On Why We Actually Still Don’t Understand Religion

This essay traces the academic study of religion from Tylor’s animism through Durkheim, Otto, Freud, Malinowski, Geertz, and the cognitive science of religion, identifying a recurring structural pattern: each framework captures something real but is then used to explain everything, producing what the essay calls “the glide” — an unacknowledged shift between levels of analysis. Drawing on archaeological evidence from Göbekli Tepe, the Venus figurines, and the Lascaux caves, the essay argues that the problem of religion is larger and stranger than any single disciplinary framework has acknowledged.