236 religious revolution now
law. Unlike Hinayana Buddhism or Islam in its historical core, it lacked
the power with which to make sacred law the law of the state. Th e na-
tional churches created in the aft ermath of the Protestant Reformation
were, on the other hand, largely committed to the religion of the heart.
Th e establishment of a national church, even when enshrined in the
constitutional arrangements, did not serve to impose sacred law upon
social life. Instead, such an establishment used the power of the state to
protect and to promote the privatization of the sacred, in the spirit of
the religion of the heart.
In what sense a religious revolution
In what sense is the change in our spiritual experience that these argu-
ments prefi gure religious? In what sense is it a revolution? If it fails to
invoke the intervention of a transcendent personal God in history (on
the model of the salvation religions), it may not seem to be religious at
all; it may appear to be more accurately described as a criticism and
revision of a familiar secular humanism.
Th e category of religion lacks any permanent core. Th ere is no set
way in which the aspects of our experience that we designate as reli-
gious relate to other aspects. Th at the category of religion is historical,
however, does not mean that it is empty of content. Its powers of dis-
crimination are those that the history of mankind gives it. Each major
change in the content of religion inspires a change in our idea of what
the term most usefully designates.
It makes no sense to defi ne religion to include only the three Near East-
ern mono the isms. Under such a defi nition, most of humanity, over the
last two thousand years, would be without religion. I have proposed to
use the term religion in a sense that is ample enough to include the
three major orientations that emerged from the spiritual upheavals of a
thousand years of trouble and vision: including Buddhism and Confu-
cianism as well as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Th is sense is, how-
ever, not so ample that it loses its power to distinguish religious experi-
ence, however relatively, from philosophy, art, and politics.
To respond to the inconsolable hurts in human existence, to root
an orientation to life in a vision of the world, thus surmounting the