SKJ Today

Does “Religion” Exist?

April 1, 2009 // No Comments »

Jonathan Z. Smith on the existence of “religion”:

If we have understood the acrheological and textual record correctly, man has had his entire history in which to imagine deities and modes of interraction with them. But man, more precisely western man, has had only the last few centuries in which to imagine religion. It is this act of second order, reflective imagination which must be the central preoccupation of any student of religon. That is to say, while there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena , of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another as religious-there is no data for religion. Religion is soley the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy. For this reason, the student of religion, and most particularly the historian of religion, must be relentlessly self-conscious. Indeed, this self-consciousness constitutes his primary expertise, his formost object of study. (Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown, xi.)

In other words, as far back as we can conceive human beings have fashioned gods, worshipped them, engaged in cultic practices and the like. But human being have not reified a universal concept like religion and then categorized the aforementioned activities under it. It’s interesting that modern theologians like Barth and Schmemann both consider religion to be at the heart of the Fall, namely human disintegration of God from the rest of life. This may be how the Fall plays out in modern life, but to postulate this experience as universal seems difficult to say the least.

Posted in Modernity, Religion