The Meaning and End of Religion

by Wilfred Cantwell Smith

Wilfred Cantwell Smith, maintained in this vastly important work that Westerners have misperceived religious life by making "religion" into one thing. He shows the inadequacy of "religion" to capture the living, endlessly variable ways and traditions in which religious faith presents itself in the world.

Genres: Religion, Theology, Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Anthropology, Spirituality

356 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

Wilfred Cantwell Smith (July 21, 1916 – February 7, 2000) was a Canadian professor of comparative religion who from 1964–1973 was director of Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions. The Harvard Gazette characterized him as one of the field's most influential figures of the past century. In his 1962 work The Meaning and End of Religion he notably and controversially questioned the validity of the concept of religion.

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have heard countless times, and probably often said myself, that Christianity is not a religion, it’s a relationship. Religion is what other people do - rituals and practices to try to earn God’s favor. But Christians are living in relationship, uniquely, with God. Sometimes this language contrasted religion with spirituality. There was even that viral video years ago where a spoken-word poet decried the problems of religion.

As I read this book, it was quite humorous then to realize that attitude is not unique to Christians. Smith quotes a Buddhist who says, “Buddhism is not a religion” and a Muslim who says “Islam is not a religion.” The point, in the most mundane way I can put it, is real people in the real world do not say, “I am now going to practice my religion and try to earn God’s favor.” Or, at least, this approach to the divine, if it is how people think today, so new as to be unrecognizable to most humans throughout history.

Smith’s book is a classic in religious studies. It makes me wonder why I did not read it while literally majoring in RELIGIOUS STUDIES at Penn State 20 years ago. Maybe its my fault for doing liberal arts at an engineering school? Maybe we did read it and I was too young and dumb to realize how good it was?

Either way, this book is a brilliant work on religion. Of course, one of the main arguments is that “religion” is a term whose use has run out. Smith traces the history of the concept and the creation of “world religions” while at the same time showing how academics, and the public, are already moving away from describing large group of people by their Religion.

I’ll leave it to others to provide a more detailed review of the book; I’m sure anyone reading this can find such a review. Basically, in place of “religion” Smith wants two terms - cumulative tradition and faith. The cumulative tradition is the stuff anyone can observe through history. Faith is the internal relationship to the divine that humans practice.

One particular point I found interesting was realizing how difficult it is to define a religion. To define a religion we are looking for some ideal thing that really only exists in our imagination. The desire for such a definition is at least partly rooted in Platonic philosophy where the really real is the ideals that only exist in the spiritual realm. But when we look at lived religion, when is this ideal found? Where? In a moment in the early church? The Reformation? Some more abstract set of truths you can discern by finding what all Christians through history had in common? Is this even possible?

The idea of world religion happened when religion became more about a set of beliefs than about practices. Once it was primarily about a set of beliefs, this idea was then transported out into the world. I remember being given a comparative religions chart in church or campus ministry that listed different religions (Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Marxism, etc.) and what they believed about different topics (creation, sin, salvation). The point was to show how Christianity provided the best answers. The problem was, such comparisons force other faiths into being primarily about belief. It approaches other peoples through a default-Christian lens.

Further, even for Christianity this was a new way to approach people. Its not that Christians prior to the modern world did not concern themselves with belief. They did. The point is, there was always a recognition that religion was not about being part of a monolithic group but about living a life of faith.

There is so much more to chew on in this book. Whether you are a person of faith (as I am) or not, this book will help better understand how we talk about religion, how we could talk better about religion and much more.

[Roman Brasoveanu · Rating 2 out of 5]

How this book ever became a classic in the field of religious studies is incomprehensible. ‘The Meaning and End of Religion’ is much ado about nothing. It argues at unnecessary length that ‘Religion’ is not a helpful term for describing religious traditions, in part because of its changing meaning in history, but this is hardly profound.

This book is a historical study and a work of comparative religion buttressing a liberal Protestant homily about the unity of men in ‘personal faith’ and the unimportance of ‘theology.’

The slinking between academic writing and slyly denouncing Roman Catholicism through sermon is cringeworthy.

W.C. Smith is a second rate Schleiermacher acting as a historian of religious traditions. This is not a book for serious people.

[John]

This classic work is a study of the evolution of "religion" as a reified, essentialist concept in modern intellectual history. Religion, as Cantwell Smith persuasively argues, is--when understood either as designating an absolute "thing" in human experience ("religion in general") or as indicating a particular instantiation of that thing ("the Christian religion" or "the Buddhist religion")--purely a modern intellectualist construct, one that has no parallel in pre-modern Western thought or in the ideas of non-Western cultures that have not come under decisive Western influence. Cantwell Smith further argues that the term "religion" and the concept that it communicates create barriers to true scholarly understanding of human religiousness.

The methodology proposed by Cantwell Smith involves recognizing what we have called "religions" as being, in fact, nexuses of "cumulative traditions" (the historically-observable data of religious life in history--artworks, buildings, rituals, communities) and "faith" (the inner encounter between the individual and what Cantwell Smith calls "transcendence"--presumably comparable to Otto's Heilige or Eliade's "the sacred," and similarly susceptible to the charge that it is simply a smuggled-in God-concept).

The Meaning and End of Religion is now nearly half a century old, and it shows its age. While the historical survey is very compelling, and the case Cantwell Smith makes in this portion of the book is persuasive, much of the rest of the work takes a decisively theological turn that reveals the author's largely uncritical mid-twentieth-century liberal-Protestant worldview. When Cantwell Smith writes that "Men of different religious communities are going to have to collaborate to construct jointly and deliberately the kind of world of which men of different religious communities can jointly approve, as well as one in which they can jointly participate" (location 2421 in the Kindle edition), it's hard for this not to sound like the culturally-imperialist fantasy of white, affluent, first-world liberals like the author.

In spite of these reservations, The Meaning and End of Religion is a work of real erudition and one which has helped to establish important themes in the methodological and theoretical study of religion over the past five decades.

[Erik Graff · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a truly important book, the thesis of which is summarized in its description here. It was assigned to all Religious Studies majors taking the Senior Seminar with Grinnell's faculty which then consisted of the Rev. Dennis Haas, Harold Kasimow, Howard Burkle and two junior faculty on terminal assignment. The three senior faculty listed are to be commended for selecting this text as a required capstone reading.

[Damien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Smith's hoped for future, one in which the words "religion" and especially "religions" have disappeared from serious discourse, hasn't yet arrived, and may seem even more distant in some ways. But his work opened the doors to that possibility, revealing to the Western world how empty these words have become. Today, people tend to sort themselves into two categories, one, "anti-religious" who define religion in such a way as to make it a strawman of primitive ignorance, easily castigated or simply ignored, the other, "religious" who define religion in a deeply personal way so idiosyncratic as to be unapproachable by anyone outside that individual's mind. Both are extremes that eliminate any practical possibility of meaningful engagement or discourse. By carefully outlining the historical growth of the modern concept of "religion," Smith can bring a person in either camp toward the middle – a place of deeper, broader understanding that can open the discursive doors once again. Though there are portions of the work that are dated, it is the foundational work in modern comparative religion, a field whose importance today cannot be overstated.

[Zyf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very impressive book, especially considering my personal experience. In China, following the guidance of Marxism sermon that "religion is opium", all kinds of ritual practices and supernature beliefs are condemned as "religious supersistion" and banned. This is partly due to the vague theme of "宗教（religion）迷信(supersistion)". People keep using this imported notion while never thinking what it refers to.
In China we have got Buddhism, Taoism and many other native beliefs(sometimes Confucianism) as "religions", but we call them "教"（means "teaching"), they are more like religio, its original meaning, which is an embedded system of all kinds of duties and relationship. And in Chinese history we have never got any words similar to "religion" used to include all those different things. I don't know what Marx means when he says "religion" as opium, but I do think it is important to draw a line between temple-castle system in Tibet and what people do before their parents' grave(which may be criticized as folk religions) instead of banning them all.
Nowadays scholars in China still keep using XX教(-ism) in all fields, this is especially harmful when studying history, how can you use a term to describe their practices againist their own wills? Globally, anthropology also needs to respond the reflection of "religion": do Nuer and Azande people know such things?
More can be read in Cavanaugh's books.

[Unsympathizer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Smith completely challenges our idea of religion. He notes that we think that all religions are universalist and involve proselytizing and deity worship, when only Christianity and Islam (and Manichaeism in the past) are like that. He notes that Hinduism, Buddhism etc. were seen as things that simply existed in that culture, and not universal. He also notes that Islam is special because it’s the only religion to name itself and call itself a religion.

His conception of religion is that it is faith (personal belief) plus cumulative tradition (corpus of work and tradition of people that subscribe to that religion).

His analysis of Buddhism is a bit off though, as he thinks Buddhists never proselytized, which is true now, but not true during Buddhism’s early years.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a classic with some limitations.

[Mister Weintruab · Rating 5 out of 5]

The goldfish metaphor alone deserves 5 stars!

[Renato Jimeno Ushenizhnik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Está en el top 10 de mis regalos de cumpleaños.

[Andika Pratama · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is very enlightening to me. To all those who have developed some prior judgments just by reading the title, note that this is not about the end of "religion" as you understand it. It is more about the exploration of the term "religion" itself, which is nowhere said in any religious scripture, with the exception of the Qur'an. But even so, according to Smith's analysis, what the Qur'an means by "religion" (din) is not the same at all as the term "religion" that we in modern times seem to have been brought to believe. Overall, Smith radically proposes to drop the term "religion" altogether and instead focus on either faith or tradition.

So for those who think that they know a lot about "religion" and still use "religion" using their own preconceptions of it, this book is worth exploring and eventually pondering because it has impacts on how we deal with religious issues in a broad and practical sense.

[Avery · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book still has plenty of food for thought, but it is quite dated now. In particular, when one takes into account the critical work that occupies most of the first half, the conclusion seems overly optimistic and kind of leaves the modern reader hanging.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

nonfiction,philosophy,theology

[Harmony Courtney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very heavy text only for those really strong in their faith.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Far denser in thought and language than I recall its being in the late 80s when I was in seminary, a crucial work in defining what religion does in and for human life.