ABSTRACT
The two quotations above give us the outlines of two profoundly diff erent meanings given to ‘religion’.2 The fi rst talks about religion as permeating the whole of life, and it bears comparison with religion in early modern England. I will call this holistic concept ‘encompassing religion’, since all practices and institutions are, in the fi nal analysis legitimized in terms of it.3 As such it is virtually impossible to distinguish religion from culture in the use of many anthropologists. The second quotation conveys a concept of religion as privatized and essentially distinguished from an area of life defi ned in non-religious terms. It is this kind of religion that is protected in modern constitutions as a human right; however, such constitutions also protect politics and the state from religion. It was encompassing
religion against which William Penn and others such as John Locke objected, and their claims abut the essential diff erences between religion and politics were prescriptive, a rhetorical demand for change, rather than a description of reality. This concept of religion can be seen as the product of ‘secular’ thinking and also as a condition for the realization of secularity in the fi rst place. A non-religious domain of politics, for instance, could not have been thought of unless ‘religion’ had been siphoned out of the totality and placed in a special essentialized category. I shall refer to this as ‘privatized’ or ‘essentialized’ religion and religions. These can be treated as two ideal ends of a spectrum, with various empirically confused examples sitting at diff erent positions along it. However, this is not only an abstract model, but a claim about historical change.
