ABSTRACT
Many in both the general public and in the study of religion alike persist in understanding things designated as religion to be concerned with what the German Protestant theologian Paul Tillich famously termed “faith in an ultimate concern”. The word “authority” dates from the Anglo-Norman terms auctorete and auctoritie, used as early as the twelfth century. Authority was a social product of people in ranked situations. Authority, much like the thing we call an identity, is thus the result of claims and contests among a group’s many members, with followers always implicated in how they are governed. For, as Lincoln makes evident throughout his book, Authority, social legitimacy derives from those over whom so-called leaders exercise their status—whether via the members’ active agreement or apathy and inaction.
