Russell T. McCutcheon
Abstract A shortened and revised version of the introduction to the 2026 edition of Manufacturing Religion , this essay demonstrates the continued relevance of the book’s critique, which argued for a more rigorously historical approach to the implications of designating assorted cultural items as religious. Not unlike thirty years ago, when the book was first published, today many seemingly critical scholars often are ambiguous in their approach; for while acknowledging that the word “religion” has a history they nonetheless work as if what it names somehow predates all such designation and thus human agency. This idealist presumption of an enduring and inherently meaningful faith, experience, spirituality, or tradition – or what I refer to as religion before “religion” – is, however, one of the defining marks of the discourse on religion that is examined in the book, making plain that many scholars have by now undermined this critical approach by adopting it only partway.