The History of Religion

The high ideology of the reformation became more or less the house philosophy of academi around the world. It was so with relief that a lot, for example, marxs historians turned away and said, we don't need to look at these phenomena any more. Or you could swing the other way and say, religion really is this set of facts, these sets of commitments, and we're going to try and politicize what religious belonging means. But both of those things turn on, i think, a consiquence of the reformations, conceptualization of religion. And it becomes one of the ar driving machines of european modernity to think of religion in this way.