Thinking About Religion Before 'Religion' A Review of Brent Nongbri's Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept

Proponents of the view that religion is a socially constructed concept frequently argue that historians should not write about religion in the premodern world. Brent Nangbri's Before Religion nuances this argument by distinguishing between issues of translation and issues of historiography. Like other social constructionists, Nongbri argues that historians cannot defensibly translate words from premodern source languages as 'religion'. He maintains, however, that historians can defensibly write about premodern religions, so long as they write redescriptive histories: narratives that explicitly treat 'religion' as a modern, anachronistic category that the historian applies to premodern materials for explanatory purposes. This review challenges both parts of Nongbri's argument. Historians are entitled to translate premodern terms as 'religion', and social constructionists of religion are better off abandoning Nongbri's distinction between descriptive and redescriptive histories. All histories are redescriptive, in Nongbri's sense, making histories of premodern religions less exotic and less problematic than many imagine.