Abstract:

This review places Prothero's book in the context of the academic study of Religion. Specifically, I discuss the issues of defining religion, the history of the category "religion," and the relationship between that category and Euro-American colonialism. The central argument offered is that Prothero's implicit theory of religion is poorly defined, uninformed about the history of the term, and naive about issues of cross-cultural study. As such, his picture of religion is ethnocentric in that, for all his discussion of differences, he does not see real difference. Given that he explicitly claims that the book will be useful for American entrepreneurs, diplomats, and soldiers, his work is complicit in the project of the neo-colonialist, neo-imperialist spread of capitalist modes of production throughout the globe.

Author: Tim M Murphy