ola sigurdsonin a lucid way: “Religion [.. .] shall mean for us the feelings, acts and
experiences of the individual men in their solitude.”^6 Religious
institutions are seen as something secondary, something that grow out
of individual experiences rather than that constitute these experiences.
Religion is, essentially, a private commerce between God and the soul.
For pre-modern theologians or philosophers, however, there was no
such concept of religion. It is a concept that is historically developed
and that fits quite well with the modern ideal of separation between
religion and politics, where the nation-state takes care of the body but
leaves each conscious person free to think and believe whatever he or
she wishes. To be a believer is no longer defined by belonging to this
or that institutional religious tradition or to practice religion in this
or that way, but to have certain religious feelings or sentiments and
ascribe to certain values. A consequence of this is that religion per
definition is understood as something irrational, something that could
or should have no public voice since this voice could never be the voice
of reason. Compare this to, for instance, Augustine or Thomas
Aquinas, for whom this very definition of religion as something private
and as such not able to take part in public debate would be impossible
to understand, let alone to practice.
But when religious institutions disappear from the view of philoso-
phy or theology, and private experiences and public discourse are what
remain, the lack of an intermediate social body or institution also
means that the questions of how religious experiences are mediated
through their material conditions and how religious texts and doc-
trines should be interpreted also disappear. The political blessing of
the reduction of religion to something private also becomes a political
curse, as religion, when defined as something irrational, cannot but
understand authority and revelation as something in contrast to a
public reason. “Fundamentalism” is a concept very hard to define, but
if there is any meaning to this concept when it comes to religion, it is
as a child of modernity, as its ideas of unequivocal revealed proposi-
tions as well its claims for infallible knowledge are dependent on the
- William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature,
Centenary Edition, London/New York: Routledge, 2003, 29f.