Seven Ways of

Looking at Religion
Benjamin Schewel

Among the twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
The blackbird in Wallace Stevenss famous poem is many things at once. It is a living
center of perception, a creature that inhabits the earth, an entity swirling through the
natural world, an expression of the universal whole, a beautiful melody, a passing shadow, and various other things, depending on the observers perspective. Yet in making
his point about point of view, Stevens does not argue that the blackbird has no essence.
Indeed, he tries to suggest a more profound truth: that the blackbird is something that
exists beyond the ways it can be viewed. My intention here to suggest that something
similar holds true for religion. Up to a point.
There is nothing new about approaching religion in a perspectival way. Indeed,
it is commonplace today to find long lists of the things religion is: It is practice and
observance. It is prayer. It is tradition and culture. It is morality and belief and faith
and much else as well. We are routinely enjoined to appreciate the particularities and
differences that characterize religious traditions, and there is something useful in this
relativizing move. It helps us avoid collapsing rich religious diversity into an abstract
and constructed ideal. Nevertheless, it would be false to conclude that religion is nothing more than the many different things that assorted religious traditions do.
Benjamin Schewel is a fellow at the Centre for Religion, Conflict, and the Public Domain at
the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and also an associate fellow at the Institute
for Advanced Studies in Culture. This essay is adapted from his book, Seven Narratives of
Religion, forthcoming from Yale University Press.
Right: A raven on a snow-covered tree branch, c. 1910, by Ohara Koson/Shoson (18771945); private
collection, Alfredo Dagli Orti/Art Resource, NY.

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I want to suggest that we can proceed toward the kind of balanced perspectivism
Stevens champions by examining the various ways scholars narrate the history of religion. I suggest focusing on these narratives because one of the greater challenges in
thinking about religion today comes precisely from the multiplicity of approaches to
explaining how, and to what effect, religions change. Certainly, we know that religion
has somehow evolved from its tribal beginnings through the archaic, axial, and medieval periods. We know how it changed under the pressures of modernity, and we are
beginning to speculate about its transformations in the current global age. Yet there
is no clear consensus about the dynamicssocial, psychological, economic, political, intellectual, culturalthat have driven these changes. Has religion been gradually
declining? Has it been improving? Do the same dynamics appear again and again
and work in the same ways? Have we fallen away from some ideal religious orientation
of an earlier time? Or has religion undergone a series of qualitatively neutral changes?
Regardless of the story they ultimately adopt, even the most learned observers can and
do see religious history in profoundly different ways.
To show what we might learn from these various explanations of religious change
but also to argue how one of them in particular might help us benefit from the insights
of the manyI will focus on seven major narrative frameworks that shape the contemporary and largely (but not exclusively) academic discourse on religion. I call these
narratives (1) subtraction, (2) renewal, (3) trans-secular, (4) construct, (5) perennial,
(6) post-naturalist, and (7) developmental. Each narrative tells us something important about the history of the worlds various religious traditions, even while displaying
certain limitations that insights from the other narratives help compensate for. The
challenge is to appreciate the deeper complementarity holding these seven narratives
together without overlooking their respectively unique insights and features.

The Subtraction Narrative

The so-called major religions or universal religions, far from being
the quintessential embodiment of religion, are in fact just so many stages of its abatement and disintegration. The greatest and most universal
of them, our own, the rational religion of the one god, is precisely the
one that allows a departure from religion. So we must change our perspective. When dealing with religion, what appears to be an advance is
actually a retreat. Fully developed religion existed before the bifurcation which, somewhere around 3000 BC in Mesopotamia and Egypt,
plunged us into another religious world, one capable of existing without
religionour own.
Marcel Gauchet 1
Subtraction narratives depict religion as a means of dealing with the ignorance and
powerlessness that characterized early human societies. By this account, as humans
grow in knowledge and extend their mastery over the world, they become less religious.
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Not surprisingly, subtraction narratives posit an inverse relationship between modernity

and religion: The more modern we are, the less religious, and vice versa.
Auguste Comte (17981857), the French philosopher often credited with founding
modern sociology, articulated one of the first fully developed subtraction narratives.
He argued that humanity was steadily moving away from its primitive belief that all
things possessed a human-like spirit, and toward a modern positivist view that rejects
supernaturalism and concentrates entirely on the immanent tasks of science, technology, and practical morality. In Comtes telling, this process involved three intermediary
stages. Humans first went beyond animism by
positing a plurality of semi-transcendent divinNot surprisingly, subtraction
ities.2 Then they collapsed these divinities into
a single transcendent God. Later, they began
narratives posit an inverse
treating God as a mere abstraction, which
relationship between modernity and
can furnish no basis for any religious system of
real efficacy, intellectual, moral, or, above all,
religion: The more modern we are,
social.3 Finally, this abstract deistic philosothe less religious, and vice versa.
phy began to give way to the age of positivistic
naturalism, in which supernatural belief would
entirely disappear.4
Although many scholars still tell similar subtraction stories today, they must now
explain why religion has not disappeared as quickly as Comte and others imagined it
wouldand even why, during the last several decades, it has appeared to make a vigorous resurgence. Often instanced in this regard is the eminent sociologist Peter Berger,
who in 1968 famously declared that by the 21st century, religious believers are likely
to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture.5
In 1999, however, Berger was among the first to acknowledge that the world was as
furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever.6 Although this
realization led him to abandon his subtraction narrative outright, other scholars have
simply modified it to make sense of religions continued importance.
One of those who have made such adjustments to subtractionism is the philosopher Daniel Dennett, whose work on consciousness has made him a favorite among
neuroscientists. Describing the evolution of religion in broadly Comtean terms,
Dennett acknowledges that religion remains attractive for many people today and is
therefore unlikely to disappear soon. Yet far from embracing or even celebrating religions persistence in the way that, for example, Berger does, Dennett seeks to mitigate
its influence. To that end, he calls not just for better science education and stronger
natural-scientific explanations of religion, but also for policies and media campaigns
that would seek to minimize what he sees as religions more pernicious social and
psychological effects.
Subtraction narratives are of most value in showing how certain aspects of religious
belief or practice are likely to fall by the waysideor at least come under wide suspicionwith the advance of human knowledge and mastery over the world. Indeed,
most thoughtful people believe that sun worship, voodoo, caste systems, systematized
gender inequality, child sacrifice, witch-hunts, inquisitions, and Bible-based science
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were deserving victims of civilizational progress. However, acknowledging the merit of

these subtractions does not mean we must also believe that all religious practices and
beliefs ought to eventually decline.
Indeed, many great religious thinkers have celebrated the fact that their traditions
have shed certain problematic practices and beliefs, and have often called for further
subtractions. Yet they insist that this subtractive process need not eliminate everything
about their respective traditions, and they argue that religion is an indispensable corrective to the excesses that beset purely materialistic modes of thought. Science can
purify religion from error and superstition, wrote Pope John Paul II, while religion
can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.7

The Renewal Narrative

What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be
sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And
if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last
dark ages, we are not entirely without hope. This time however the
barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been
governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of
this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a
Godot, but for anotherdoubtless very differentSt. Benedict.
Alasdair MacIntyre 8
Supporters of the renewal narrative claim that the decline of some specific religious
configurationhigh medieval Catholicism, polytheistic pre-Socratic Greek spirituality,
Golden Age Islamcaused the many problems we face in the modern world, and
that the only way to solve these problems is to restore parts of the lost dispensation.
Renewal narrativists agree with subtraction narrativists that modernity brings about
the marginalization and decline of (true) religion. They simply reverse the subtractivist
claim that this marginalization and decline is a good thing.
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has presented a highly influential version of the
renewal narrative. His basic claim is that the virtue tradition of moral inquiry, which
arose in ancient Greece and culminated in Thomistic Catholicism, gave rise to the
best moral intuitions that we now associate with the West. However, modern Western
civilization fell into a state of pernicious moral confusion after Enlightenment thinkers
rejected the virtue tradition. Indeed, MacIntyre argues that the only way out of our current state of moral degeneration is for small groups of people who recognize the virtue
traditions truth to abandon the modern world and begin working to build up local
forms of community within which [the virtue tradition] can be sustained through the
new dark ages which are already upon us.9
The challenge facing every renewal narrative is to show both how the decline of
a specific religious dispensation caused the problems of the modern worldanomie,
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moral confusion, cultural decline, materialism,

The challenge facing every renewal
gross economic inequalityand how its renewal
narrative is to show both how
might help us overcome these afflictions. The
burden of proof is quite high for such categorithe decline of a specific religious
cal claims. Indeed, the simple fact that multiple
dispensation caused the problems
renewal narratives persuasively argue that the
decline of their preferred religious dispensation
of the modern world and how its
caused the major problems of the modern world
renewal might help us overcome
suggests the tenuousness of all such exclusivist
claims. Thus, for example, whereas MacIntyre
these afflictions.
attributes the moral chaos and degeneration of
the modern world to the decline of the virtue
tradition, Martin Heidegger claims that it arose as a consequence of the ancient Greeks
decision to elevate a unified, monotheistic account of Being over a more pluralized,
polytheistic one.10 For his part, the famed Pakistani philosopher and poet Muhammad
Iqbal sees the source of decline in the collapse of the evolutionary worldview that characterized the Golden Age of Islam.11 Though subsequent interpreters have challenged
certain elements of each of these authors historical narratives, thoughtful and learned
people continue to embrace their renewalist critiques of the modern world.

The Trans-secular Narrative

Religion is not essentially a conversation-stopper, as secular liberals
often assume. Neither, however, is religion the foundation without
which democratic discourse is bound to collapse, as traditionalists suppose. Each of these positions thrives mainly by inflating the others
importance. They use each other to lend plausibility to their fears and
proposed remedies. Each of them needs a force of darkness to oppose
if it is going to portray itself as the force of light. The result of such
posturing is the Manichaean rhetoric of cultural warfare.
Jeffrey Stout 12
Subtraction and renewal narratives both assert an inverse relationship between modernity and religion. The crucial difference is in whether they consider the advancement of
modernity, and hence the decline of religion, to be a good or bad thing. Trans-secular
narratives aim to overcome this dichotomy by presenting modernization as a force of
religious change.13 Such narratives assert that the disruptive dynamics identified by
both subtraction and renewal narratives are the cause not of religions marginalization
and decline, but of its transformation.14
Prominent among trans-secular thinkers is the philosopher Charles Taylor, who
argues that the conditions of belief in Western culture were transformed during the
modern period.15 Whereas medieval peoples could hardly envision the possibility of
atheism, we moderns see unbelief as a viable position. This does not mean that the
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modern West is now dominated by unbelief. Modern Westerners simply learned how to
view the world without reference to a transcendent realm or being. Dubbing this new
perspective the immanent frame, Taylor argues that its emergence has stimulated an
ever-expanding supernova of new religious perspectives and beliefs. It is thereTrans-secular narratives suffer from the
fore not religion as such that has declined
tendency to replace the Eurocentrism of
during modernity, but, rather, the kind
of unreflective and unproblematic belief
subtraction and renewal narratives with
that characterized premodern periods.
an American-centric vision of modernity.
Although trans-secular narratives play
an invaluable role in helping us move
beyond straightforward visions of religious decline or renewal, they often suffer from
the tendency to replace the Eurocentrism of subtraction and renewal narratives with
an American-centric vision of modernity. Thus, whereas subtraction and renewal narratives present secularized Western Europe as the culmination of the modernizing project, trans-secular narratives often identity the much more religious United States as
their proper telos. This tendency is evident in many recent trans-secular accounts of
the resurgence of religion. Consider the opening remarks of John Micklethwait and
Adrian Wooldridge in God Is Back:
Ever since the Enlightenment there has been a schism in Western thought
over the relationship between religion and modernity. Europeans, on
the whole, have assumed that modernity would marginalize religion;
Americans, in the main, have assumed that the two things can thrive
together. For most of the past two hundred years the European view
of modernity has been in the ascendant. [Yet] the world seems to be
moving decisively in the American rather than the European direction.
The American model of religionone that is based on choice rather
than state fiatis winning.16
Though sophisticated trans-secular thinkers such as Taylor do not make such aggressive
pronouncements, they still tend to favor the analysis of American religious life in their
efforts to understand our (trans-)secular age.

The Construct Narrative

All of this raises the question of how and when people came to conceptualize the world as divided between religious and secular in the
modern sense, and to think of the religious realm as being divided into
distinct religions, the so-called World Religions.
Brent Nongbri 17

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Construct narratives also challenge the assumption that modernity entails the marginalization and decline of religion. But instead of advancing this challenge by presenting
modernity as a force of religious change, construct narratives question the very idea
that there was something called religion that could decline or be transformed in the
first place. Rather, constructivists believe, the idea of religion as a general phenomenon
that is variously instantiated throughout history and around the world was constructed
by modern Western thinkers and projected outward and backward onto non-Western
peoples.
The historian Brent Nongbri, for instance, argues that the modern concept of religion arose through a projection of Christian disunity onto the world.18 In response
to the period of conflict in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries known as the Wars
of Religion, modern Europeans developed the idea that different religions stand in
tension with one another and offer competing ways to salvation.19 People cannot
decide among such competing religious visions by resorting to reason or empirical data.
Hence, modern Europeans felt that religion must be removed from the public sphere
in order to prevent further social conflict. Although the development of such a secularized vision of modern society is significant in its own right, Nongbri is particularly
interested in how modern Europeans subsequently used this new concept of religion
to interpret and control the diverse cultures they encountered through their imperial
and colonial projects.
Not all construct narratives are so critical of the modern discourse on religion. The
historian Guy Stroumsa claims that the development of a general concept of religion
was one of the great scientific discoveries of early modernity.20 Of course, early modern thinkers tended to conceptualize religion through what now appears to us to be a
narrow biblical lens. Nevertheless, Stroumsa argues,
these scholarly efforts to develop a notion of reliA growing number of construct
gion in general provided researchers with a powerful tool for investigating and comparing the many
narratives seek to show that the
aspects of human culture that relate to the divine.
modern discourse on religion
Furthermore, a growing number of construct narratives seek to show that the modern discourse on
is not an exclusively Western
religion is not an exclusively Western phenomenon.
phenomenon.
Another historian, Steven Wasserstrom, has shown
how modern European notions of religion were
deeply influenced by the extensive comparative inquiry pursued by the twelfth-century
Islamic scholar Al-Shahrastani,21 while the anthropologist Peter van der Veer has illustrated how modern India and China developed their own distinct notions of religion
through their ongoing interactions with the modern West.22 Instead of banishing the
concept of religion because of its problematic Western formations, as Nongbri and
others23 seek to do, the insights of the construct narrative framework call us to develop
a sharper critical awareness of the origins and contemporary usages of religion, as well
as greater care in our use of this increasingly ubiquitous term.

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The Perennial Narrative

The most highly developed branches of the human family have in common one peculiar characteristic. They tend to producesporadically it
is true, and often in the teeth of adverse external circumstancesa curious and definite type of personality; a type which refuses to be satisfied
with that which other men call experience, and is inclined, in the words
of its enemies, to deny the world in order that it may find reality. We
meet these persons in the east and the west; in the ancient, mediaeval,
and modern worlds. Their one passion appears to be the prosecution of
a certain spiritual and intangible quest: the finding of a way out or a
way back to some desirable state in which alone they can satisfy their
craving for absolute truth.
Evelyn Underhill 24
Perennial narratives assert that all religions display a certain unity or likeness. The word
perennial can be used to describe either eternal or recurrent phenomena. The golden
rule is a perennial (eternal) truth, while perennial (recurrent) flowers blossom every
year. That same duality appears in the perennial narrative lens, with some renewal narratives highlighting eternal religious truths and existential structures and others describing recurrent sociological patterns of religious life. Nevertheless, all renewal narratives
explain religious diversity in terms of a more fundamental commonality.
Many eternal-perennial narrators argue that all religions are pathways to the same
higher truth. This perspective is particularly common among those who call themselves
spiritual but not religious. Indeed, the very idea of non-religious spirituality arose
through the interaction of Enlightenment notions
of a universal natural religion and new, esoteric
If we want to claim that different
visions of a trans-traditional mysticism.25 Yet not
religions are manifestations of
all eternally oriented perennial narratives proceed
in this direction. The arguments of scholars who
the same underlying experience of
say that all religions arise from similar experimysterium tremendum, are we
encesan encounter with transcendence26 or an
experience of mysterium tremendum27also exemimposing a Procrustean one-sizeplify the eternal-perennial approach.
fits-all on what are, in reality,
Though unreservedly cyclical visions of religious history are less common than in previous
distinct living traditions?
epochs, many perennial narratives still emphasize recurrent historical processes. Consider,
for example, how Arnold Toynbee and Ibn Khldun narrate the history of religion
according to the cyclical rise and fall of religious civilizations.28 Furthermore, a wide
variety of existential thinkers claim that our religious life operates in a cyclical manner. In this regard, consider how the Buddhist thinker Steve Hagan asserts that the
perennial problem of human life is our tendency to become trapped in an illusory cycle of suffering and desire,29 while Sren Kierkegaard similarly explains that
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religious consciousness gradually matures as we proceed through a perennial cycle of

inauthenticity and despair.30
The main charge leveled against both kinds of perennial narrative is reductivism. If
we want to claim that different religions are, for example, manifestations of the same
underlying experience of mysterium tremendum, are we imposing a Procrustean onesize-fits-all on what are, in reality, distinct living traditions? Some who employ a perennial narrative framework are clearly unable to defend against that charge. For example,
the famed Russian occultist Helena Blavatsky, who played a major role in the founding
of the historically important Theosophical movement, elaborated a perennial narrative
that makes outlandish and reductive leaps in order to show how every theology, from
the earliest and oldest down to the latest, has sprung not only from a common source
of abstract beliefs, but from one universal esoteric, or Mystery language.31
Some perennial narratives do a better job of defending against the reductivist charge.
The philosopher John Hick, for example, bases his claim that all religion emanates
from the human encounter with transcendence on the commonsensical observations
that human nature is one and that all people interact with the same reality.32 It would
therefore be wrong to entirely reject the perennial narrative framework because of the
immodesties of some of its more enthusiastic supporters.

The Post-naturalist Narrative

There is no real conflict between theistic religion and the scientific
theory of evolution. What there is, instead, is conflict between theistic
religion and a philosophical gloss or add-on to the scientific doctrine of
evolution: the claim that evolution is undirected, unguided, unorchestrated by God (or anyone else).
Alvin Plantinga 33
Champions of the post-naturalist narrative argue that modern science rightly disrupted
premodern views of nature but has subsequently been burdened by a false identification
with naturalism. Indeed, they argue that naturalisms influence has actually hindered
the advance of our scientific understanding by preventing us from investigating nonmaterial entities and forces that humanity has long known to exist. Post-naturalist
narratives also argue that recent developments in
natural science are leading us to a place where we
Thomas Nagel argues that
can begin considering the reality of these nonmaterial entities and forces anew.
neo-Darwinian naturalism has
The philosopher Thomas Nagel has articulathindered our ability to investigate
ed a fascinating and controversial post-naturalist
narrative.34 Nagel argues that neo-Darwinian
the world by forcing us to discount
naturalism has hindered our ability to investiall ideas that appear to legitimize
gate the world by forcing us to discount all ideas
that appear to legitimize a religious worldview.35
a religious worldview.
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Nagel is particularly concerned that neo-Darwinism blocks us from engaging with the
quite obvious fact that mind is a non-material reality.36 His reasoning on this front is
clear: If we accept the idea that mind is non-material, then we must also accept the idea
that the metaphysical structure of the world contains non-material dimensions, a claim
that appears to legitimize certain religious worldviews.37 Though himself an atheist,
Nagel concludes that we should entertain such directions of thought, and he specifically
recommends that we begin considering again the kind of Platonic-teleological visions
of nature that religious believers of various sorts have long embraced.38
Philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead offered another interesting
post-naturalist narrative, arguing that modern science is one fruit of the new scientific
mentality that arose during the modern period.39 Whitehead described this scientific mentality as a union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract
generalization,40 and explained that it arose in modern Western civilization through a
combination of religious, philosophical, social, economic, political, and technological
developments. Unfortunately, the rapid advance of modern science led modern Europeans
to falsely claim that embracing the scientific mentality required us to also accept a naturalistic worldview. Nevertheless, Whitehead, writing in the first half of the twentieth century, believed that recent developments in philosophy and post-Newtonian physics were
facilitating a dissociation of naturalism from the scientific mentality and the re-situating of
scientific inquiry within a much wider, and more spiritually oriented, worldview.
Though post-naturalist narratives significantly advance our understanding of the
relationship between science and religion, they tend to overestimate the role naturalism
played in diminishing the legitimacy of religious ideas in the modern West. The intellectual historian Stephen Gaukroger, for example, has persuasively argued that historical critical studies of the Bible did far more than reductive materialism to undermine
the intellectual authority of traditional Christianity.41 Additionally, Guy Stroumsa
argues that the intellectual and religious shock caused by the observation of formerly
all-but-unknown religious rituals and beliefs during the Age of Discoveries challenged
Europeans taken-for-granted belief in Christianitys truth, particularly when they
observed the sophistication of other traditions and the savagery displayed during the
European Wars of Religion.42 None of this suggests that the emergence of naturalism
was the key cause of religions intellectual displacement, or even a central cause. We
would wrongly assume that defeating naturalism would somehow restore religion to
the position of eminence it enjoyed in the premodern world.

The Developmental Narrative

But the progression [of finite religions] is a condition for the arrival of
religion at its absolute truth. These determinate religions are definite
stages of the consciousness and knowledge of spirit. They are necessary conditions for the emergence of the true religion, for the authentic
consciousness of spirit.
G. W. F. Hegel 43
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Developmental narratives claim that religion has long been undergoing a process of
evolution. The developmental narrative framework took root in the modern West
among thinkers who wanted to present all religions as rungs on a progressive ladder,
the topmost of which being something resembling European Christianity, usually of a
Protestant sort. As Guy Stroumsa explains, the idea was that
there was an evolution in history and that God revealed Himself and
His will gradually: Moses offered a religion truer than that of the
Sabians. Jesus permitted a higher, more spiritual way of serving God
than the ritual laws of Moses. And finally, the Reformation proposed a
better Christianity than Catholicism, a religion with too many rituals,
remnants, as it were, of earlier stages of religious life.44
In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel presented one of the most extensive versions of this developmental story.45 He argued that religion began with a kind
of diffuse pagan nature worship and culminated with the Protestant realization that
the triune God manifests himself in
the development of the Christian
community. Along the way, magical religion, Daoism, Hinduism,
Zoroastrianism, Egyptian religion,
Greek religion, Judaism, and Roman
religion (in this particular order)
intervened, advancing humanitys
understanding of God.
Although some authors still
advance Christo- and Westerncentric developmental narratives, 46
most endeavor to develop more
open-ended and globally nuanced
accounts. The late Robert Bellah, for
example, argued that the evolution of
religion played a central role in stimulating the advancement of human
cognitive capacity. 47 He made this
argument by highlighting the isomorphic resemblances between the
mimetic, mythic, and theoretic stages of cognitive capacity 48 and the
tribal, archaic, and axial phases of
religious history. This isomorphism
exists, he explained, because at each
stage of history religion concentrates
Wheatfield with Crows (detail), 1890, by Vincent Van Gogh
human energies upon creating and
(18531890); HIP/Art Resource, NY.
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sustaining cultural structures that sustain our continued cognitive advance. During
the tribal phase of religious history, religion launched the very process of cultural
evolution by establishing sacred rituals. It was only through indefinitely preserved
ritual that humans who lacked complex narrative language and external symbolic
storage could generate knowledge. During the archaic phase, religion facilitated the
emergence of an encompassing mythological framework by concentrating society on
the mediating role of a divine king. And during the axial phase, religion helped generate theoretic capacity by centering humanitys energies on sacred texts derived from
the teachings of prophetic figures.
In evaluating the developmental narrative framework, one must acknowledge the
ambiguity that complicates our use of the term development. On the one hand, we
use this term to describe neutral processes of growth: a cough develops, and so does
a culture of migration. On the other hand, we use it to describe ideal or progressive
processes. This is what we mean when we speak of social, moral, and spiritual development. Bellahs developmental narrative exemplifies the neutral perspective well. As he
said, Religious evolution does not mean a progression from worse to better. We have
not gone from primitive religion that tribal peoples have had to higher religions
that people like us have. Religious evolution does add new capacities, but it tells
us nothing about how those capacities will be used.49 Hegels philosophy of religion
exemplifies the second, progressive perspective. Yet it is possible to articulate a vision of
religious progress without embracing Hegelian triumphalism. Following Karl Jaspers,
one can argue that humanitys powers of self-consciousness and understanding of universality have steadily expanded throughout religious history without necessarily positing a concrete endpoint of religious evolution.50

Each of the seven narrative frameworks makes a weighty claim about the history of
religion. Yet it can be difficult to know how to make sense of their often contradictory conclusions. Is there any way to reconcile subtractivist and renewalist accounts
of the modern disruption of religion? Can perennialist claims about the unity of religion, developmental visions of religious evolution, and constructivist efforts to show
how religion was created during the modern period all be true? Although trans-secular accounts of modern religious transformations and post-naturalist re-evaluations
of science make less polarizing claims, authors often use them to support one of the
other, more ambitious narrative views. Thus, for example, philosopher Alvin Plantinga
advances his post-naturalist narrative as part of a broader project of orthodox Christian
renewal,51 while Alfred North Whiteheads post-naturalist narrative grounds the developmental account of religious history he presented in other works.52 How, then, should
we interpret the truth-value of each of these seven narrative lenses?
I see three possibilities. First, we can approach each narrative as a largely incommensurable view of religious history that must compete with the others in order to vindicate
its truth. Second, we can embrace the kind of perspectivism Wallace Stevens employs in
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his poetic meditation on the blackbird and see each narrative as a partial yet authentic
insight into the irreducibly complex phenomenon of religion. Or, third, we can try
integrating the insights of each narrative into a broader narrative whole.
My personal view is that the third approach provides the best way forward. More
specifically, I find it helpful to approach the subtractivist, renewalist, trans-secularist,
constructivist, perennialist, and post-naturalist dynamics as facets of religions broader
developmental trajectory. Such an approach indicates that, as part of religions historical development, certain aspects of earlier religious epochs are rightly left behind, while
others are problematically abandoned and ought to be revitalized; that the distinctive
forces of modernity stimulate religions transformation, not necessarily its marginalization and decline; that recent developments in natural science help us see beyond
naturalism and understand non-material phenomena more deeply; that a problematic
concept of religion has taken hold of modern Western discourse and skewed our perceptions of both historical and contemporary religious dynamics; and that many religious structures, cycles, and ideas perennially appear in different contexts and settings.
Such a broadened developmental narrative provides us with a flexible yet coherent
framework within which to think about the changing place of religion in the world
today. Thus, when we see, for example, secularists deploying subtraction narratives in
order to argue for further curtailing religions ability to influence the public sphere,
fundamentalists drawing upon the renewal narrative lens in order to argue for some
renewed form of public orthodoxy, or those who identify as spiritual but not religious
employing perennialist tropes in their attempts to articulate some vision of modern
spirituality, we can perceive all these efforts as facets of the global process of religious
transformation that will lead, through various fits and starts, into a new stage of global
religious evolution. Admittedly, our understanding of what precisely this new stage will
entail must, for the time being, remain somewhat vague. Yet by keeping this broadened
developmental perspective in mind, we are able to interpret the many profound and
often contradictory religious stirrings that are taking place throughout the world today
as part of a coherent, global process of religious evolution.53

Endnotes
1

Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1999), 10.

Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, ed. and trans. Harriet Martineau (Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 202. Originally published 1853.

Ibid., 231.

Ibid., 55053.

Cited in Monica Duffy Toft, Daniel Philpott, and Timothy Samuel Shah, Gods Century: Resurgent
Religion and Global Politics (New York, NY: Norton, 2011), 1.

The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview, in The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent
Religion and World Politics, ed. Peter Berger (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 2.

115

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John Paul II, Letter of His Holiness John Paul II to Reverend George V. Coyne, S.J., Director of the
Vatican Observatory, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, June 1, 1988; http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paulii/en/letters/1988/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_19880601_padre-coyne.html.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2007), 263.

9 MacIntyre,
10 See

After Virtue, 263.

Mark Wrathall and Morganna Lambeth, Heideggers Last God, Inquiry 54, no. 2 (2011), 16082.

11 Muhammad

Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2013). Originally published 1930.

12 Jeffrey

Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 12.

13 Indeed,

the trans-secular narrative and each of the subsequent four narrative frameworks seek to move
beyond the dialect of subtraction and renewal narratives in their own particular way.

14 Because

of the connection of this narrative to the ideas advanced by both subtraction and renewal narratives, I choose to use the term trans-secular instead of trans-subtraction.

15 Charles Taylor,

A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 23.

16 John

Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the
World (New York, NY: Penguin, 2009), 925.

17 Brent

Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2012), 5.

18 Ibid.,

174.

19 Ibid.,

86.

20 Guy

G. Stroumsa, A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2010).

21 There

is general agreement among historians of the history of religions that Islamicate civilization produced the greatest pre-modern historical studies of world religions. Indeed, Western scholarly approbation of this literature has been sustained and enthusiastic, based on the observation that historical
science was pioneered by Muslims. Considering the extent to which the Muslim contribution has been
neglected, this point can bear reiteration. But the history of religions waited until the nineteenth
century for any other historian to take the religions of others as seriously as Shahrastani did. Steven M.
Wasserstrom, Islamicate History of Religions?, History of Religions 27, no. 4 (1988): 408.

22 Peter van der Veer, The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 63-89.

23 See Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore,

MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam,
Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World
Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2012).

24 Evelyn

Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness (Mineola,
NY: Dover, 2002), 910.

25 Advocates

of this mystical perennialism have included Emmanuel Swedenborg, H. P. Blavatsky, Ralph

Waldo Emerson, Aldous Huxley, and Swami Vivekananda. See Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual, but Not
Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2001), 13-74.

26 John

Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2005), 1.

27 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1958), 26.
28 Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, vols. 12, ed. D. C. Somervell (Oxford, England: Oxford University

Press, 1987); Ibn Khaldn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, ed. and abridged N. J. Dawood,
trans. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969).

29 Steve
30 Sren

Hagan, Buddhism Plain and Simple (Boston, MA: Broadway Books, 1997), 1324.

Kiergegaard, The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and
Awakening, trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1980), 38. Originally published 1849.

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31 H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, ed. Boris de Zirkoff

(Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Society in America, 1978), 266. Originally published 1888.

32 Hick,

An Interpretation of Religion, 13.

33 Alvin

Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (New York, NY: Oxford
University Press, 2011), xii.

34 For

a review of the controversy surrounding Nagels work, see Andrew Ferguson, The Heretic: Who Is
Thomas Nagel and Why Are So Many of His Fellow Academics Condemning Him?, Weekly Standard
March 25, 2013; http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/heretic_707692.html.

35 As

Nagel says, The political urge to defend science education against the threats of religious orthodoxy,
understandable though it is, has resulted in a counter orthodoxy, supported by bad arguments, and a
tendency to overstate the legitimate scientific claims of evolutionary theory. Skeptics about the theory
are seen as so dangerous, and so disreputably motivated, that they must be denied any shred of legitimate interest. See Thomas Nagel, Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament: Essays 20022008
(Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2009), 42.

36 Thomas

Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1986).

37 Nagel,

Secular Philosophy, 1617. For other influential post-naturalist narratives, see David Bohm,
Wholeness and the Implicate Order (New York, NY: Routledge, 1980); Bernard DEspagnat, On Physics
and Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in
an Age of Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Henry P. Stapp, Mind, Matter, and
Quantum Mechanics, 3rd ed. (New York, NY: Springer, 2009); Pim van Lommell, Consciousness beyond
Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience, ed. Laura Vroomen (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2010);
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York, NY: Free Press, 1997), originally
published 1925.

38 Nagel,

Secular Philosophy, 1617.

39 Whitehead,
40 Ibid.,

Science and the Modern World, 13.

3.

41 Stephen

Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210
1685 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006), 2324.

42 Guy

Stroumsa, A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2010), 27.

43 G.

W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: One-Volume Edition, the Lectures of 1827, ed. and
trans. Peter C. Hodgson (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2006), 20405.

44 Stroumsa,
45 Hegel,

A New Science, 97.

Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, passim.

46 See

Rodney Stark, Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief (New
York, NY: HarperCollins, 2007).

47 Robert

N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), passim.

48 Bellah

borrows his account of humanitys tree major cognitive capacities from Merlin Donald. See:
Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

49 Bellah,
50 Karl

Religion in Human Evolution, xxiixxiii.

Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953), passim.

51 See:

Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (New York, NY:
Oxford University Press, 2011).

52 See

Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1967, originally published
1933); Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making, reissue ed. (New York, NY: Free Press, 1967,
originally published 1926); Whitehead, Science and the Modern World.

53 For

an example of how this posture can lead to novel analyses of contemporary religious dynamics,
see Richard Madsen, The Future of Transcendence: A Sociological Agenda, in The Axial Age and
Its Consequences, eds. Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2012), 41129.

117