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Comparing World Religions?

Today, the academic study of religion in the discipline widely called Religious Studies or Religionswissenschaft has developed into a large array of thematic fields and foci, of general approaches and source-specific methods. As such it is ranging from historical and anthropological disciplines through social sciences and economics to philosophies and theologies, either conceived as a proper discipline overlapping with these other disciplines or seen as a subdiscipline to one or the other of them. What I am advocating here is the use of a term defining the traditional object of Religious Studies, namely “religion” and its use for comparison on a global scale. But it is not religions or even World Religions that could be the object of such comparison. Looking for similarities and differences, for contingent processes and local constellations, it is religious practices of communication, sacralization, it is reflexions and organizations that we need to look at in their very different combinations. If there is any single aim of this short piece, it is to make readers aware that general terms like “religion” are utterly useful but need conceptual reflection. Religion is certainly a term that has a big pedigree.

I need to stress this, as I am quite aware that this very term is highly debated and criticized. I will come back to this a bit later but still need to address the second questionable term of my title, that is “world”. Isn’t that problematical right from the start? Shouldn’t we restrict ourselves to our own little ponds instead of crossing oceans? People, their material and immaterial products as well as their material and immaterial demands produce huge flows even if relatively few actually move. Globalization theory has taught us to see the effects as clearly as the enormous variety of the local in the light of consumerist or institutional standardizations. If we want to study both in whatever field, we need terms that are able to describe and analyze similarities and outright identities as much as differences. Comparative research, driven by contemporary questions but applied to artefacts and constellations in past societies, too, are a hallmark of History of Religion and to the first term of my title, comparing, I add an exclamation mark.

Is that academic imperialism? No doubt, conceiving of other peoples’ cultural practices as “religion” (or in similar terms) was a practice that was typically developed by people who were either directly engaging in or profiting from expansion, be it of economic networks or outright military domination. And surely, a German speaker and the Anglo-American language could be attacked for their imperialist baggage. Yet, with Russia, China, and again the USA in an outspoken way performing as expansive empires and, to a less explicit degree Iran, India, France, Serbia, Turkey, remaining or embarking on such routes, such critiques are of diminishing substance. We are living in a world of competing empires that allow only limited space to the much younger idea of nation states (and their aggressive nationalisms) and are in bitter need of mutual understanding and overarching perspectives. Competition is a hall-mark of research too, and I would count competing concepts among the tools on the fair side of this form of interaction. Plagarism, exclusion, buying out or hacking are on the other.

This is not to say that we do not need to critically discuss the implications and potential pitfalls of such terminological and methodological choices. Tomoko Masuzawa, a religious studies scholar from Tokyo, has published a book by the title “Inventing World Religions” nearly 20 years ago in 2005 (Masuzawa 2005). That book has been read as denouncing the concept of “world religions” as European and North-American and as being basically defined by taking Christianity as a model. Now, using Christianity, and above all Protestant dogmatics as an analytical tool, invariably will lead to problematic emphases, on eschatology for instance, disregarding of items like ancestor cult, or on written communication rather than ritual interaction etc. We are now also much more aware of the internal pluralism and “hyperdiversity” of religious traditions and groups. All of this makes scholars more reluctant to employ the term “world religion”. This was certainly an implicit intention of Masuzawa. And yet, it misses her point (see Masuzawa 2008). She plausibly demonstrates that the concept of world religions helped European scholars of the 19th and early 20th centuries to find an adequate perspective on religion that was more in accordance with their new identities. This was

1) the age of Enlightenment and the self-ascribed modernity based on Reason rather than Faith,

2) the age of comparative linguistics leading to the postulation of an “Indo-Germanic” or “Indo-European”, if not to say, “Indo-Aryan” common origin,

3) the age of a struggle for commonalities beyond the newly erected boundaries of aggressive nationalism,

4) the age of an explosive anti-Semitism, and

5) last but not least, it was the age of the most intensive colonial globalization by Europeans or former Europeans.

Against this background, the idea of Christianity being one (and even the best) of several “world religions” was very attractive. Such “world religions” were religions that were operating beyond national boundaries. In that respect, tribal or folk, people’s or Volks-religions were the complementary category. Instead, “world religions” were addressing the individuals (mostly by textual means, that is, “Holy Scriptures”) and their salvation. The list included Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Bahá’ís and, hotly debated, Confucianism and Hinduism – and of course Christianity. In such a classification, the globally open Christianity was not any longer a semitic Judaic offspring but its alternative.

There were further factors. Intellectuals from the second half of the 19th century onwards were ever more attracted by the texts and beliefs of those other world religions – of course stripped of their ridiculous outer shell of folk rituals, folk beliefs, and maybe priestly performers. What a nice image: A rational Europe and non-semitic and non-oriental West, that happened to entertain the most rational form of religion (some found Confucius even more rational), could study other worthy traditions and compare them without prejudices. British colonial officers, who had left the Indians to whatever of their doings before, suddenly started to administratively deal with what now started to be religions.

The teaching Confucius. Portrait by Wu Daozi, 685-758, Tang Dynasty (Public Domain. See here for copyright details).

Bad enough and we might stop here. Scholars should simply end construing the world in their prejudiced terms. Yet, normal people do exactly these things, not least influenced by academic utterances during the past 150 years. Juridically and politically, under the conditions of the 20th and 21st centuries, being a religion and, sometimes, having a religion, brought and brings advantages. It is the same institutional isomorphism, the copying of institutional forms, that we see in, say, the field of economics, where it is more advantageous to operate as a firm, a company, rather than a family: It is even easier to subjugate the minors and the wife in morally neutral forms. To be a religion or even world religion opened participation in World congresses or world parliaments of religion. Such a status provided tax benefits, and maybe global networks, for which you, situationally, happily sacrifice your local distinctiveness – if you cannot have the latter recognized as world heritage. Another global policy mechanism.

Evidently, religious practices and religious groupings look very different in their sacralized places, in a living room, a cultural fair, on performance stages or on the spreadsheets of the ministries of cultural affairs. Only occasionally – if at all – they are moral institutions, only occasionally they assure uniform beliefs among all members, and only occasionally they are the intermediate groups that help a national society to stay on alive rather than tearing it apart. And yet, it is these very differences that invite comparative inquiry and demand a concept of religion that is sufficiently open to include potentially relevant phenomena. They also demand a concept of religion that is sufficiently sharp to identify differences, to understand the semantics, the terms, employed by those, whose practices we study. Only in such a way, comparison can be a way to create bridges and understand gaps between practices and practitioners. Looking at how people integrate supra-human agents into their world as lived, how they practice a lived religion that shapes and appropriates even professional and monumental activities is offering such a concept. This I have argued in many places and will not further address here.

Instead, let me describe some consequences of the position argued so far. Research on and historiography of religion must be a global historiography of religion. Thanks to postcolonial critique, we see more clearly that it must be a multifocal history (Zimmerer 2004). Thanks to post-postcolonial criticism, we also see that the mutual denial of competences or corresponding self-restrictions are highly problematic. If European scholars, for instance, are no longer allowed to describe non-European religious practices or if South Asian scholars, for example, are restricted to Indian religious history, if men are not allowed to write women’s history and rich people are not allowed to write the history of the poor, this turns into campanilismo, into Kirchturmdenken.

Yet, the demands of global comparison without using the concept of world religions are high, both in theory and in practice. A history of religion that will be relevant in and for the future must overcome such difficulties. We are currently experiencing – and I hope only to some extent – where the journey can take us in the European Union: the acclaimed Europe of fatherlands has not produced a fatherland Europe, but a fortress Europe and a Europe of fortress friends or aggressive nationalists supporting globalism above all in its chauvinistic variants. It is important to critically examine all perspectives and conceptual resources; I advocate reverse hermeneutics instead of restricting ourselves to our own terminology, which serves to erect walls, increase the limits of our own competencies and not face up to the competition of perspectives and histories. Otherwise, we will only leave the field to the next Eurasian mental or factual imperialism.

This leads me to a second point for the global historiography of religion of tomorrow: any global history of religion is not a single history. It is a bundle of histories, each of which is characterized by a concept of religion defined in one way or another, a history of ideas or institutions, a history of gender or materiality, a history of structures or a history of practices. In his book “Le monde, l’histoire”, Hervé Inglebert has shown in detailed work on more than twelve hundred pages how much ideas of comprehensive historiography are shaped by the respective ideas of the world:

Le passé est toujours mieux connu dans ses grandes lignes, et notre tâche n’est plus de découvrir, mais d’explorer et de nous approprier les ‘Mondes comme histoires’. Pour cela, les historiens doivent devenir les arpenteurs des Temps, construire de nouveaux belvédères pour créer des perspectives inédites, et rédiger enfin les chroniques des Mondes

The past is ever better known in its broad outlines, and our task is no longer to discover, but to explore and appropriate ‘Worlds as stories’. To do this, historians must become the surveyors of Time, build new belvederes to create unprecedented perspectives, and finally write the Chronicles of the Worlds (Inglebert 2014, 1213, my translation).

This is also something that is subject to historical change. Today – and I don’t want to extrapolate this arbitrarily into the future – I am not thinking of universal historiography, but of a history of networked spaces that keeps an eye on how the global or supra-regional and the local relate to each other. This is a story, or more precisely: these are stories of how religious practices, imaginations, and religious groupings, how data, objects, people, and institutions connect with each other. Comparison of such religion needs to be aware of planetary interdependencies while keeping a critical eye on yet the next globalization strategy. It does not need the world religions of a past globalization strategy that failed utterly.

References:

Inglebert, Hervé 2014, Le monde, l’histoire: Essai sur les histoires universelles, Paris: Presses universitaires de France.

Masuzawa, Tomoko 2005, The invention of world religions: Or, how European universalism was preserved in the language of pluralism, Chicago Univ. of Chicago Press.

— 2008, ‘What Do the Critics Want?—A Brief Reflection on the Difference between a Disciplinary History and a Discourse Analysis’, Method & theory in the study of religion 20 (2), Online-Ressource.

Zimmerer, Jürgen (ed.) 2004, Verschweigen – Erinnern – Bewältigen: Vergangenheitspolitik nach 1945 in globaler Perspektive = Comparativ 14, 5/6, Leipzig: Universitätsverlag.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Jörg Rüpke (May 26, 2025). Comparing World Religions? Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations. Retrieved November 6, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/140jh


Jörg Rüpke

Jörg Rüpke is Fellow in Religious Studies and Vice-director of the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies of the University of Erfurt, Germany. His research interest focus on ritual, religion and urbanity. Recent publications include: Pantheon: A New History of Roman Religion (Princeton, 2018); Urban Religion: A Historical Approach to Urban Growth and Religious Change (Berlin, 2020); Religion and its History: A Critical Inquiry (London, 2021); Ritual als Resonanzerfahrung (Stuttgart, 2021).

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