beyond wishful thinking 51religion. Th e scope and nature of what we now call religion changed
when we began directly to address the implications of our mortality,
groundlessness, and insatiability; envisioned a higher realm of reality or
value above or within us; and sought to enhance our share in the life of
that higher order, thus transforming rather than merely protecting our-
selves. Th is emergent set of practices and beliefs shares no common es-
sence with the fi rst set. What it shares with it is a history, rooted in the
circumstance, the struggles, and the discoveries of mankind.
For the purpose of my argument here, the concept of religion has three
advantages over any manifest rival. Th e fi rst advantage regards the pres-
ent; the second, the past; the third, the future.
Th e present- regarding advantage is that the idea of religion comes
already laden by its history, which is also our history, with two conno-
tations that are central to the intellectual perspective from which I
propose to engage the past and future of comprehensive orientations to
existence. Th e fi rst connotation is that of the need to take a position, to
commit our lives in one direction or another, even when our grounds
for taking one position rather than another may seem inadequate to
persuade anyone who has not shared the same experience by which we
came to our belief. In this domain, we cannot stop, as we do in science,
at the boundaries of knowledge that we can hope to defend by readily
available and widely accepted argument and evidence. We must take a
stand, implicitly if not explicitly, what ever the limitations of our in-
sight. A person who professes to take no such position will be shown by
the course of his existence to have taken one in fact.
Th e second connotation of the concept of religion is that the vision
in the name of which we take such a stand cannot be cabined in any
department of experience. It has implications for every feature of the
conduct of life and of the or ga ni za tion of society. Th ose are mistaken
who object to the concept of religion (in its application, for example, to
Islam or to Judaism) on the ground that it separates a religious and a
non- religious sphere of existence. Th e main line of belief and action in
all the orientations to existence explored here moves against any such
separation.
Th e privatization of religion, especially in part of the history of Prot-
estant Christianity, is, from this standpoint, an exception to a tendency
that has been dominant in all these approaches to existence for much of