Abstract:

This article tries to sketch the emergence of religion as a modern historical object for a wider outlining the genealogy of religion. Thus the ways in which the theoretical search for an essence of religion invites us to separate it conceptually from the domain of power is examined. This is tried to be made by exploring a universalist definition of religion offered by an eminent anthropologist, namely Clifford Geertz’s Religion as a Cultural System. The aim of this article is to try to identify some of the historical shifts that have produced our concept of religion as the concept of a trans-historical essence. One of the basic argument suggested here is that socially identifiable forms, preconditions, and effects of what was regarded as religion in the medieval Christian epoch were quite different from those so considered in modern society.

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