After a generation of academic critique and legal and political transformation, the field of law-and-religion stands in the midst of a crisis. Theorists in disciplines ranging from religious studies and anthropology to international relations and law have problematized the category of “religion” from a variety of perspectives. To be sure, these theorists have rarely, if ever, sought to do away with the category, either as an empirical descriptor or as a tool of analysis. Rather, they have shown its historically contingent, politically constructed, and perennially contested nature.

Post-colonial theorists, for example, have argued for the Eurocentric genealogy of “religion” and its global diffusion through colonialism and its aftermath. Legal critics have undermined the perennial protestations of theological agnosticism by courts in the West; in the United States, such criticism has revealed an implicit strand of “low-church” Protestant presuppositions.