Summary Of Wilfred Smith's The Meaning And End Of Religion

Wilfred Smith in his book The Meaning and End of Religion traces the development of the concept of religion and demonstrates that it is a word attributed to the Western world used to describe traditions as mutually exclusive systems of belief. This process is known as reification, “mentally making religion into a thing, gradually coming to conceive it as an objective systematic entity” (Smith, 51). This has proved damaging because to say that religion is reified is to claim that something belonging only in the world of imagination or the supernatural is mistaken for something that exists in the real world. In stead we must use words such as traditions to identify the visual practices done by people. Tillich defines religion as ‘not a special function of man’s spiritual life, but is the dimension of …show more content…
Through the process of reification we have taken the observable traditions and labeled them as distinct religions. In traditions such as the emak cem for the Asmat people the rite of passage and the safe transfer of souls were not particularly seen as religious because they simply did them as a custom. As Smith states, “they [primitive people] perform their rites, relate their myths, uphold their norms, and experience their emotions, without analytic reflection or linguistic generalization” (Smith,54). These customs are an aspect of their culture. The reification of religion came to describe not an inner, personal attitude that people have, but a well-defined and impersonal system of beliefs and practices. Ceremonies as such were inner, personal and abstract not meant to be defined and classified under one of many. Smith suggests that practitioners of any given faith do not come to regard what they do as religion until they have developed a degree of cultural self-regard, causing them to see their spiritual practices and beliefs in some way significantly different from the