Given that religion, religious, and religions are Western folk concepts, that their meaning is unstable and contested, and that they cannot be defined so as to specify anything uniquely, we need to consider broader, more generic ways of characterizing the sorts of things that interest us as scholars of religion. Rather than relying on emically loaded first-order terms, such as sacred, magical, spiritual, mystical, or religious, we can seek ways to translate the disciplinary second-order discourse of religion, religious, and religions into broader, more generic terms when designing research. Instead of stipulating a definition for a key first-order term, such as “religious,” and, thus, defining in advance what exactly will count as such, I propose – to borrow a fishing metaphor – that we cast our nets more broadly and then sort through the variety of things that our nets pull in. Identifying a broader set of nets that we can use – singly or in combination – to specify what it is we want to study would not only eliminate the confusion between first- and second-order use of the term “religious,” it would also highlight the impossibility of uniquely specifying what is meant by the first-order terms and force us to specify what it is about this constellation of concepts that most interests us.

SPECIALNESS AS A GENERIC ATTRIBUTE OF THINGS CONSIDERED RELIGION-LIKE

The idea of specialness is one broader, more generic net that captures most of what people have in mind when they refer to sacred, magical, spiritual, mystical, or religious, and then some. We can consider specialness both behaviorally and substantively, asking whether there are behaviors that tend to mark things off as special and whether there are particular types of things are that are more likely to be considered special than others.