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World Religions, Concept of

The concept of “world religions” is a 19th- and 20th-century European and American attempt to understand the global diversity of cultural patterns. Those who use the concept imagine that variations in the world's religious practices and beliefs can be apportioned into neatly demarcated “religions” that are relatively unchanging over historical time and geographic place. They further assume that all adherents in a given “religion” share similar practices and beliefs, and these can be compared with parallel practices and beliefs in other religions. By the end of the 20th century, all of these assumptions were challenged. Although still widely accepted and used by the general public, the term world religions has fallen into disuse in the scholarly world.

The Concept of Religion

Fundamental to the idea of “world religion” is the notion that there is such a thing as religion that can be defined and contrasted with other religions. As an historian of religion, Wilfred Cantwell Smith pointed out that the idea of religion as an organization and ideology distinct from secularism is a relatively new invention in history. It emerged during the time of the European Enlightenment as a way of containing what were regarded as religious excesses, superstition and intolerance, and the political and economic influence of the clergy. The alternative of religion was secularism, a concept also invented at the time, which described the values and practices in public life that were unaffected by traditional ideas and clerical control. Hence, the modern world was informed by what Talal Asad has called the “twin concepts” of religion and secularism.

Implicit in this organizational containment of the Christian church and its clergy in post-Enlightenment Europe was not only the notion that there was such a thing as religion but also that there was a specifically European version of it that was called Christianity. Although Christianity was thought to be the dominant religion of European countries, there was an awareness of cultural patterns and beliefs that did not quite fit and that were indications of competing religions. Judaism was the most obvious of the anomalies in Christian societies. For some, Judaism created a problem, or a “question,” for European cultural uniformity. This point of view laid the conceptual groundwork for the tragic attempt at genocide against European Jews during the Nazi reign of terror in the mid-20th century.

The Invention of World Religion

With the European contact of other parts of the world during the era of colonial expansion in the 18th through the 20th centuries, the template of religion provided an easy way of understanding cultural differences in these parts of the world. Inhabitants of non-Christian areas were thought to be adherents of other religions. Hence, concepts of Hinduism, Buddhism, and what was called “Mohammadanism” were invited as comparative terms with Christianity. Islam was known by the name of its founder, with the mistaken idea that the role of the prophet Mohammad (whom most Muslims regard as fully human) played the same role in the Islamic frame of reference that Jesus Christ (regarded by most Christians as a manifestation of God) played in Christianity. In 1893, a Parliament of the World's Religions was held in Chicago, Illinois, which helped to cement the notion that there were such things as world religions, that they had leaders, and that these representatives could meet in a parliament that prefaced the League of Nations and the United Nations by several decades. In many cases, the “leaders” were representative of only small groups of followers. But the 1893 parliament was nevertheless a paradigmatic event for demonstrating the viability of the world religions concept.

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