The Invention of “Christianity”

Asad identifies the particular moment when “Christianity” (in the pejorative sense I’ve used it) was invented: In the wake of the post-Reformation wars, Lord “Herbert produced a substantive definition of what later came to be formulated as Natural Religion – in terms of beliefs (about a supreme power), practices (its ordered worship), and ethics (a code of conduct based on rewards and punishments after this life) – said to exist in all societies. This emphasis on belief meant that henceforth religion could be conceived as a set of propositions to which believers give assent, and which could therefore be judged and compared as between different religions and as against natural science.” Europeans already knew that there were religions without writing, so a written scripture was not seen as a part of the basic definition of writing. But Asad says that the more important reason Scripture was left out was because a shift occurred in the 17th century from the word to the work of God, so that “‘Nature’ became the real space of divine writing, and eventually the indisputable authority for the truth of all sacred texts written in merely human language.” As a result, “Natural Religion not only became a universal phenomenon but began to be demarcated from, and was also supportive of, the newly emerging domain of natural science.” Natural religion became the standard against which particular religions could be measured and classified; the “higher” religions were closer to this purely natural religion, the lower were further.

Asad concludes, “what appears to anthropologists today to be self-evidence, namely that religion is essentially a matter of symbolic meanings linked to ideas of general order (expressed through either or both rite and doctrine), that it has generic functions/features, and that it must not be confused with any of its particular historical or cultural forms, is in fact a view that has a specific Christian history. From being a concrete set of practical rules attached to specific processes of power and knowledge, religion has come to be abstracted and universalized.” Along with this came “a new kind of state, a new kind of science, and a new kind of legal and moral subject.”

There is much to regret in this move, but it seems also that this is a pointer to the universal spread of Christian faith. After all, “Natural religion” ended up looking a lot like latitudinarian Christianity, and this meant that a form (admitted anemic) of Christianity became accepted by academics as the very definition of “religion.”