beyond wishful thinking 53mean by secularization is not that people have ceased to believe in some
version of the dialectic between transcendence and immanence but
rather that they see what ever such belief they do hold as inapplicable to
much of existence. Such a distinction between the domain of religion
and the realm of a secular residue, in fact most of everyday life and so-
cial order, impoverishes religious experience. To say that the category
of religion presupposes or implies such a division between the part of
life in which religion takes an interest and the part to which it remains
indiff erent is to look at religion from the perspective of its enemies and
to take the world religions as tools in their hands.
Th ere is no good reason to acquiesce in such a reversal. Th e sugges-
tion that the term religion has been irremediably compromised by the
Protestant beliefs shadowing its wide adoption in the eigh teenth and
nineteenth centuries is abdication of our freedom to say what we mean.
Such an abdication sacrifi ces something deep and enduring (the shared
characteristics of the orientations to existence that have prevailed over
the last two and a half millenniums) to something local and short- lived
(the privatization of religion in the middle period of Protestantism).
Why should Kant, Schleiermacher, and Madison determine, from their
graves, how we use our words?
Expunged of this confusion, the historically contingent concept of
religion, even if we employ it to designate only the living reality and the
discontinuous history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, would al-
ready suggest the seemingly paradoxical sum of two connotations: a
commitment that exceeds its grounds, or a vision that goes beyond its
reasons, demands to penetrate the whole of existence and of society. No
concept that we took out of a book, or devised in the study, would be
likely to exhibit such a startling and improbable combination, vital to
my inquiry and to my proposal.
Th e past- regarding advantage of the concept of religion is that it
off ers a ready- made imaginative space in which to compare the major
comprehensive and practical orientations to existence over the last twenty-
fi ve hundred years. I claim that, as a matter of historical fact, three such
approaches to life have commanded, above all others, the attention of
mankind during this long historical period. Each of these approaches
has an internal conceptual order: a moral and a metaphysical logic. Th e
historical instances of belief and of practice that have exemplifi ed these