The Meaning and End of Religion [Paperback] Wilfred Cantwell Smith

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In The Meaning & End of Religion, Smith contends that religion is a peculiarly European concept of recent origin. Practitioners of any given faith don’t come to regard what they do as ‘religion’ until they have sprouted that form of collective self-regard which causes them to have absorbed the perspective of the outsider. Religion, in the modern sense of the word, is a product of identity politics & apologetics: “One’s own ‘religion’ may be piety & faith, obedience, worship & a vision of god. An alien ‘religion’ is a system of beliefs or rituals, an abstract & impersonal pattern of observables. A dialectic ensues, however. If one’s own religion is attacked, by unbelievers who necessarily conceptualize it schematically, or all religion is by the indifferent, one tends to leap to the defence of what is attacked, so that presently participants of a faith–especially those most involved in argument–are using the term in the same externalist & theoretical sense as their opponents. Religion as a systematic entity, as it emerged in the 17th & 18th centuries, is a concept of polemics & apologetics”.
Thru etymological study of ‘religion’ (Latin: religio), Smith further contends that the term, which at first, & for most centuries, denoted an attitude towards a relationship between god & humans, has, thru conceptual slippage, come to mean a “system of observances or beliefs”, a historical tradition institutionalized thru a reification process. Whereas ‘religio’ denoted personal piety, ‘religion’ refers to an abstract entity or transcendental signifier which he says does not exist.
Smith argues that the term as found in Lucretius & Cicero was internalized by the Church through Lactantius & Augustine. During the Middle Ages it was superseded by the term “faith”, which he favors by contrast. In the Renaissance, via the Xian Platonist Marsilio Ficino, ‘religio’ becomes popular again, retaining its original emphasis on personal practice even in John Calvin’s Christianae Religionis Institutio (1536). During 17th century debates between Catholics & Protestants, religion begins to refer to abstract systems of beliefs, especially when describing an oppositional structure. Thru the Enlightenment this concept is further reified, so that by the 19th century Hegel defines religion as ‘Begriff’, “a self-subsisting transcendent idea that unfolds itself in dynamic expression in the course of ever-changing history… something real in itself, a great entity with which man has to reckon, a something that precedes all its historical manifestation”.
Smith concludes his etymology by arguing that religion now has four meanings: 1) personal piety; 2&3) “an overt system of beliefs, practices, values” comprising both an ideal formation in theology & an empirical formation in history & sociology; & 4) a generic summation or universal category, ie: religion in general.