We have traced the history of thinking about religion from the Age of Discovery to the present, during which time the concept of religion has changed several times. Its first definition was provided by familiarity with medieval Christianity, conceptualized consciously when the New World was discovered and Columbus found that “the natives had no religion.” A kind of bewilderment settled in, for medieval Christian mentality had no way to classify humans without religion. During the next two centuries, missionaries, explorers, and scholars struggled with this conundrum, finding traces of what they thought were religious sensibilities, but without being able to identify or conceptualize anything similar to what they understood religion to be. When scholars and ethnographers finally focused on tribal myths and rituals, they triggered a shift in the concept of religion that broke away from its Christian connotations. Religion was understood no longer as a matter of belief and piety interested only in contacting a realm of the gods, but as one of symbolic representations of social interests and structures.

In Part I of the book I was able to develop a social theory of myths and rituals and explain the ways in which their imagined worlds created a common mentality for a people and a grammar for thinking together about themselves and their world. Then, taking some time to document and describe the Christian system of myth and ritual, we found that its imagined world and resulting grammar were created during the ages of empire and that its transformation into the institution of the Church enabled it to survive the social changes of the modern world.