Max Muller Proposes a Science of Religion

Religious studies describes and compares religious traditions as historical and cultural phenomena, on terms that do not depend on any one tradition's own theological claims being true, treating religion itself as a subject that can be studied the way any other human institution is studied. The philologist Friedrich Max Muller gave the discipline its founding statement in his 1873 book Introduction to the Science of Religion, based on lectures delivered at the Royal Institution, arguing for a comparative science of religion that would study all traditions by the same method rather than treating one as normative theology and the rest as objects of missionary or antiquarian curiosity.

Religious studies is the disciplinary home the atlas itself works within, and Muller's founding move, describing what a tradition holds and practices without asserting or denying its doctrinal claims, is the same descriptive stance the atlas takes toward every tradition it covers. The discipline supplies the comparative vocabulary, doctrine, practice, institution, cosmology, that lets traditions with no shared theological ground still be described and compared on the same terms, a debt every comparison the atlas draws between two otherwise unrelated traditions ultimately owes to Muller's original proposal.