EN
ID
Abstract
This essay proposes a redefinition of religion as the “institutionalization of piety.” Contemporary academic approaches to religion remain fractured along several axes: essentialist definitions seek a single experiential core, functionalist definitions reduce religion to its social utility, polythetic models catalogue overlapping traits without a unifying principle, and critical-redescriptive approaches dissolve religion into discourse and power. Drawing on the relatively peaceful coexistence of multiple religions across Southeast Asia over millennia, this essay argues that piety—understood as a deeply felt reverence and moral orientation toward the sacred—constitutes the common ground shared by Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Confucianism. Through the phenomenological lens of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s embodied intentionality and Margaret Gilbert’s theory of collective intentionality, this essay demonstrates that piety is not merely a private subjective state but an objectified, externalized, and socially shared reality. The historical record of Southeast Asia, where sacred sites and houses of worship have been consensually transferred and transformed across religious traditions through successive eras of hybridity, inculturation, and dialogic coexistence, provides vivid empirical evidence for this claim. Using Reiner Keller’s Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD), the essay integrates the affectual-experiential and political-institutional dimensions of religion into a coherent analytical framework. Religion is thus redefined through four processes: substantiation, habituation, objectification, and sedimentation of piety. This redefinition clarifies both the integrative nature of normative and empirical elements of religion and the distinctive characteristics of religious life in Southeast Asia.
Keywords: religion, piety, institutionalization, Southeast Asia, phenomenology, SKAD, collective intentionality, sacred landscape
1. Introduction: The Fragmentation Problem in the Study of Religion
What is religion? The question appears simple, yet it has produced a remarkably fragmented landscape of answers. More than a century of scholarly labor in the humanities and social sciences has yielded not convergence but proliferation: definitions that emphasize inner experience stand apart from those that foreground social function; definitions that treat religion as a universal human phenomenon clash with those that regard the very category as a modern Western invention. The result is a field of study that often talks past itself, each disciplinary tradition working with a different, and frequently incompatible, understanding of its basic subject matter.
The fragmentation has deep historical roots. As scholarship on the etymology of the Latin term religio has shown, its meaning has shifted dramatically across epochs. In Roman antiquity, religio referred to the scrupulous performance of ancestral ritual practices and civic obligations. Cicero linked it to relegere—to retrace, to reread—suggesting a careful following of inherited lore. Early Christian theologians, however, reoriented the term. Lactantius derived religio from religare—to bind—redefining it as a bond of piety between humanity and the one true God. This theological move introduced a fateful binary: “true religion” (Christianity) versus “false religion” or superstition (everything else). The Enlightenment brought yet another shift, transforming faith from what Wilfred Cantwell Smith called a “dynamic of the heart” into religion as an impersonal, objective set of propositions and beliefs. This era gave birth to the “World Religions” paradigm, in which diverse traditions were classified as species under the generic genus “religion”—a taxonomic grid that many scholars now recognize as profoundly shaped by Protestant Christian assumptions and colonial-era comparative ambitions.
Within contemporary academic discourse, at least four families of definitions can be identified, each illuminating certain aspects of the phenomenon while obscuring others. Essentialist definitions seek a unique inner core of religion, typically identified with private experience or “faith.” William James defined religion as the feelings, acts, and experiences of individuals in their solitude insofar as they understand themselves in relation to the divine. Rudolf Otto characterized it as an encounter with the mysterium tremendum et fascinans—an experience of the holy that is both terrifying and fascinating. These definitions powerfully capture the experiential intensity of religious life, but they tend to privatize religion, stripping away its social, material, and political dimensions.
Functionalist definitions take the opposite tack, defining religion by what it does for individuals or society. Emile Durkheim’s classic formulation treats religion as a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things that unite adherents into a single moral community. Clifford Geertz, synthesizing Durkheim with Max Weber, defined religion as a system of symbols that establishes powerful moods and motivations by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence. These approaches illuminate religion’s social cohesion and meaning-making functions, but they risk reducing the sacred to a mere instrument of social solidarity or cultural order. One might apply Durkheim’s definition to a football club or a political party without significant distortion—a sign that functionalism, however sociologically useful, may not capture what makes religion distinctively religious.
Polythetic or family-resemblance definitions, inspired by Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, avoid seeking a single essence. Bruce Lincoln, for instance, proposes a four-domain definition encompassing transcendent discourse, practices, community, and institutions. This approach is more flexible and inclusive, but it trades analytical sharpness for descriptive breadth: by enumerating overlapping traits without specifying what holds them together, polythetic definitions risk becoming checklists that tell us what religion looks like without telling us what it is.
Finally, critical and redescriptive definitions reject the project of defining religion as a “thing in the world” altogether. Talal Asad argues that no universal definition of religion is possible because the category itself is a historical product of discursive processes of power. Jonathan Z. Smith famously declared that religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. Russell McCutcheon redescribes religion as a social formation, treating religious behaviors as ordinary rhetorical strategies for constructing and contesting social identity. Timothy Fitzgerald goes further, arguing that religion is a mystifying ideological category that serves modern Western liberal ideology by creating a “secular” space for capitalism and the nation-state. S.N. Balagangadhara hypothesizes that religion is a specifically Western “explanatory intelligible account of the Cosmos”—a reflexive entity that, through proselytization, transforms other traditions into “false religions.” These critiques are intellectually powerful and historically important. Still, they pose a practical problem: if religion is nothing but a scholarly construct or a tool of colonial power, how do we make sense of the fact that billions of people across the globe organize their lives, their communities, their hopes, and their suffering around something they experience as irreducibly real and sacred?
This essay takes a different path. Rather than beginning with Western European debates about secularization and definitional politics, it begins with the lived experience of a region where multiple religions have coexisted with relative peace for millennia: Southeast Asia. The Malay Archipelago, mainland Indochina, and the broader Nusantara world have been home to Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Confucianism, and countless indigenous spiritual traditions, often within the same village, family, or even an individual’s life. This is not to romanticize the region or deny the existence of religious conflict; it is to say that Southeast Asia offers a distinctive vantage point for asking what religion is, precisely because religions there have long been practiced in proximity and mutual awareness. From this vantage point, this essay proposes a redefinition of religion as the “institutionalization of piety.”
2. Finding Common Ground: Piety Across Religious Traditions
Suppose we are looking for a concept that runs through the heart of all major religions—a concept that is at once deeply personal and universally recognizable—“piety” recommends itself as a strong candidate. Every major religion, in its own vocabulary and conceptual idiom, identifies a fundamental orientation of the human person toward the sacred, the ultimately real, or the morally supreme. This orientation is not merely intellectual assent to a set of propositions; it is an embodied, affective, and practical commitment that shapes how a person lives, acts, relates to others, and understands the meaning of existence. The word “piety” captures this orientation with a specificity that more abstract terms like “spirituality” or “faith” do not always convey. Let us trace this concept across five traditions, attending to both etymology and lived meaning.
Hinduism: Bhakti and Dharma
In Hindu tradition, the closest analogues to piety are bhakti and dharma. Bhakti, derived from the Sanskrit root bhaj (to share, to participate, to worship), denotes loving devotion to a personal deity. It is not cold obedience but passionate, intimate engagement with the divine—what A.K. Ramanujan, in his studies of the Tamil bhakti poets, described as a relationship so intense it dissolves the boundary between lover and beloved. Dharma, from the root dhr (to uphold, to sustain), denotes the cosmic and moral order that sustains the universe and the individual’s duty within it. Together, bhakti and dharma constitute a piety that is at once affective (love for God) and ethical (right action in the world). In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna’s instruction to Arjuna synthesizes these dimensions: devotion to God and faithful performance of one’s duties are not opposed but mutually reinforcing.
Buddhism: Saddha and Sila
In the Buddhist tradition, piety takes a somewhat different form, given the tradition’s distinctive understanding of self and ultimate reality. The Pali term saddha (Sanskrit: shraddha), often translated as “faith” or “confidence,” denotes a settled trust in the Three Jewels—the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha—that arises not from unquestioning belief but from direct experience and reasoned reflection. Saddha is paired with sila (moral conduct), which encompasses the ethical precepts governing a Buddhist’s daily life. The combination of inner confidence and outer moral discipline constitutes Buddhist piety. In Theravada Southeast Asia—Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia—this piety takes vivid material form: the daily offering of food to monks on their alms rounds, the accumulated merit of temple donations, and the practice of vipassana meditation are all expressions of a devotional orientation that is simultaneously inward and socially visible.
Christianity: Pietas and Eusebeia
The English word “piety” itself derives from the Latin pietas, a concept with deep roots in Roman civic religion and later Christian theology. In Roman usage, pietas denoted dutiful respect toward the gods, one’s family, and the state. Early Christianity inherited and transformed this concept, combining it with the Greek eusebeia (reverence, godliness), which appears frequently in the Pastoral Epistles of the New Testament. As noted in the etymological history above, Lactantius’s derivation of religio from religare explicitly identified religion as a bond of piety. In Christian usage, piety came to denote a life oriented toward God through prayer, devotion, worship, and charity. The Protestant Reformation added further nuances: for Luther, true piety was faith alone (sola fide); for the Pietist movement of the seventeenth century, it was personal experience of God’s grace in everyday life. What remains constant across these variations is that piety names a fundamental orientation of the whole person toward the divine.
Islam: Taqwa and Birr
In the Islamic tradition, piety is expressed primarily through two Qur’anic terms: taqwa and birr. Taqwa, derived from the root w-q-y (to protect, to be mindful), is often translated as “God-consciousness” or “reverent awareness.” It denotes an inner state of perpetual mindfulness of God’s presence that naturally issues in moral action. The Qur’an (2:177) provides an expansive definition of birr (righteousness): it is not merely turning one’s face toward the east or the west in prayer, but believing in God and the Last Day, giving one’s wealth to the needy, establishing prayer, paying alms, and keeping one’s promises. Birr thus integrates belief, ritual practice, and social ethics into a single concept of lived righteousness. In classical Islamic scholarship, al-Ghazali elaborated taqwa as a comprehensive transformation of the self that harmonizes spiritual, intellectual, and practical dimensions of life. In Southeast Asian Islam—from the pesantren tradition of Java to the surau culture of Minangkabau—this integrated piety has taken distinctive local forms, blending Arabic textual learning with Malay and Javanese aesthetic sensibilities.
Confucianism: Li and Xiao
In the Confucian tradition, piety is expressed through li (ritual propriety) and xiao (filial devotion). Li encompasses the entire spectrum of ritual, etiquette, and ceremonial conduct—not mere formalism but the outward expression of ren (humaneness), the moral quality that makes a person truly human. Xiao extends this reverence vertically through time: one honors one’s parents and ancestors, and, by extension, the social order that sustains human flourishing. The Classic of Filial Piety (Xiaojing) declares filial devotion the root of all virtue. In Chinese-influenced cultures in Vietnam and among overseas Chinese communities in maritime Southeast Asia, Confucian piety has deeply shaped social mores, family structures, and attitudes toward authority and education.
What emerges from this survey is a striking convergence. Despite vast differences in metaphysics, cosmology, and institutional organization, all five traditions identify a fundamental orientation of the human person toward something greater than the self—the divine, the dharma, the moral order—that simultaneously involves inner experience, moral commitment, and outward practice. This is what we mean by piety: a reverent, morally engaged, practically expressed orientation toward the sacred. It is the common thread that runs through the world’s religions and the foundation on which a more integrative definition can be built.
3. The Objectivity of Piety: Embodiment, Collective Intentionality, and the Sacred Landscape of Southeast Asia
A skeptic might object that piety, as described above, is merely a subjective experience. This inner feeling differs from person to person and tradition to tradition, and therefore cannot serve as the foundation for a general definition of religion. This objection rests on a dualist assumption: that the inner and the outer, the subjective and the objective, are neatly separable. One of the most important contributions of twentieth-century phenomenology was to dismantle this assumption.
Merleau-Ponty and Embodied Intentionality
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945) argued that consciousness is not a ghostly inner theater but is always already embodied—woven into the fabric of the body, its gestures, its habits, and its engagement with the world. Intentionality, for Merleau-Ponty, is not merely the mind’s directedness toward an object; it is the body’s directedness toward a meaningful world. Applied to religion, this insight transforms how we understand piety. When a Muslim performs the prostration (sujud) of daily prayer, forehead touching the ground in a gesture of absolute submission, this is not an external “expression” of an internal state; the prostration is itself an act of reverence, an embodied intentionality that constitutes piety in the very act of performing it. When a Theravada Buddhist layperson places rice in a monk’s alms bowl at dawn, the piety is in the gesture, in the bodily habit, in the felt weight of the bowl and the coolness of the morning air. When a Balinese Hindu arranges a canang sari offering on a household shrine, the fingers shaping the banana-leaf tray are themselves performing devotion.
If piety is embodied, then it is always already in the world—visible, tangible, public. It inheres in gestures, postures, spatial orientations, material objects, and built environments. The mosque’s mihrab, orienting prayer toward Mecca; the stupa’s concentric terraces, guiding circumambulation toward enlightenment; the church’s nave, drawing the eye toward the altar: these are not mere settings for an inner experience but constitutive elements of piety itself. Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “motor intentionality”—the body’s pre-reflective capacity to orient itself meaningfully in space—illuminates why sacred architecture and sacred geography are so central to religious life: they are the material infrastructure of embodied piety.
Margaret Gilbert and Collective Intentionality
Merleau-Ponty helps us see that piety is embodied and worldly, yet irreducibly social. Here, Margaret Gilbert’s work on collective intentionality provides a crucial supplement. In On Social Facts (1989), Gilbert argued that collective intentionality—the “we” of shared commitments—cannot be reduced to a mere aggregation of individual intentions. When two people walk together, their joint activity is constituted by a mutual commitment that creates obligations and expectations not reducible to individual states of mind. Religious worship is paradigmatically such a collective activity. When a congregation prays together, when a Javanese village performs a slametan communal meal, the piety involved is not simply the sum of individual pieties. It is a collectively constituted piety—a shared orientation toward the sacred that arises through joint commitment and mutual recognition. Gilbert’s framework thus allows us to speak of piety as something objective in a robust sense: it is not merely “in my head”. Still, it is constituted by a community's intersubjective commitments.
The Sacred Landscape of Southeast Asia: Religious Layering and Spatial Consensus
Perhaps the most striking evidence for the objective, externalized, and trans-traditional character of piety comes from the sacred landscape of Southeast Asia itself. The region’s history is not primarily a story of “conquest and replacement” but rather one of what we might call “continuity of sanctity”—a pattern in which physical locations remain holy even as the theological framework inhabiting them shifts. The landscape becomes a palimpsest of devotion, each layer acknowledging and building upon what came before. This pattern of religious layering and spatial consensus unfolds across three broad historical phases.
Pre-Colonial Hybridity: Shared Sacred Landscapes. In the classical era, the boundaries between Shaivism and Mahayana Buddhism were remarkably porous across the region. The Prambanan plain (Dataran Kewu) in Central Java offers the most vivid illustration. Candi Prambanan, the greatest Hindu temple of ancient Java, was built from around 850 CE by Rakai Pikatan of the Sanjaya dynasty and later expanded by King Lokapala and Balitung Maha Sambu. Just 800 meters to the north stands Candi Sewu, a massive Buddhist complex inaugurated in 782 CE during the reign of Rakai Panangkaran of the Shailendra dynasty. According to the Kelurak and Manjusrigrha inscriptions, Candi Sewu’s original name was Prasada Vajrasana Manjusrigrha—the House of the Bodhisattva Manjusri. The two dynasties were not merely rivals but were bound by marriage: Rakai Pikatan, the Hindu king who built Prambanan, was married to Pramodhawardhani, a Buddhist princess of the Shailendra line. She was credited with the inauguration of Borobudur and the construction of several Buddhist temples in the Prambanan plain, including the guardian temples (perwara) at Sewu, Plaosan, and Sajiwan. What is remarkable is that the Hindu Sanjayas did not harm the older Buddhist monuments of the Shailendras. Their ambition appears to have been competitive rather than destructive—to match and surpass the Buddhist edifices, not to erase them. The result is a shared sacred landscape in which Hindu and Buddhist complexes stand side by side, built by intermarried dynasties, within a single ritual territory. The coexistence of Prambanan and Sewu, with the additional presence of Candi Lumbung, Bubrah, Plaosan, and Ratu Boko in the surrounding area, demonstrates that religious pluralism was literally built into the landscape of ninth-century Java.
A parallel dynamic is visible at Angkor in Cambodia. Angkor Wat, constructed in the early twelfth century by King Suryavarman II as a Hindu temple dedicated to Vishnu, was gradually transformed into a Theravada Buddhist site by the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The transformation was so seamless that original Hindu deities were often reinterpreted as Buddhist protectors. The central prang (tower) representing Mount Meru—the cosmic axis in both Hindu and Buddhist cosmology—required no alteration because its symbolism was shared across traditions. Similarly, at Wat Chaiwatthanaram in Ayutthaya, Thailand, King Prasat Thong built a Buddhist temple that heavily incorporated Khmer Hindu cosmological architecture. These are not cases of violent replacement but of what O.W. Wolters called “localization”: the creative adaptation of sacred forms to new devotional content, in which the accumulated piety of a site is recognized and honored even as its theological framework changes.
The Islamic Transition: Architectural Continuity and Inculturation. As Islam spread through the Malay Archipelago from roughly the thirteenth century onward, early mosques typically drew on the foundations and aesthetic vocabulary of the preceding Hindu-Buddhist (Majapahit) era—a deliberate strategy to foster a sense of cultural belonging and ease the community’s transition from one form of piety to another. The Menara Kudus Mosque in Central Java, founded in 1549 CE by Ja’far Shodiq (Sunan Kudus, one of the nine Islamic saints of Java), is the most striking example. Its minaret is a red-brick structure that closely resembles a Majapahit-era Hindu-Javanese candi, in the form of Candi Kidal near Malang in East Java. The mosque compound is entered through a candi bentar (split gateway) and kori agung (roofed gateway)—architectural forms directly inherited from pre-Islamic Javanese sacred architecture. The minaret houses a large skin drum (bedug) used to summon the faithful to prayer, elevated in a pavilion that echoes the Balinese Hindu kul-kul signal tower. The mosque’s tiered roof resembles the mythical Hindu mountain Meru. As scholars have noted, this architectural continuity was not accidental but a deliberate act of inculturation by Sunan Kudus, who sought to make the Kudus community comfortable worshipping in a mosque that retained the visual grammar of their previous religion. Sunan Kudus even issued a fatwa prohibiting the slaughter of cows during Idul Adha out of respect for the Hindu community that was converting to Islam—a remarkable act of interreligious sensitivity that extended from architecture to ritual practice.
A similar logic governs the Great Mosque of Demak in Central Java, traditionally regarded as the oldest mosque on the island. Its tiered tajug roof derives directly from pre-Islamic Indonesian temple architecture, and the eight pillars inside the mosque are said to have been donated by various Majapahit-linked figures—literally building the new faith upon the structural remnants of the old. The Wali Sanga, the nine saints of Javanese Islam, deliberately adopted pre-Islamic architectural forms to convey that the piety of Islam was continuous with, rather than opposed to, the piety that preceded it. The physical remnants—bricks, gateways, roof forms—were preserved as material bridges between one form of collective devotion and another.
Post-Colonial Dialogic Space: Intentional Coexistence. In the modern era, the pattern of spatial consensus has evolved from organic layering and inculturation into deliberate dialogic juxtaposition, in which houses of worship from different traditions are intentionally placed in proximity to symbolize national unity and shared devotion. The most architecturally and politically deliberate modern example is the positioning of the Istiqlal Mosque and Jakarta Cathedral in the Indonesian capital. The Istiqlal Mosque, the largest mosque in Southeast Asia with a capacity of over 120,000 worshippers, was built directly across the street from the neo-Gothic Jakarta Cathedral (consecrated in 1901). This placement was not coincidental. President Sukarno, who personally supervised the mosque’s construction from 1961 onward, explicitly insisted that the national mosque be located near the Cathedral and Immanuel Church to symbolize religious harmony and tolerance, as promoted by Pancasila, Indonesia’s state philosophy. The mosque was designed by Friedrich Silaban, a Christian Protestant architect from North Sumatra—a fact that itself embodies the cross-religious cooperation Sukarno envisioned. In practice, the two institutions share parking lots during major holidays: the mosque’s lot is used by Christians during Christmas and Easter, and Muslims use the cathedral’s lot during Eid prayers. In 2020, a “Tunnel of Friendship” (Terowongan Silaturahmi) connecting the two compounds was inaugurated, physically linking mosque and cathedral underground. In 2024, Pope Francis visited the Istiqlal Mosque. He signed the Istiqlal Declaration on religious moderation alongside Grand Imam Nasaruddin Umar—a gesture that recognized the mosque as concrete proof of Indonesia's religious moderation.
Similar patterns of spatial dialogue, though less architecturally deliberate, are visible elsewhere in the region. In Yangon, Myanmar, the ancient Shwedagon Pagoda and the colonial-era St. Mary’s Cathedral occupy the same central urban district, maintaining a pluralistic spiritual skyline in which Buddhist and Christian sacred structures coexist within a shared civic space. In the Philippines, some early Spanish colonial churches were built atop or adjacent to indigenous sacred groves and spirit-houses, redirecting what might be called the local “piety of place” toward the Catholic altar. While the colonial context introduces dynamics of power and imposition absent from the more consensual Javanese examples, the underlying spatial logic—that a place already invested with devotional energy becomes the site for a new institutional form of worship—remains consistent. In Bali, Pura Tanah Lot, a Hindu sea temple, is traditionally associated with the blessing of Dang Hyang Nirartha, a figure whom local tradition sometimes identifies as a Muslim sage, suggesting that even the founding narratives of sacred sites in the region encode a memory of cross-religious encounter.
What makes the Southeast Asian pattern distinctive, compared to analogous phenomena elsewhere in the world (the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the Mezquita of Cordoba, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem), is not merely that sacred-site transfers occur, but that they occur with such frequency, such relative amicability, and such deep cultural acceptance. The region’s cultures, shaped by centuries of maritime trade, dynastic intermarriage, and cosmopolitan encounter, developed what might be called a “grammar of spatial consensus”—an implicit understanding that the sanctity of a place belongs to no single tradition but to the human community that has invested its piety there over time.
These three phases—pre-colonial hybridity, Islamic-era inculturation, and post-colonial dialogic space—constitute a regional pattern of remarkable consistency. In each era, the mechanism differs (shared patronage, architectural continuity, deliberate juxtaposition). Still, the underlying logic is the same: the piety invested in a sacred place is recognized as transcending the boundaries of any single institutional form. The sanctity of the site is not erased when the theological framework changes; it is translated, accumulated, and honored. This pattern is not adequately explained by theological or doctrinal analysis alone; it requires an account of piety as an objective, trans-traditional, and materially embodied reality.
4. Integrating the Dimensions: Reiner Keller’s Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse
The foregoing sections have established that piety is (a) a common experiential ground across major religions, (b) embodied and worldly rather than purely subjective, and (c) collectively constituted and historically durable. But a further problem remains: how do we integrate the experiential and affective dimensions of religion with its political and institutional dimensions? Piety may be the heart of religion, but religion as we encounter it in history is never just piety; it is also law, governance, hierarchy, authority, territorial jurisdiction, taxation, education, and often warfare. The challenge is to connect the inner devotional core with the outer political-institutional shell without reducing one to the other.
Here, Reiner Keller's work offers a valuable analytical resource. Keller’s Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (Wissenssoziologische Diskursanalyse, or SKAD), first elaborated in his 2005 work and subsequently developed in numerous publications, synthesizes elements from Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s sociology of knowledge, and the symbolic interactionism of the pragmatist tradition. SKAD is designed to analyze how knowledge—including experiential, affective, and normative knowledge—is produced, circulated, institutionalized, and transformed through discursive practices embedded in specific social fields and power relations.
What makes SKAD particularly useful for the study of religion is its refusal to separate meaning from power. Unlike purely hermeneutical approaches that focus on the experiential meaning of religious symbols, and unlike purely Foucauldian approaches that reduce meaning to an effect of power, SKAD insists that meaning and power are co-constitutive. Discourses simultaneously produce experiential meaning (what it feels like to be pious, what the sacred means) and institutional reality (who has authority, how resources are distributed, how boundaries are drawn). This dual character maps directly onto the dual character of religion: religion is both a field of lived devotional experience and a field of institutional power, and these two dimensions are constitutively, not accidentally, related.
Keller’s concept of the dispositif—borrowed from Foucault but given a more knowledge-sociological inflection—is especially helpful. A dispositif, in Keller’s usage, is the ensemble of discourses, practices, material arrangements, and institutional structures through which a particular domain of knowledge-power is organized. Applied to religion, a religious dispositif would include not only doctrines and theological texts but also liturgical practices, sacred spaces, legal codes, educational institutions, patterns of authority, material culture, and the bodily habits and affective dispositions of practitioners. The concept allows us to see religion as a complex, multi-layered phenomenon in which experiential, normative, and political elements are woven together.
For Southeast Asian religions, SKAD’s sensitivity to the co-constitution of meaning and power is particularly illuminating. Consider the historical role of the Theravada Buddhist sangha in mainland Southeast Asian polities. The sangha was not merely a community of individual meditators; it was an institutional apparatus that provided legitimacy to kings (who gained merit by supporting monks), education to the populace (monasteries were the primary schools), and moral regulation to society (the Vinaya code established behavioral norms). The piety of individual monks and laypeople was inseparable from the political structures that sustained and were sustained by that piety. Similarly, in the Islamic sultanates of the Malay world, the pesantren was simultaneously a site of devotional formation, intellectual cultivation, and political socialization. The kiai who led the pesantren was at once a spiritual guide, an educator, a community leader, and a political figure. To separate the “religious” from the “political” dimensions of such institutions would be to misunderstand them fundamentally.
SKAD thus provides the analytical framework we need to integrate the experiential and political dimensions of religion. It does so by treating religion as a discursive field in which piety and institution are co-constitutive rather than opposed. With this framework in hand, we can now formulate a more precise definition.
It is worth noting how SKAD resolves the impasses created by the definitional traditions surveyed in the introduction. Essentialist definitions, by focusing exclusively on inner experience, cannot account for the political and institutional dimensions of religion. Functionalist definitions, by reducing religion to social utility, cannot account for its experiential intensity and its claim to transcendence. Critical-redescriptive definitions, by dissolving religion into power, cannot account for the genuine devotional commitments that motivate billions of people. SKAD, by insisting on the co-constitution of meaning and power—of experience and institution—provides a framework that holds all these dimensions together. The experiential is always already institutional, and the institutional is always already experiential. Piety does not exist in a vacuum; it is always embedded in structures of authority, material infrastructure, and social relations. Conversely, those structures are not mere machinery; they are animated and sustained by the devotional commitments of the people who inhabit them. This mutual constitution is precisely what the concept of “institutionalization of piety” is designed to capture.
5. Religion as Institutionalization of Piety: Substantiation, Habituation, Objectification, Sedimentation
Drawing together the threads of the preceding analysis, this essay proposes the following definition: religion is the institutionalization of piety. By “institutionalization,” I mean not the narrow sociological sense of bureaucratization, but the broader sense developed by Berger and Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality (1966): the processes by which subjective meanings become objective social realities. The “institutionalization of piety” thus refers to the processes by which the deeply personal, embodied, and affective orientation toward the sacred becomes a durable, shared, structured, and self-reproducing social reality. This process unfolds through four interrelated moments.
Substantiation
The first moment is substantiation: the process by which piety acquires substance, content, and form. Piety, as a basic human orientation toward the sacred, is initially diffuse and pre-articulate—a felt sense of awe, gratitude, dependence, or love in the face of that which transcends ordinary experience. In Rudolf Otto’s language, it begins as a numinous experience not yet articulated in concepts or narratives. Through the creative activity of prophets, sages, poets, and communities, the numinous experience is given specific content: narratives about the divine, cosmological frameworks, moral codes, ritual practices, and aesthetic forms. The Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, the Qur’an’s recitation of divine attributes, the Upanishads’ articulation of Brahman, and the Confucian codification of li—all represent moments of substantiation.
Substantiation is not a one-time event. It is an ongoing process of creative articulation and re-articulation. In Southeast Asian history, the localization of Indian religions provides vivid examples. When Hinduism and Buddhism arrived in the Malay Archipelago and mainland Indochina, they were substantiated anew through encounters with local cosmologies, spirit beliefs, and aesthetic traditions. The result was not a diluted version of Indian religion but a genuinely new substantiation of piety—Javanese Hinduism, Thai Theravada, Vietnamese Mahayana—each with its own distinctive content and texture. The process continues in the contemporary era: the global Islamic revival has prompted new substantiations of Muslim piety across Southeast Asia, just as the charismatic Christian movement has generated new substantiations of Christian devotion in the Philippines and Indonesia. Each new substantiation draws on the numinous experience that is piety’s core, but gives it fresh doctrinal, ritual, and aesthetic form appropriate to its time and place.
Philosophically, substantiation corresponds to what phenomenologists call the “constitution” of meaning—the process by which raw experience is shaped into determinate, communicable, and sharable content. Husserl’s concept of Sinngebung (meaning-bestowing) captures this dynamic: consciousness does not passively receive meaning but actively constitutes it. In religious terms, substantiation is the collective Sinngebung through which communities give determinate form to their encounter with the sacred.
Habituation
The second moment is habituation: the process by which substantiated piety becomes habitual—a matter of embodied routine, practical competence, and unreflective know-how. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, we can understand habituation as the process by which the body “learns” piety—not merely memorizes doctrines but acquires the motor skills, perceptual dispositions, and affective attunements that constitute religious practice. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus captures this process well: a set of durable, transposable dispositions that generate and organize practices and representations.
In Southeast Asian contexts, habituation is strikingly visible. In rural Thailand, the habit of offering food to monks each morning structures the entire day: one rises before dawn, prepares the offering, waits by the road, makes the offering in silence, and then begins the day’s work. In Java, the slametan communal ritual meal is so habituated that it functions as a basic unit of social life. Saba Mahmood’s landmark study, Politics of Piety (2005), showed how Egyptian women in the Islamic revival understood piety precisely as a form of habituation—a disciplined cultivation of moral dispositions through repeated practice. Her insight applies equally to Southeast Asian contexts, where daily prayers, seasonal rituals, and life-cycle ceremonies constitute the rhythmic infrastructure of habituated piety.
Habituation is also the mechanism through which religious pluralism becomes livable in practice. In a Javanese village where the call to prayer sounds from the mosque while incense rises from a Hindu-Javanese kejawen ceremony next door, the coexistence of traditions is not an intellectual puzzle to be solved but a habituated reality—something the body knows how to navigate without theoretical deliberation. The capacity for interreligious tolerance, so often attributed to abstract philosophical commitments, is perhaps more accurately understood as a deeply habituated practical skill, passed down through generations of bodily practice in shared space.
Objectification
The third moment is objectification: the process by which habituated piety becomes externalized in durable material and institutional forms that exist independently of any particular individual’s subjective experience. The construction of a temple, the codification of a legal system, the establishment of a monastic order, the creation of a canon of sacred texts—all are acts of objectification through which piety is given a material and institutional existence that can persist across generations.
This is precisely what we observed in the sacred landscape of Southeast Asia. When the Shailendra dynasty built Borobudur in the ninth century, they were objectifying their community’s piety in stone—creating a material structure that would continue to embody and transmit Buddhist devotion long after the builders were gone. When the Javanese ulama established the pesantren system, they were objectifying Muslim piety in an institutional form that would reproduce itself for centuries. When Sunan Kudus built his mosque with Hindu-Javanese candi forms, he was objectifying a piety that acknowledged and incorporated the devotional heritage of the community’s past. These objectified forms take on a life of their own; they become part of the taken-for-granted social world that subsequent generations encounter as a given reality. A child born in a village with a mosque or a temple does not first develop piety and then seek out an institution to express it; the child encounters the objectified piety of the built environment from birth and is shaped by it from the beginning.
The concept of objectification also helps explain the phenomenon of sacred-site transfer that we documented in Section 3. When a Hindu temple becomes a Buddhist monastery, or when a Majapahit-era candi form is incorporated into an Islamic mosque, what is recognized is precisely the objectified piety of the earlier tradition—the sanctity invested in material form. The new tradition does not need to start from zero, building piety from scratch on barren ground; it inherits the accumulated objectified piety of the site and translates it into its own devotional idiom. This is why sacred sites in Southeast Asia tend to accumulate rather than replace religious meanings: each new institutional form builds upon the objectified piety of its predecessors.
Sedimentation
The fourth and final moment is sedimentation: the process by which objectified piety accumulates in layers over time, creating a dense, stratified cultural deposit that Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann called the “stock of knowledge.” Sedimentation is what gives religious traditions their depth, their historical weight, and their sense of antiquity and authority. A tradition that has undergone centuries of sedimentation is experienced by its adherents not as an arbitrary human construction but as a solid, weighty, given reality—something that was here before them and will be here after them.
Southeast Asia offers an extraordinary laboratory for observing sedimentation. The sacred landscapes of the region are stratified geologically: layers of animistic, Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, Christian, and modern devotion have accumulated over centuries, each layer partially visible beneath the next. The Prambanan plain, with its Hindu and Buddhist temples standing side by side from the ninth century, represents one stratum. The mosque of Demak, built upon Majapahit structural remnants, represents another. The Istiqlal-Cathedral complex, with its Tunnel of Friendship linking two faiths underground, represents the most recent layer. The syncretic traditions of Javanese kejawen, Balinese Agama Hindu, and Vietnamese Tam Giao (the simultaneous practice of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism) are all products of centuries of sedimentation in which multiple layers of piety have been deposited, compressed, and fused into complex cultural formations.
Through these four processes—substantiation, habituation, objectification, and sedimentation—piety becomes religion. What begins as a personal, embodied orientation toward the sacred becomes a shared, structured, materially embedded, and historically deep social reality. Religion, in this definition, is not an ethereal set of beliefs floating above the social world; nor is it merely a tool of political power with a devotional veneer. It is the living, layered, institutionalized expression of humanity’s most fundamental orientation toward the sacred.
6. Conclusion: Toward an Integrative Understanding
This essay has proposed that religion be redefined as the institutionalization of piety. This redefinition offers two principal clarifications.
First, it integrates the normative and empirical dimensions of religion that have been fragmented across academic disciplines and definitional traditions. Essentialist definitions capture piety’s experiential core but neglect its social and political dimensions. Functionalist definitions illuminate religion’s social utility but miss what makes it distinctively sacred. Polythetic definitions catalogue features without specifying what holds them together. Critical-redescriptive definitions powerfully expose religion’s entanglement with power but dissolve the phenomenon into discourse without offering a reconstructive alternative. By locating piety—a concept with both normative and experiential content—at the center of the definition, and by describing institutionalization as the multi-layered process through which piety becomes a durable social reality, this essay bridges these gaps. It takes seriously the experiential dimensions that essentialist approaches prioritize, the social and political dimensions that functionalist and critical approaches emphasize, and the material and institutional dimensions that polythetic models catalogue—holding all these together in a single, coherent framework.
Second, this redefinition illuminates the distinctive characteristics of religious life in Southeast Asia. The relatively peaceful coexistence of multiple religious traditions in the region becomes more intelligible when we recognize that what different traditions share is not a common theology or a common institutional structure but a common orientation—piety—that can be recognized and honored across tradition boundaries. The pre-colonial hybridity of the Prambanan plain, the inculturation of the Menara Kudus and the Great Mosque of Demak, and the post-colonial dialogic space of the Istiqlal-Cathedral complex all point to a regional culture in which piety is understood as transcending the boundaries of any single institutional form. Southeast Asian cultures, shaped by what Wolters called “localization,” have developed a distinctive capacity for recognizing and honoring piety across tradition boundaries—a capacity grounded not in indifference to religious difference but in a deep, embodied, collectively constituted sense that the sacred, however differently named and worshipped, is ultimately one.
This is not to deny the reality of religious conflict, exclusivism, or intolerance—in Southeast Asia or anywhere else. It is to insist that such phenomena are distortions of religion’s fundamental orientation, not its essence. When religion becomes a marker of ethnic or political identity primarily, when its institutional structures become instruments of domination rather than vehicles of devotion, when its sedimented traditions become fossilized rather than living, it has drifted from its constitutive core. The redefinition proposed here, by keeping piety at the center, provides a critical standard against which such distortions can be measured and, perhaps, corrected.
The Southeast Asian experience reminds us that the default condition of religion—the ground from which all its institutional expressions grow—is not doctrinal rigidity, institutional hierarchy, or political power, but the humble, embodied, shared, and always-renewable human orientation toward the sacred that we call piety. A study of religion that begins from this recognition will be better equipped to understand not only the religions of Southeast Asia but the phenomenon of religion itself.
There is, finally, a broader implication for the academic study of religion. The definitional debates surveyed in the introduction—between essentialists and functionalists, between universalists and constructivists—have often been framed as irreconcilable oppositions. This essay suggests that the opposition is unnecessary. Essentialist and phenomenological approaches are right that religion involves a distinctive experiential core; they mistake the part for the whole. Functionalist and sociological approaches are right that religion is embedded in social structures and power relations; they miss the experiential engine that drives those structures. Critical and redescriptive approaches are right that the category of “religion” has been shaped by Western colonial history; they go too far in concluding that religion is therefore nothing but a scholarly or political construct. The concept of “institutionalization of piety” holds all these insights together: piety provides the experiential and normative core (satisfying the essentialists), institutionalization describes the social, material, and political processes through which that core becomes durable structure (satisfying the functionalists and sociologists), and the whole definition is grounded in non-Western (specifically Southeast Asian) historical experience (addressing the constructivist critique of Eurocentrism). If religion is the institutionalization of piety, then every tradition of inquiry into religion has been partially right—and this definition shows how their partial truths fit together.
Whether this definition proves useful beyond the Southeast Asian context from which it emerges is, of course, an empirical question that future research must address. But if the argument of this essay is sound—that piety is the common experiential ground of the world’s religions, that it is embodied, collective, and objective, that it becomes religion through the processes of substantiation, habituation, objectification, and sedimentation—then it should, in principle, illuminate religious life wherever it is found. The Southeast Asian vantage point, far from being parochial, may offer a more universal perspective on religion than the Western European vantage point from which the concept has traditionally been theorized. That, at any rate, is the wager of this essay.
Bibliography
Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Balagangadhara, S.N. “The Heathen in His Blindness...”: Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion. Leiden: Brill, 1994.
Bellah, Robert N. Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Coedes, George. The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. Translated by Susan Brown Cowing. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1968.
Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Karen Fields. New York: Free Press, 1995 [1912].
Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Translated by Willard R. Trask. New York: Harcourt, 1959.
Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. Translated by Rosemary Sheed. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1958.
Fitzgerald, Timothy. The Ideology of Religious Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Geertz, Clifford. The Religion of Java. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
Gilbert, Margaret. On Social Facts. London: Routledge, 1989.
Gilbert, Margaret. Joint Commitment: How We Make the Social World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962 [1927].
Husserl, Edmund. Ideas About a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book. Translated by F. Kersten. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982 [1913].
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York: Longmans, Green, 1902.
Keller, Reiner. Wissenssoziologische Diskursanalyse: Grundlegung eines Forschungsprogramms. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2005.
Keller, Reiner. “The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD).” Human Studies 34, no. 1 (2011): 43–65.
Keller, Reiner. Doing Discourse Research: An Introduction for Social Scientists. Translated by Bryan Jenner. London: Sage, 2013.
Kempis, Thomas A. The Imitation of Christ. Translated by Aloysius Croft and Harold Bolton. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003 [c. 1418–1427].
Lieberman, Victor. Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003–2009.
Lincoln, Bruce. Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
McCutcheon, Russell T. Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald Landes. London: Routledge, 2012 [1945].
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968.
Mus, Paul. India Seen from the East: Indian and Indigenous Cults in Champa. Translated by I.W. Mabbett and D.P. Chandler. Melbourne: Monash University, 1975.
Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine. Translated by John W. Harvey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958 [1917].
Ramanujan, A.K. “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation.” In Many Ramayanas, edited by Paula Richman, 22–49. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Reid, Anthony. Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988–1993.
Ricklefs, M.C. Mystic Synthesis in Java: A History of Islamization from the Fourteenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries. Norwalk, CT: EastBridge, 2006.
Scheler, Max. On the Eternal in Man. Translated by Bernard Noble. London: SCM Press, 1960 [1921].
Schutz, Alfred, and Thomas Luckmann. The Structures of the Life-World. 2 vols. Translated by Richard M. Zaner and H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973–1989.
Smart, Ninian. Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Smith, Jonathan Z. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. The Meaning and End of Religion. New York: Macmillan, 1963.
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
van der Leeuw, Gerardus. Religion in Essence and Manifestation. Translated by J.E. Turner. London: Allen & Unwin, 1938.
Wolters, O.W. History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives. Rev. ed. Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1999.
Woodward, Mark R. Islam in Java: Normative Piety and Mysticism in the Sultanate of Yogyakarta. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989.