I like this a lot. This is a great piece of Nietzschean/Foucaultian “genealogy”. Indeed, it seems that people look back today at a variety of cultural practices and conflate them under the notion of “religion”, which seems to in many circles in the Christian world refer either to Christianity itself, or, problematically, the Other’s analog to Christianity. As though one were to ask from this perspective, of all of these traditions, rituals, practices, and politics, “wh0 is your Christ?” or “to whom do you pray?”. This sentiment is reflected particularly egregiously when it is suggested, particularly by those who fancy themselves as open minded and inclusive, that “all gods are simply different interpretations or cultural concepts of the same transcendental entity”, that we are simply confused in our misapprehension of our differences. When this is suggested, it is all but clear that the “same transcendental entity” is always, beneath the shroud of abstraction, the Abrahamic God; the “one and only God”. This is a very particular pretense of the Abrahamic tradition, not a universal striving for the universal.

And as I understand the history of colonial proselytizing, this conflation of religion with all cultural practices was itself a practical approach to conversion: to propose to so many people, with often great imposition, that they had a “religion” qua Christianity and simply needed to correctively reorient their symbolism.