ABSTRACT
Many in the field, both past and present, regard this term as relevant solely to the externalization of religious faith, since religion is imagined as either pre-political or inherently apolitical on account of its perceived intimate relationship to private experience. Politics therefore enters the scholar of religion’s analysis often only as part of the broader context of the expression of religious faith, something that is also termed piety. Some might object that the people have merely substituted a previous generation’s use of “the religious” let alone “the sacred” for these three interrelated technical terms, thereby making a approach just as theological as any other. While there certainly has been a range of meanings, the people take seriously that both the individual and collective uses of the term generally presuppose the sort of strategic negotiation that they argue inevitably takes place in the social groups of which humans have no choice but to participate.
