aims to bring together different beliefs and practices seeing their essential unity rather than their difference
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Because the major cultural traditions of Europe, the Middle East, India, and China have been independent over long periods, no single history of the study of religion exists. The primary impulse that prompts many to study religion, however, happens to be the Western one. On the whole, in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages the various approaches to religion grew out of attempts either to criticize or to defend particular systems and to interpret religion in harmony with changes in knowledge. The same is true of part of the modern period, but increasingly the idea of a nonjudgmental, descriptive, or explanatory study of religions, and at the same time the attempt to understand the genesis and function of religion, has become established. Viewed thus, the 19th century is the formative period for the modern study of religion. The ensuing account here of the history of the subject takes it up to the modern period and then considers the various disciplines connected with religion in detail since the 19th century.