What is Religion?
The Evolution of an Ancient Term
“Religion” is not just a Latin word, but a quasi-legal term. “Religio” just meant state-permitted worship as opposed to superstitio, a derogatory term for those cults that the Roman state frowned upon. Before Christianity became the official religion of Rome, it was the new kid on the block and, as such, was persecuted as a “superstition.” Religions are superstitions that have proven themselves. Like start-ups that have passed from seed-stage to IPO.
The term religion has two possible root-meanings. One is re-ligere: to bind or join again. The other is re-legere: to read or study again. The re- prefix means that religion is a kind of repetition or recuperation of something that came before. We often find doubling in religious texts and origin stories. For example, Abraham and the characters in Genesis practice natural religion, observing an intuitive relationship with God. But religion only appears from Exodus on when the group is commanded to observe the laws and the implicit norms of Genesis are codified, expanded, and revised.
While Dante put Homer in Purgatory since he wasn’t a Christian, he made Virgil his guide. This is because every religious tradition admits a pre-history, an element in which its official wisdom exists in primitive form.
Paul Ricouer says he wants to cultivate “second naiveté,” the paradoxical innocence of a believer who has passed through the trials of academic skepticism. But one needn’t look to moderns to see the theme of the second chance. God gives the Israelites two sets of tablets, a broken set and a whole set; a set that God writes and a set that humanity re-writes. Religion is re-pentance.
The concept of religion is not only modern but Protestant. It assumes that all religions share the same structural features, reducing singularities to a kind of analytical translation. The Protestant concept of religion sees religion, on the one hand, as a matter of faith or belief, and on the other hand, as a matter of social bonding. The former view comes from Luther while the latter comes from Spinoza. A critic of the very category of religion might say that it misses the essence of what it feels like to be religious.
But this line of reasoning is no different than that put forward by phenomenologists against Weberian sociology, more generally. And phenomenology started as a science. The founder of phenomenology, Husserl thought of his own discipline as a “rigorous science.” From a Kierkegaardian point of view, the scientific account of faith, spirituality, religious life, is all to mechanical and anonymous. It is like trying to describe love by writing about two lovers from the outside instead of being in love oneself.
Nonetheless, religion has stuck. Even religious people have embraced the term. Jews, Christians, Muslims, and people of all faiths, in the West, at least, have accepted a loose idea of perennialism, the notion that while we all worship differently, we worship the same thing. We may have different sacred terms, but all religious concepts have analogues in one another. While this may be true, to some extent, it also has the downside of flattening what makes different religions distinct and untranslatable.
To speak of religion is to speak of a term that does not exist in the Torah or the Gospels. The closest term I can think of in the Torah is avodah, which means service or work, but which has a connotation of serving God (or false gods). Our discourse would be very different—if not nonsensical—if we spoke about a separation between avodah (service) and malchut (kingdom) rather than religion and state. But here we are. The origins of the term religion are at once religious and secular. But whatever they are, they are loaded with assumptions on which still have yet to reflect.
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