Lactantius's “Modern” Conception of Religio*

Abstract

Scholars of religion sometimes argue that a distinctively modern conception of religion takes religion to be a trans‐cultural category, divisible into “true” and “false” versions, of which Christianity is the core type. Thus, according to the so‐called modern conception of religion, every culture has its own religion. Some are true (paradigmatically Christianity), some are false. This paper argues that these ideas were present in Lactantius's (c. 250–325) conception of religio. It shows this by presenting Lactantius's development of a theory of religio. This theory was the product of Lactantius combining one Ciceronian conception of religio and a Christian origin‐story about where religio comes from. Lactantius used this theory to analyse Christianity and what he took to be its competitors.