The theoretical study of religion emerged in the eighteenth century. Like the concept of religion itself, it is the product of, among other influences, the Age of Exploration and Empire (fifteenth and sixteenth centuries), the Protestant Reformation (sixteenth century), and the Augustan Age (eighteenth century). In The Meaning and End of Religion (1962), Wilfred Cantwell Smith documents how the premodern etymological antecedents of the modern word religion (e.g., Latin religio) generally mean something like "the pious Christian rites of worship," not what the modern word means. The practice of translating the premodern terms as religion, therefore, often misleads. Non-Western cultures, furthermore, did not have terms with anything like the same connotations or semantic scope.

In premodern Europe, the known religious horizon consisted of (1) the mythology of ancient Greek and Roman pagans, (2) Jews,...