The Big Picture: Religion and Global Comparative History

This article considers what a ‘big picture’ approach to global religious history might look like, and in particular the implications of deploying the comparative method across much larger stretches of time and space than historians normally attend to. It will begin by reflecting on the epistemological moods that have hindered this project to date, the problem of the very question of defining ‘religion’ and the recent development of Globale Religionsgeschichte. A truly longue durée endure global history of religion will need organising problems, and there are at least two: how were innumerable religious systems eaten up by a handful of world religions? And how might religion ever have ceded the centre‐ground of social and political life? After briefly referring to the way in which the author has sought to answer the first question through the model of immanentism‐transcendentalism, it is suggested that attending to the big picture will necessarily involve genuine dialogue with anthropology, historical sociology and cognitive science. Among the many problems of conceptualisation raised by this perspective is the question of how to understand macro‐cultural regions or ‘civilizations.’ Lastly the question of modernity and secularisation theory is briefly addressed in a final section.