By Mark Waters

In a June 17, 2024 Washington Post opinion piece, Shadi Hamid provided a helpful perspective on changes in evangelicalism resulting from its current entanglement with politics. My further claim is that this phenomenon signals a possible change in the concept of religion itself. Hamid noted a Cooperative Election Study disclosing that 14 percent of Muslims, 12 percent of Hindus, and 5 percent of Jews identified as evangelical in 2022. Another survey indicated significantly reduced church attendance compared to evangelicals in the past. Both surveys represent a substantial shift in American evangelicalism compared to previous distinctives of this segment of the Christian tradition. In this article, I assert that changes in evangelicalism may forecast a shift in the meaning of the concept of religion in popular consciousness.

Despite their central role in religious studies, a number of languages including Sanskrit, Hebrew, and Greek do not have words that translate directly into the English word religion. Some translators use the English term “religion” to translate words like worship, piety, service, and dharma from their respective languages, but the concepts do not precisely match. For example, dharma is used to mean a variety of things in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhi, but it is misleading to translate it as religion. 

In Latin, Cicero and Lactantius, a theological advisor to Constantine, attributed the etymology of religio to relegare and religare respectively. For Cicero, religio evolved from the idea of carefully rereading a text and came to mean scrupulous adherence to procedures for offerings and sacrifices in Roman temples. Lactantius, appealing to religare, claimed that religio meant to reconnect or rebind, thus reestablishing relationship with God and, by implication, with one another. Word meanings are determined by usage, not etymology. But in this case, the etymology described by Cicero and Lactantius represents how they used the words. Interestingly, Romans viewed Christianity as superstitio rather than religio. 

During the middle ages in Europe, only those who had taken Holy Orders were considered religious, not adherents to Christianity at large. Over time, the word broadened to refer to the collective of all members of a particular tradition. Today in the United States, religion is popularly understood to refer to what one believes. This convention is reductionistic; people tacitly recognize that religion is more than belief. But belief is ordinarily the implicit, go to, understanding.

The elevation of belief misconstrues many if not most of the religions of the world. Jewish scholars and rabbis, for instance, explain that being Jewish isn’t really about belief at all. Although Hinduism has six complex philosophies, it is not uncommon for Hindus to practice their faith without much reflection on beliefs. This is an observation, not a criticism. I add this qualification because it is almost inevitable that some Western Christian readers will initially intuit a reduced importance of reflection and belief as something inherently negative. 

Finally, our brief tour of the use of the term religion over time would be incomplete without a look at colonialism. British colonial influence in India will function as our example. Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians, and others in pre-colonial India had informal boundaries and, therefore, communal identities; but these boundaries could be porous and even syncretic. There was violence in particular places at certain times, but peaceful coexistence was also quite common. Peaceful coexistence and syncretism did not unilaterally disappear after the onset of colonialism, but the British Raj strategically divided traditions across India under the motto, “divide and rule.” Colonial control strategies hardened boundaries and transformed communities of people who observed different faith traditions into hermetically sealed religions as defined by Western Christianity. Thus the English understanding of religion, a concept that to my knowledge only exists as an unsuitable translation of dharma in the many languages of India, was deployed as a defining and divisive identity marker.

Back to Hamid, my claim is that the meaning of religion in social consciousness evolves over time and varies by location. I wonder if Hamid’s points and the surveys to which he referred represent the beginning of a political-religious turn related not only to what evangelical means but also to what religion means in contemporary American consciousness? Could a similar phenomenon be occurring with Hindu Nationalism known as Hindutva? Religion and politics, of course, have long been entangled, but for surprising percentages of American Muslims, Hindus, and Jews to identify as evangelical based on political ideology is remarkably new. We can only speculate about this novelty and these questions. More time is needed and additional research is warranted to discern changes in the concept of religion. 

Dr. Mark Waters is professor of religion in McMurry University’s Department of Religion and Philosophy and Chair of the Division of Humanities, Religion, and Social Sciences