In Paul’s day, “religion” consisted of God-related activities that, along with politics and community life, held a culture together and bound the members of that culture to its divinities and to one another. In the modern Western world, “religion” tends to mean God-related individual beliefs and practices that are supposedly separable from culture, politics, and community life. For Paul, “religion” was woven in with all of life; for the modern Western world, it is separated from it.
