Several scholars have recently argued that the concept of "religion" is manufactured, constructed, invented, or imagined, but does not correspond to an objective reality, "out there" in the world. This paper seeks to evaluate that critique. I argue that the critique is composed of three levels or threads: that "religion" is a social construction, that the term distorts one's perceptions of the reality it seeks to name, and that it is ideologically poisonous. Granting the partial truth of these three arguments, the paper agrees with the critics that a naive realism about religion is indefensible. However, some of the critics draw the conclusion that "there is no such thing as religion" or "there are no religions," but I reject this conclusion. I seek, instead, to develop a critical realist view of the concept of religion that is able both to take into account the history of the semantics of the concept and, nevertheless, to see the study of religion as the study of patterns of behavior which are independent of the scholar.Several scholars have recently argued that the concept of "religion" is manufactured, constructed, invented, or imagined, but does not correspond to an objective reality, "out there" in the world.1 If one thinks of deconstruction in a nontechnical sense as an approach that takes meanings that are unreflectively taken as real and seeks to reveal them as conceptually unstable, historically emergent, and ideologically motivated, then these critics are pursuing the deconstruction of the concept of religion.2 This paper seeks to evaluate that critique.Here is a summary of this paper's trajectory. There is an unreflective, but widespread, view of religion that takes religion as something that exists independent of the concepts with which it is described. From this perspective, religion has a certain objective character and the scholar's task is to discover it. Call this view of religion "naive realism." I believe that in the face of the critique, a naive realism about religion is indefensible. Nevertheless, some of the critics draw the conclusion that "there is no such thing as religion" or "there are no religions," but I argue that this anti-realist view of religion does not follow from the critique. I seek, instead, to develop a chastened view of the concept of religion, a critical realism, that takes into account the contribution of the modern western provenance of the concept, but nevertheless sees the study of religion as the study of a social reality that is in the crucial respects independent of the scholar.3

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Several theorists argue that the concept of "religion" is not a cultural universal but rather emerged under particular historical and political conditions in the modern post-Reformation west. "Religion," they say, is a social construction. What are the implications of this view of the ontology of religion? My aim in this paper is to critically engage the arguments of Timothy Fitzgerald-a social constructionist about religion who combines, in my judgment, insight and confusion on the issue-in order to trace out the values and the limits of this approach.

Clifford Geertz's influential definition of religions as providing their members with both an ethos and a worldview-in his terms, both a "model for" and "model of" reality-has of late become a neuralgic point of contention in religious studies. In particular some critics have seen his ideas of religious models of reality as biased, out-moded, or in other ways confused about the way that language refers (or does not refer) to the world. In this article, I consider two criticisms of Geertz's project and seek to show that, despite the partial value of the criticisms, the idea of religious models of reality continues to be a legitimate and fruitful approach to what religious communities are typically up to.

Some scholars of religion have turned their attention from religion to "religion" and have then deconstructed the conceptual category, arguing that the concept of religion is an invention of the scholar that corresponds to nothing. In Schilbrack (2012), I used the work of Tim Fitzgerald to identify what such arguments get right and what they get wrong. In the present reply to Fitzgerald, I make a case for critical realism as a methodological stance for the study of religion that can learn from deconstructive approaches without abandoning the concept Schilbrack, kevin (2013)