founders were given founders; traditions with no single scripture were assigned canonical texts; diverse local rites were bundled into overarching systems.

As world religions took hold as a subject of academic study in the later 19th century, European scholars did their systematic best to treat disparate systems of practice and thought as members of a class. Buddhism became one test case. To call it a single ‘religion’, scholars first had to unify various practices of South, Central and East Asia, and then to decide whether a sometimes godless tradition could qualify. Such struggles over classification exposed a deeper uncertainty: how was ‘religion’ to be defined?

The great minds of the era had ideas. John Stuart Mill held that a religion must unite creed, sentiment and moral authority. Herbert Spencer thought that what religions shared was ‘the tacit conviction that the existence of the world with all it contains and all which surrounds it, is a mystery ever pressing for interpretation.’ The anthropologist Edward B Tylor proposed, as a minimum definition, ‘belief in spiritual beings’. The philologist Max Müller called religion a ‘mental faculty’, separate from ‘sense and reason’, by which humans apprehend the Infinite. For the Old Testament scholar and Orientalist William Robertson Smith, the true foundation of religious life was ritual – the binding force of collective acts. The sociologist Émile Durkheim’s own definition, in his classic The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), joined belief to behaviour and belonging: religion, he wrote, was ‘a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things’ that united its adherents ‘into one moral community, called the Church’.

These definitions came up short because they excluded too much or included too much. Either they failed to net the fish you were after or they netted too much bycatch. Mill wanted creed, emotion and moral suasion in one package, but many traditions that Europeans encountered in the 19th century didn’t distribute those elements in anything like that pattern. Did a religion involve a metaphysical stance on the cosmos and our place within it – was it driven by the ever-pressing ontological mysteries that Spencer considered central? What we’d call ancient Judaism........

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