ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to elucidate the larger reason why, in different parts of the world, a relatively uniform new conception of religion was able to take hold in quite a short span of time. It looks at the social functions of ‘religion’ in the modern world. The chapter focuses on the broader meaning of the transcultural approach both for the study of the history of religion and for the analytical vocabulary we employ in the social sciences and humanities. It provides three major issues, highlighting the respective regional contexts and their connections. These issues are religion and science, religion and the state and patterns of responses by religious groups. The relativization of revelation, by arguing for historical origins of sacred texts, is another hallmark of the nineteenth century, dramatically changing the character of first European Christianity. Yet even in Europe, a reassertion of Christianity was often articulated in a less self-certain way.
