50 beyond wishful thinkingway to designate both communities of faith and their creeds, only in
the eigh teenth and nineteenth centuries, under Protestant infl uence. Th e
earlier uses of the word and of its cognates had been narrower and more
selective; ritual practice had been their chief connotation.
Th e move to repudiate the term religion betrays a characteristic con-
fusion. Th is confusion should not be allowed to bar deploying the con-
cept of religion, so long as we are clear about the meaning that we choose
to give to it and the uses to which we intend to put it. Th e advantages of
the concept of religion over any rival category for use in argument like
the one that I conduct in this book are palpable and decisive.
No human practice has an unchanging core. If our practices are his-
torical and mutable, and open to revision, addition, and subtraction,
there cannot be such an essence of religion any more than there can be
an essence of law, of art, or of science. Religion is not the name of a
stable entry in an encyclopedia of human activities. No such encyclope-
dia exists. Th e experience of which it forms part can be carved up in
diff erent ways. Its commonalities and continuities are those of a his-
tory: a history of re orientations and of stabilizations.
If practices lack essences, the words that we use to designate them
are even more mutable in meaning. Th ere is hardly a word of any con-
sequence in the labeling of our enacted beliefs that has not suff ered
successive conversions of meaning, or not had origins suspect to those
who later appropriate them to a changed use. What matters is clarity of
purpose on the part of the converters of meaning, not fi delity to the as-
sumptions of the dead.
Every revolution in the beliefs and activities that we now call reli-
gious is bound to change our idea of what religion is. If the same prin-
ciple applies to the practice of natural science, constrained as it is by the
reach of our scientifi c equipment, the discipline of its mathematical
expression, and the pressure exerted by the inherited agenda of scien-
tifi c problems, it must apply in spades to the practices we call religion,
which labor under none of these constraints.
When we were terrifi ed by nature, and sought to placate gods who
represented natural forces and who were not unequivocally on the side of
any supreme good or reality in the world, and when we sought from such
gods only the protection of our worldly welfare, our worship of the invis-
ible powers meant something diff erent from what would later be called