Critiques of religion are as old as religion itself, for as soon as
something called religion was identified as a phenomenon distinct
from other kinds of human attachments, behaviors, and concepts, it
became an object of contestation and debate. This identification has
a particular, modern history even if religion, once “discovered,” is
then found to have existed everywhere and always. We will be
pursuing this history from early to late modernity and post
modernity, focusing on the emergence of the consciousness of
religion in its various meanings (e.g., faith, morality, ritual,
ideology) and on the kinds of things critics objected to and
envisioned as alternatives. While we will concentrate on the sources
of the European West, we will also consider voices from beyond this
historical-geographic complex, including authors who are directly
critical of Western domination of the terms of religion and those
who simply conceive of religion otherwise.