ABSTRACT
A map of the world’s religions will likely bear a specific color of some sort for each world religion. South America, for example, would almost uniformly be one color and pretty much all of north Africa another (for Islam). Indeed, the category may play such a fundamental role in modernity that doing without it, no matter how persuasive the criticisms may seem to be, might turn out to be an impossibility. In fact, it has meant different things at different times over the past two centuries, ranging from its early use to imply that certain religions are, for lack of a better term, world class to designating an exclusive subset of so-called great religions. Though mid-twentieth-century books produced in Europe and North America, obviously, included a relatively small number of chapters, and while the earliest use of the term was often limited to just Christianity and Buddhism, they often included subdivisions within the larger designation.
