When we were terrified by nature, and sought to placate gods who represented natural forces and who were not unequivocally on the side of any supreme good or reality in the world, and when we sought from such gods only the protection of our worldly welfare, our worship of the invisible powers meant something different from what would later be called religion. The scope and nature of what we now call religion changed when we began directly to address the implications of our mortality, groundlessness, and insatiability; envisioned a higher realm of reality or value above or within us; and sought to enhance our share in the life of that higher order, thus transforming rather than merely protecting ourselves. This emergent set of practices and beliefs shares no common essence with the first set. What it shares with it is a history, rooted in the circumstance, the struggles, and the discoveries of mankind.
For the purpose of my argument here, the concept of religion has three advantages over any manifest rival. The first advantage regards the present; the second, the past; the third, the future.
The present-regarding advantage is that the idea of religion comes already laden by its history, which is also our history, with two connotations that are central to the intellectual perspective from which I propose to engage the past and future of comprehensive orientations to existence. The first connotation is that of the need to take a position, to commit our lives in one direction or another, even when our grounds for taking one position rather than another may seem inadequate to persuade anyone who has not shared the same experience by which we came to our belief. In this domain, we cannot stop, as we do in science, at the boundaries of knowledge that we can hope to defend by readily available and widely accepted argument and evidence. We must take a stand, implicitly if not explicitly, whatever the limitations of our insight. A person who professes to take no such position will be shown by the course of his existence to have taken one in fact.
The second connotation of the concept of religion is that the vision in the name of which we take such a stand cannot be cabined in any department of experience. It has implications for every feature of the conduct of life and of the organization of society. Those are mistaken who object to the concept of religion (in its application, for example, to Islam or to Judaism) on the ground that it separates a religious and a non-religious sphere of existence. The main line of belief and action in all the orientations to existence explored here moves against any such separation.
The privatization of religion, especially in part of the history of Protestant Christianity, is, from this standpoint, an exception to a tendency that has been dominant in all these approaches to existence for much of their history: the demand to touch and to transform, in the light of their message, every facet of human action. Even in Protestantism a contrast between a religious and a non-religious part of experience has been anomalous. It characterized much of Protestant spirituality and theology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it gained an afterlife in the United States, given the predominant political and constitutional doctrines, in that country, about the place of religion in a pluralistic society. However, it was foreign to Luther as well as to Calvin. Much of the most influential Protestant theology of the last hundred years has been in rebellion against this bias, characteristic of the middle period in the history of Protestantism.
Similarly misguided is the view that a separation of the religious and the non-religious is regularly associated, at least in a Christian context, with the idea of a Church. For a Christian, the Church is primarily the community of the faithful, sustained by the presence of divine spirit and engaged in the transformation of every aspect of human life. It is only secondarily an organization. The validity and the meaning of the doctrine of the apostolic succession have been a source of division among Christians almost since the beginnings of Christianity.
It is also important not to mistake the contrast between the religious and the secular for the distinction between the orders of grace and of nature, which gained force in the nominalist Christian theology of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and has beset Christianity ever since. Later in this book, in exploring the direction of a religion of the future, I use the opposing words sacred and profane to mark a contrast different from the contrasts between religious and secular as well as between grace and nature. Sacred and profane distinguish a vision that sees our ascent to a higher life as enveloped in a narrative of transactions between a transcendent God and his human creatures from a vision dispensing with any such story.
Any distinction between a sphere of private life and devotion penetrated by religious faith and a remainder of existence on which faith has no purchase negates a defining impulse of the religions of transcendence: not just of those that worship a creative God—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—but also of Buddhism and Confucianism, and indeed of all the spiritual orientations that broke with cosmotheism. That distinction is the operational meaning of secularization. What we chiefly mean by secularization is not that people have ceased to believe in some version of the dialectic between transcendence and immanence but rather that they see whatever such belief they do hold as inapplicable to much of existence. Such a distinction between the domain of religion and the realm of a secular residue, in fact most of everyday life and social order, impoverishes religious experience. To say that the category of religion presupposes or implies such a division between the part of life in which religion takes an interest and the part to which it remains indifferent is to look at religion from the perspective of its enemies and to take the world religions as tools in their hands.
There is no good reason to acquiesce in such a reversal. The suggestion that the term religion has been irremediably compromised by the Protestant beliefs shadowing its wide adoption in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is abdication of our freedom to say what we mean. Such an abdication sacrifices something deep and enduring (the shared characteristics of the orientations to existence that have prevailed over the last two and a half millenniums) to something local and short-lived (the privatization of religion in the middle period of Protestantism). Why should Kant, Schleiermacher, and Madison determine, from their graves, how we use our words?
Expunged of this confusion, the historically contingent concept of religion, even if we employ it to designate only the living reality and the discontinuous history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, would already suggest the seemingly paradoxical sum of two connotations: a commitment that exceeds its grounds, or a vision that goes beyond its reasons, demands to penetrate the whole of existence and of society. No concept that we took out of a book, or devised in the study, would be likely to exhibit such a startling and improbable combination, vital to my inquiry and to my proposal.
The past-regarding advantage of the concept of religion is that it offers a ready-made imaginative space in which to compare the major comprehensive and practical orientations to existence over the last twenty-five hundred years. I claim that, as a matter of historical fact, three such approaches to life have commanded, above all others, the attention of mankind during this long historical period. Each of these approaches has an internal conceptual order: a moral and a metaphysical logic. The historical instances of belief and of practice that have exemplified these orientations to existence have common, non-trivial characteristics, of form and of substance, despite the immense differences, of substance as well as of form, distinguishing them. In an earlier section, I explored the extent to which they share a program for society and for the self. In this section, I discuss the degree to which they can all be understood as instances of a similar practice. I call this practice by the conventional name religion, modifying the conventional idea of religion in the double light of a thesis about the past and an intention concerning the future.
The future-regarding advantage of the idea of religion is the most significant in the argument of this book. Given that a historical construction about historical realities, such as the concept of religion, lacks a fixed reference or a stable essence, it should not be surprising that it has a pragmatic horizon. The meaning that we give to it should depend on what we propose to do with the activities and beliefs that at a given time we use it to describe. What this form of experience has been until now matters chiefly by virtue of its bearing on what it can and should become: on what we should do with it, and turn it into.