Summary
William T. Cavanaugh points out that most people at most times have not thought that word means what we think it means.
Scholars have been doing a lot of investigation into this idea that you can separate religion out from the rest of life, and one of the reasons why it’s so difficult is because historically, people just didn’t make that separation. So, Wilfred Cantwell Smith kind of got this line of enquiry going in his 1962 book The Meaning and End of Religion, where he went looking for the concept of religion as we think of it in ancient Greece, in ancient Egypt, in ancient India, in ancient Rome, and just finds that it’s just not there, that it’s an invention of the modern Western world. And so the word religio is there in Latin, but what it tends to mean is any kind of binding obligation that people take seriously, and that includes things that we normally consider to be secular.
So St Augustine, in the fourth century, when he’s writing … or the fifth century when he’s writing in The City of God, he says that religio in its normal sense means a relation of respect between a man and his neighbour – which is nothing like what we mean by that. In medieval Europe, the distinction between the religious and the secular is a distinction between two different kinds of priests. The religious were the ones that belonged to orders like the Dominicans and the Benedictines, and the secular priests were the ones that belonged to a diocese. So this distinction just isn’t found until you get the distinction in the modern West.
And it comes about in the early modern period in an attempt to kind of differentiate the responsibilities between civil rulers and church leaders. You always have this distinction between the civil and the ecclesiastical, but it becomes particularly a tension in the rise of the nation state in early modern Europe, and then it becomes a way of saying to the church authorities, what you do is non-public, it’s non-political; and what we, the civil authorities, do, that’s something different. And that distinction then gets exported to the rest of the world in the period of colonisation. But for most of the rest of the world it doesn’t really make any sense, it has to kind of be imposed.
