Origin of Religion - Ancient Foundations
Origin of Religion - Ancient Foundations
Religions are collections of ideas, practices, values, and stories that are all embedded
in cultures and not separable from them. Just as religion cannot be understood in
isolation from its cultural (including political) contexts, it is impossible to understand
culture without considering its religious dimensions. In the same way that race, ethnicity,
gender, sexuality, and socio-economic class are always factors in cultural interpretation
and understanding, so too is religion.
Whether explicit or implicit, religious influences can virtually always be found when one
asks the religion question of any given social or historical experience. For example,
political theorists have recently highlighted the ways that different interpretations of
secularism have been profoundly shaped by varied normative assumptions about
Christianity.[1] This is just one representation of a fundamental shift in political theory
that is challenging the legitimacy of the longstanding assertion that religion both can
be and should be restricted to a private sphere and separated from political influence.
Modernist claims predicting the steady decline of the transnational political influence of
religion that were first formalized in the 17th century have been foundational to various
modern political theories for centuries. In spite of the ongoing global influences of
religions in political life throughout this time period, it is only in the aftermath of 1) the
Iranian Revolution in 1979; 2) the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the subsequent rise
vs. the widely predicted demise of religion; and 3) the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks that political
theorists in the West began to acknowledge the highly problematic ways that religions
and religious influences have been marginalized and too simplistically rendered.
This shift is a welcome one and paves the way for multi and cross-disciplinary
collaborations with religious studies scholars across the full range of social science
investigations in order to explore the complex and critically important roles that religions
play in our contemporary world.
[1] See Charles Taylor, The Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007);
J. Bryan Hehir, Why Religion? Why Now? in Timothy Samuel Shah, Alfred Stepan,
and Monica Duffy Toft, eds., Rethinking Religion and World Affairs (NY: Oxford, 2012)
pp. 15-24; Jos Casanova, Rethinking Public Religions in Shah, et. Al., eds., pp. 25-
35; and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in Shah, et. Al., pp. 36-
54.
Image Source:
"Holding a vajra empowerment wearing 5 Dhyani Buddha Crowns, lay people, monk,
nun, Sakya Lamdre, Highest Yoga Tantra, Tharlam Monastery of Tibetan Buddhism,
Boudha, Kathmandu, Nepal," Wonderlane (2007), from Flickr Creative Commons