As I mentioned in a previous post, currently I am teaching a class on philosophy of religion. The starting point for the course is concepts of religion. We're approaching a cluster of issues concerning definitions or identifications of "religion" through reading excerpts from Ninian Smart's Dimensions of the Sacred, Brent Nongbri's Before Religion, and Tomoko Masuzawa's The Invention of World Religions.
Partly at issue between Smart's and Nongbri's respective analyses is whether the parochial connotations of "religion" (too often a part of how philosophy of religion is currently practiced) can be shed in favor of broad, cross-cultural (perhaps universal?) category of human experience. Smart deals with the problem by subsuming religions under the genus of worldview, a concept that he analyzes by means of his seven (or eight) dimensions or components (i.e. ritual/practical, doctrinal/philosophical, mythic/narrative, experiential/emotional, ethical/legal, organizational/social, material/artistic...and political); these dimensions apparently interact in a dialectical way with each other.
So while Smart seems to seek to stretch the connotations of "religion" (even while acknowledging the term's limitations) so that it can range over a diverse array of traditions, Nongbri argues, along Wittgensteinian lines, that the term's meaning is already well-established in use: "religion is anything that sufficiently resembles modern Protestant Christianity." (Nongbri, 2013, p. 18) Use of the word cross-culturally -- and more to his point: historically -- may mislead scholars and students into thinking that contemporary constructions are universals, that the referents for the term really exist as such and not as constructions of the scholar. In short, use of the term may invite confusion into one's analysis of a text, tradition, or way of life.
Nongbri may well be right, and the spirit of his approach is very much in line with my own concerns over introducing confusion through careless use of certain terms. Even so, I'm not sure yet if my own reading of Wittgenstein would support an analysis that goes in the direction Nongbri takes. After all, it is an empirical question whether the linguistic behavior of English speakers supports Nongbri's claim. (I suspect it might, but let's see.) Also, and perhaps more importantly, words like "religion" as well as other terms that are inter-translatable with "religion" are present in many other contemporary languages. These terms may have connotations that "sufficiently resemble modern Protestant Christianity", but then again, maybe they do not. These too are empirical questions.
Reference
Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
