ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the concepts of 'religions' and 'religion' that are generally accepted uncritically by contemporary religious educators are relatively modern and are contestable. It presents a case for reviewing the ways in which religions or 'world religions' have been represented traditionally. Timothy Fitzgerald argues that 'world religion' is basically a theological concept, a concept derived from liberal Christian theology. During the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries there was a shift from Christianity as an intellectual system to Christianity as an observable, historical, geographically located social phenomenon. An important critical point is that Wilfred Cantwel Smith's appeal that we should drop the terms 'religions' and 'religion' altogether is naive in its assumptions about language use. Edward Said's analysis of Orientalism, especially if taken together with Smith's work on religion, is of considerable value in reconsidering the definition of religious systems in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
