Expanding ‘religion’ or decentring the secular? Framing the frames in philosophy of religion

New cross-cultural approaches to philosophy of religion seek to move it beyond the preoccupations of Christian theology and the abstractions of ‘classical theism’, towards an appreciation of a broader range of religious phenomena. But if the concept of religion is itself the product of extrapolation from modern, Western, Christian understandings, disseminated through colonial encounter, does the new philosophy of religion simply reproduce the deficiencies of the old, under the guise of a universalizing, albeit culturally and historically particular, category? This article argues that it is necessary to interrogate the secular episteme within which religion is thematized as a discrete topos.