The Map That Needs Explaining
Look at a map of the world’s religions and something odd should strike you. Four traditions — Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism — take up nearly all the coloured space. The category Pew surveys file under “folk religions,” meaning the countless local traditions that once organised almost every human community on earth, accounted for around 5.7 per cent of the world’s population in 2015. For the overwhelming bulk of human history the proportions ran the other way.
Alan Strathern, a historian at Oxford, calls this a historical problem of the first order and gives it a deliberately violent name: mass religiocide, the destruction of unmixed immanentist religion in all but a few corners of the earth. His essay in the Journal of Religious History is a case for the kind of history capable of taking such a question on.
Two Ways of Being Global
Global history comes in two flavours. The connective sort traces movement — people, goods, ideas crossing oceans — and has become the dominant mode. The comparative sort sets distinct cases beside one another to test propositions about cause, and remains a minority pursuit, despite the fact that the most famous work of global history, Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence, is comparative through and through.
The distinction decides which questions can be asked. Connective history is superb at showing that nothing was ever sealed off; it is less suited to explaining why deep structures changed. Comparison descends from what Lucien Febvre called l’histoire problème — history organised around a problem rather than a period — and gives historians one of their few systematic ways of weighing which causes actually did the work. Marc Bloch’s The Royal Touch, an inquiry into why French and English subjects believed for centuries that their kings could cure scrofula by touch, is the founding instance, and, conveniently for Strathern, a study of religion.
Why “Religion” Became Hard to Say
A second obstacle sits inside the study of religion itself. Late twentieth-century scholarship cultivated instincts that made deconstruction easier than construction: suspicion of essences, a genealogical habit that judges concepts by the purity of their origins, a preference for insiders’ categories over analysts’, and wariness of any question aimed at explaining the present. Talal Asad’s argument that religion cannot be universally defined, because the concept is itself a product of discourse, was received as devastating — though the same holds for class, gender, discourse and history. No concept was ever immaculately conceived. What a concept is worth is better judged by what can be done with it.
So Strathern offers one. Religion is the domain of culture oriented towards relations with supernatural beings, forces and salvation quests — especially where those relations build community and generate meaning. Not a definition meant to settle anything, but a spotlight: it lights some ground and leaves the rest dark, which is what definitions are for.
Immanentism and Its Undoing
The apparatus developed in Unearthly Powers (2019) and Converting Rulers (2024) splits what “religion” had run together. Immanentism is the near-universal condition: a world thick with metapersons — ancestors, spirits, gods — who live inside this reality and whose favour must be managed if crops, births and wars are to go well. Its cosmology is monistic, its spirits unmoralised, its central practice ritual, often sacrifice as gift-exchange. Transcendentalism is the rarer thing, emerging across Eurasia in the first millennium BCE: it cuts the world in two, sets a corrupt mundane sphere against an ineffable sacred one, makes salvation the point, codifies universal ethics, closes a canon and staffs it with a clerisy.
The payoff is a pattern in ruler conversion. Rulers of societies already anchored in a transcendentalist tradition almost never went over to an incoming faith; ask how many Christian rulers converted to Islam, or Islamic rulers to Christianity, across centuries of contact, and the answer is close to zero. Purely immanentist polities varied enormously in their responses, but over the long run their defences tended to give way — and not simply because of the power differentials of colonialism.
Vico in the Middle of the Argument
Readers of this site will find a familiar figure at a crucial hinge. Marshall Sahlins, the great anthropologist of cultural difference, spent his last years absorbing the concept of immanentism and produced The New Science of the Enchanted Universe — a title borrowed from Giambattista Vico (1668–1744). When Sahlins reached for an account of why humans everywhere populate the world with persons, he reached for Vico too: the early humans who trembled at thunder and pictured the sky as a great animated body, because the mind attributes its own nature to whatever it cannot explain. Strathern takes the observation and presses past it — what causes that propensity? — and looks to the social brain hypothesis, the idea that minds shaped to read other minds will read agency into volcanoes and rain.
What Follows From Here
Four projects sit just past the edge of what an essay this length can carry.
The first is a genealogy of the comparative method itself. Strathern notes that Jean Bodin arrived at something like reciprocal comparison in the sixteenth century, and that Vico furnished the frame Sahlins eventually used. A study running from Bodin through Vico to Bloch would give big-picture history its own epistemology rather than a borrowed one. Vico’s claim that we can know the world of nations with a certainty unavailable to us in physics, because human beings made it, is a warrant for comparative history that does not route through cognitive science — it sets the anthropomorphic propensity inside a theory of making rather than only a theory of mind.
The second is quantitative. The model was laid out theoretically and then tested against four deep case studies: Kongo, Japan, Ayutthaya, Hawaii. The natural next step is a coded dataset of ruler-conversion episodes across roughly 1450–1850, recording prior religious regime, the institutional position of any clerisy, polity scale, and the military and commercial pressure applied — so that transcendentalist resistance can be weighed directly against power-differential explanations. The Seshat initiative has done comparable work on Axial Age claims; conversion is at least as codable.
Third, the article names the study it wants on secularisation: how the critique of the immanent and the demarcation of the secular played out in Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism, rather than only in the Christianity Charles Taylor mapped. Making that tractable means picking a unit, and the clerisy is the obvious candidate. Islam inherited what Jan Assmann called the Mosaic distinction and generated its own disenchanting reformisms without arriving at the sceptical turn; whether that difference lies in doctrine or in how exegetes were positioned relative to state power is an institutional question with an answerable shape — Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal learned classes set against post-Reformation European ones.
Fourth, macro-cultural regions. Strathern proposes them as flexible heuristics in place of “civilisation,” and offers one striking indicator of a boundary that mattered: the near-absence of sustained early modern Islamic scholarship about China. That indicator could be generalised into a method. A bibliometric study of pre-modern translation and citation — what was rendered into which languages, who cites across which frontiers, what manuscript catalogues actually hold — would let macro-cultural regions be drawn out of evidence rather than proposed and defended, and would give the connective and comparative methods a shared object.
There is a fifth, hiding in a throwaway list. Immanentism, Strathern observes, survives in the quotidian corners of modern life: astrology, lucky charms, ghosts, spiritual wellness. Anyone who has heard a recommendation feed described as knowing you, wanting things, punishing you, will recognise a candidate. Whether relations with algorithmic systems recruit the same machinery that once populated the sky with persons is an empirical question, and someone should ask it.
The Case for Scale
The essay’s leitmotif is scale, and its sharpest claim may be that instincts honed at one level of enquiry are actively disabling at another — which is why specialists and generalists so often talk past each other rather than argue. Read at the scale Strathern asks for, the map of world religions stops looking like a description and starts looking like the outcome of something. That is when the big picture heaves into view.
Strathern, Alan. “The Big Picture: Religion and Global Comparative History.” Journal of Religious History (2026): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9809.70110.
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