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The Invention of World Religions: From Kuenen to Pfleiderer to Masuzawa

When scholars today speak casually of “world religions” as if they were natural facts — Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism — they rarely realize that this very classification is a modern invention. It has a genealogy, and like all genealogies, it reveals not universal truths but particular interests. The story begins in the 19th century, when Europe, drunk with its own imperial reach, began to codify religions into types, ranks, and stages. It continues with figures like Abraham Kuenen and Otto Pfleiderer, who presented Protestant Christianity as the culmination of religious history. And it culminates in the work of Tomoko Masuzawa, who, in The Invention of World Religions (2005), dismantles the entire scaffolding, exposing it as a Eurocentric fiction.

Abraham Kuenen’s National Religions and Universal Religions (1882) was one of the earliest systematic attempts to divide religions into two great categories. “National religions” were those tied to a single people and land — Judaism, the Greek and Roman cults, Hinduism. They were limited, particular, tribal. “Universal religions,” by contrast, claimed to transcend boundaries — Christianity, Islam, Buddhism. For Kuenen, this was not a neutral taxonomy but a teleological ladder: religion develops, matures, and culminates in Christianity. Judaism was thus a necessary but incomplete stage, a national faith that prepared the ground for Christian universality. Islam, though universal, was fanatical and derivative. Buddhism, though expansive, was pessimistic and sterile. Only Christianity embodied the true spirit of universality.

Otto Pfleiderer, writing just a few years later in Religion and Historic Faiths (1888), consolidated this narrative into a broader philosophy of history. Influenced by Schleiermacher and Hegel, he cast the religions of the world as stages in the unfolding of human consciousness. Hinduism was imaginative but bound to caste and myth; Buddhism was morally serious but negating of life; Islam was universal but rigid; Judaism was ethically profound but tribal. Once again, Christianity appeared as the crown — especially Protestant Christianity, stripped of superstition and purified by reason. Pfleiderer’s liberal Protestantism was not reactionary dogmatism but a subtler triumphalism: Christianity was modern, rational, ethical, and therefore the destiny of humanity.

What Kuenen constructed and Pfleiderer consolidated was not a science of religion but a theology disguised as history. They claimed to describe religions as they were, but they ranked them according to how well they approximated the Protestant ideal. Judaism was frozen as a national relic; Hinduism dismissed as decadent; Buddhism respected but subordinated; Islam acknowledged but marginalized. The supposed universality of Christianity was never argued — it was assumed. This is precisely what Tomoko Masuzawa demonstrates with devastating clarity more than a century later.

In The Invention of World Religions, Masuzawa shows that the entire discourse of “world religions” was born in 19th-century Europe to preserve European superiority while wearing the mask of pluralism. The new category seemed generous — no longer was Christianity the only true faith, now there were many “world religions.” But beneath the surface, Christianity remained exceptional, always the model against which others were measured. Buddhism was elevated as a noble other — rational, universal, a kind of proto-Christianity — but only to highlight Christianity’s ultimate superiority. Hinduism was relegated to the realm of ethnic or national religions, good for exotic color but not serious universality. Islam, though undeniably universal, was pushed aside as sterile and derivative. And Judaism, once called national, was grudgingly admitted into the “world religions club,” though always as Christianity’s stubborn ancestor rather than a genuine equal.

Masuzawa makes the crucial point: this was never a neutral science. Comparative philology, historical criticism, and the new discipline of comparative religion were all implicated in the imperial project. The languages of Aryan and Semitic, the hierarchies of national and universal, the categories of historic faiths — these were instruments of cultural domination. Europe needed to understand the religions of the peoples it conquered, and it needed to place them in a hierarchy that justified Christian superiority. The result was the birth of the very list we now take for granted in every introductory textbook on world religions.

The intellectual arc, then, is clear. Kuenen constructed the categories, drawing the sharp line between national and universal. Pfleiderer consolidated them, embedding them in a narrative of historical development culminating in Protestant Christianity. And Masuzawa, more than a century later, demolishes the edifice, exposing it as a European invention masquerading as pluralism. What looks today like an innocent catalogue — Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism — is in fact the residue of this 19th-century ideology.

For your project, the payoff is enormous. You can show that the very discourse in which Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism are discussed is not timeless but manufactured. Judaism was once the archetype of the “national religion,” dismissed as parochial; now it survives as a “world religion” only by virtue of being Christianity’s foil. Buddhism was made respectable only insofar as it resembled Christianity — universal, missionary, ethical — but it was never allowed to be its equal. Islam’s universality was systematically denied to preserve Christian uniqueness. Hinduism was locked into the cage of ethnicity and caste. And all of this was packaged as science.

Masuzawa’s critique allows you to puncture the smug liberal pluralism that still governs the language of interfaith discourse. The rhetoric of “all world religions” appears even-handed, but it remains an echo of Kuenen and Pfleiderer. Christianity is still the unspoken norm. Judaism is still the foil. Buddhism is still the noble but inferior other. Islam is still the problem case. Hinduism is still the exotic relic. To expose this genealogy is to reveal the intellectual imperialism of Europe, hidden in plain sight in every syllabus, every textbook, every casual invocation of “world religions.”