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God's Shadow: Occluded Possibilities in the Genealogy of “Religion”

There is already a standard narrative in place about the birth of religious studies as an academic discipline. It is generally imagined by scholars as emerging from the encounter between the trajectory of Enlightenment rationalism and non-European culture. The rise of higher criticism led to the reappraisal of the Christian Bible as a historical document, while simultaneously European travelers were presentedwith an unanticipated diversity abroad, which challenged their long-standing assumptions about the autonomy of Christian revelation. To make sense of these diverse cultures, Europeans extended to them the essentially Protestant category of “religion.” Comparative religion is represented as a self-conscious reaction to theology from which it differentiates itself in the same moment that it is relying on a Protestant conception of religion itself. It is often regarded as secularizing and Protestant in the same breath. This breath is not seen as a contradiction, since some Protestant and