Religion

The keyword “religion” names one side of a pair of terms—“religion” and “secularism”—each of which is defined by its opposition to the other. In this relational definition, religion is that which is not secular, is associated with the sacred rather than the profane, and is aligned with dogma rather than reason. As delineated through this series of oppositions, the concept of religion draws together a wide range of practices across cultures that may not have much in common with one another. The conflation of these practices under the sign of religion has its origins in the thought of Enlightenment writers such as David Hume ([1757] 1993), for whom religion named the universal experience that marked the unity of human beings, even as it served to distinguish among humans on the basis of their different religions (R. Baird 2000). In the process, even practices that had no reference to a god, such as Buddhism, were assimilated to a category of religion organized around the Protestant concept of “faith.” The use of this Protestant heuristic can be seen today in US public discourse, in which the most common way of speaking of multiple religious groups is to refer to “faiths” (as in the Jewish “faith,” despite the fact that most forms of Judaism prioritize practice over faith).