Social Forms of Religions in Contemporary Society 47
argument is that the intensified globalization of society over the past few centuries has
generated a situation that favors certain social forms of religion and religions yielding,
among other things, the conceptual ambiguity just discussed.
DIFFERENTIATED RELIGION IN GLOBAL SOCIETY
If we accept that the social forms that religion takes in contemporary global society are
to a large degree peculiar to that context, then it follows that assuming these forms to
be historically universal would create even more confusion. This sort of projection does
in fact take place quite frequently, in particular among academic and theological ob-
servers. Academics, in spite of protests to the contrary, regularly assume that so-called
world religions such as Hinduism and Daoism have a long history and have existed as
such at least since the first millenniumb.c.e.They are not alone, however. Often theo-
logical observers from within these religions insist on similar observations: For instance,
neo-Vedantic Hindu thinkers who style Hinduism as an ancient religion centered on
the Vedic scriptures (e.g., Dalmia and von Stietencron 1995); or post-Meiji Restoration
Shinto theologians who successfully asserted Shinto as a unified and ancient tradition^2
distinct from Buddhism and dating back at least to the eighth centuryc.e.While such
projections can and do make analytic and theological (not to mention political) sense,
they also tend to hide the degree to which this differentiation of religions as mutually
distinguishable and historically self-identified entities is of comparatively recent origin,
and would make little sense if we were not all observing from the same contemporary
social context.
A number of contemporary critiques of the concept of religion point out the degree
to which the current meaning of the word is in fact of Western and not at all of global
provenance (e.g., W. Smith 1978; Fitzgerald 1997; Chidester 1996). Historically speak-
ing, this is an accurate observation. The idea of religion as a distinct and differentiable
social domain did originate in European-based society and one could argue that it refers
more easily to religions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam than it does to other reli-
gious traditions. It would, however, be entirely misleading to assume, in addition, that
the word religion has always had this meaning among Europeans, or that other parts of
the world have not now incorporated this meaning into their own languages and ap-
plied it to at least some of their indigenous religious traditions. In fact, this supposedly
Western concept did not exist in the West before about the seventeenth century and
did not really solidify until well thereafter (W. Smith 1978; Despland 1979). And words
such asdharmain India,agamain Indonesia,zongjiaoin China, andshukyoin Japan
do today have very similar meanings to Western variants ofreligio; and refer explicitly
to entities such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Daoism, not just the Abrahamic
religions.
The question that emerges, therefore, is how did we arrive at this differentiation
of religion as something distinct and as something that inherently manifests itself in,
among other forms, a plurality of mutually distinguishable religions? The answer has
much to do with the development of global society over the last few centuries.
(^2) To be sure, these Shinto priests, scholars, and political leaders also claimed that Shinto wasnot
a religion, but this also had more to do with the historical context and what the word religion
implied for them, than it did with the characteristics of what they reinvented as Shinto. See
Hardacre 1989: esp. 34f, 63f.