ABSTRACT
Certainly, the most central term of the field, the very word “religion,” is taken-for-granted by the most scholars. This includes those of a more recent generation who have gone through the rite of passage that the so-called method and theory course has become in the many graduate programs. In fact, although the term “religious tradition” pre-dates Cantwell Smith, once naming specific customs within a religion (e.g., self-denial is a religious tradition for Jains), the preference for renaming religions as religious traditions is in part due to his influence in the second half of the twentieth century. The study of religion reframed as the study of the discourse on the religion, or religion as a social fact, finds in the modern Japan a helpful case study, one that can be generalized to how the category religion functions in other liberal democracies.
