Nineteenth-century thought unified varied sacred usages into one universal religious essence

Evidence

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “sacred” in early modern English usage generally referred to individual things, persons, and occasions that were set apart and entitled to veneration. Yet if we consider the examples given in the dictionary—the poetic line “That sacred Fruit, sacred to abstinence,” the inscription “sacred to the memory of Samuel Butler,” the address-form “your sacred majesty,” the phrase “a sacred concert”—it is virtually impossible to identify the setting apart or the venerating as being the same act in all cases. The subject to whom such things, occasions, or persons are said to be sacred does not stand in the same relation to them. It was late nineteenth-century anthropological and theological thought that rendered a variety of overlapping social usages rooted in changing and heterogeneous forms of life into a single immutable essence, and claimed it to be the object of a universal human experience called “religious.” — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 138

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the ‘invention of religion’ thesis across disciplinary histories — the anthropological construction of a unitary category out of heterogeneous practice.
• DEEPTHINKING: The argument that a term covers heterogeneous relations (dedication, remembrance, address, performance) yet gets essentialized into one universal concept is a deep epistemological critique applicable far beyond religion.