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The Meaning and End of Religion

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There are two books that you must read in order to understand the modern study of religions: The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade and The Meaning and End of Religion by Wilfred Cantwell Smith. It is not that the theories that these two books espouse are universally accepted amongst the scholarly community. In fact, both draw heavy criticism. However, both are extraordinarily influential on the study itself. They represent the two major schools of thought in the early 20th century: The Chicago style (Eliade) and the Harvard style (Smith).

More specifically, Smith offers a shocking view of studying religion and what religion is in the first place. Whether or not you completely agree with it, Smith will give you quite a bit to think about.

This classic work is a study of the evolution of "religion" as a reified, essentialist concept in modern intellectual history. Religion, as Cantwell Smith persuasively argues, is--when understood either as designating an absolute "thing" in human experience ("religion in general") or as indicating a particular instantiation of that thing ("the Christian religion" or "the Buddhist religion")--purely a modern intellectualist construct, one that has no parallel in pre-modern Western thought or in the ideas of non-Western cultures that have not come under decisive Western influence. Cantwell Smith further argues that the term "religion" and the concept that it communicates create barriers to true scholarly understanding of human religiousness.

The methodology proposed by Cantwell Smith involves recognizing what we have called "religions" as being, in fact, nexuses of "cumulative traditions" (the historically-observable data of religious life in history--artworks, buildings, rituals, communities) and "faith" (the inner encounter between the individual and what Cantwell Smith calls "transcendence"--presumably comparable to Otto's Heilige or Eliade's "the sacred," and similarly susceptible to the charge that it is simply a smuggled-in God-concept).

The Meaning and End of Religion is now nearly half a century old, and it shows its age. While the historical survey is very compelling, and the case Cantwell Smith makes in this portion of the book is persuasive, much of the rest of the work takes a decisively theological turn that reveals the author's largely uncritical mid-twentieth-century liberal-Protestant worldview. When Cantwell Smith writes that "Men of different religious communities are going to have to collaborate to construct jointly and deliberately the kind of world of which men of different religious communities can jointly approve, as well as one in which they can jointly participate" (location 2421 in the Kindle edition), it's hard for this not to sound like the culturally-imperialist fantasy of white, affluent, first-world liberals like the author.

In spite of these reservations, The Meaning and End of Religion is a work of real erudition and one which has helped to establish important themes in the methodological and theoretical study of religion over the past five decades.