48 Peter Beyer
The fact that this modern understanding of religion as differentiated and plural de-
veloped first specifically in seventeenth-century Europe is of some significance. Already
in the sixteenth century, the prolonged and violent conflict that came in the wake of
the Protestant Reformation impressed on many elite Europeans the idea that religious
differencesare fundamental and intractable. By the beginning of the eighteenth cen-
tury, we see crystallizing a double notion. First, people do not just have religion, they
haveareligion, implying both something distinct and more than one possibility. Sec-
ond, therefore, there exist distinct religions, now in the plural. Initially, the religions
thus recognized were few: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, with a broad residual cate-
gory of heathenism or paganism. In the context of their imperial expansion virtually all
around the world over the next two centuries, however, European observers “found” an
increasing number of other major religions, including what by the nineteenth century
began to be called Buddhism, Hinduism, Daoism, and Confucianism.^3
Although religious conflict in Europe and European imperial expansion were impor-
tant for this discovery of religions, other factors were just as critical. Prime among these
were the close association of religion and nation, the eventual collaboration of non-
European elites in the construction of some of these religions, and the rise of increas-
ingly powerful institutional domains more and more independent of religion.
The seventeenth-century solution to the prolonged religious conflict in Europe was
the Treaty of Westphalia, which coordinated religious and political identity: Protestant
rulers would have Protestant subjects; Catholic rulers would have Catholic subjects.
After the French Revolution and especially in the nineteenth century, we see solidifying
the further idea that states gain their primary legitimacy as agents and expressions, not
of rulers, but of nations, cultural units that in most cases carried forth the Westphalian
formula to include a particular religion as a central element in national identity. This
overlapping of nation, state, and religion was by no means rigidly consistent or even
always straightforward, but it did have the effect of institutionalizing a triple plurality:
There are many states, which correspond to the many nations. And these nations are
very frequently the carriers of different religions.
The European observers who carried forth the global expansion of European in-
fluence did not simply apply this formula to everyone else. Indeed, their dominant
attitude, especially among the Christian missionaries, was that most of the others
were heathens, targets for conversion, not carriers of yet other religions. In some cases,
however, such observers did “discover” additional and distinct religions, notably other
so-called world religions such as Buddhism, Daoism, and Hinduism. These efforts by
themselves did not, however, lead to the differentiation of these entities as yet more
self-identified, popularly, and officially recognized religions. For this additional step to
happen, indigenous carrier elites had to take up this task of revisioning the complex
and to some degree amorphous religious traditions of their civilizations as delimited
and recognizable religions, formally on a par with and distinct from the others, in
particular, given the religious identity of the Westerners, with Christianity. Where this
additional vital step happened, we witness the construction, imagining, recognition,
and to varying degrees organization of religions such as Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism,
Buddhism, and, perhaps less clearly, Daoism. Where we meet the failure of indigenous
(^3) For a fuller discussion, see Beyer 1998, 1999. See also Almond 1988; Harrison 1990; Jensen
1997; W. Smith 1978; Despland 1979; Dalmia and von Stietencron 1995.