Chapter 7 Religion, Religions, and Diaspora Seán McLoughlin Religions have a very significant place in the history of diaspora and transnational- ism, whether in terms of the prototypical Babylonian exile of the Jews and their desire to return to Zion, or the universal horizons of Christian missionaries, Sufi orders, and Buddhist monks whose networks extended empires of faith across land and sea. However, across the contemporary Western academy “religion” is a prob- lematic category. From the seventeenth century, early modern Europe gradually rationalized, compartmentalized, and domesticated religion, segregating it from secular power in line with the interests of emergent nation-states (Asad 1993). A substantive definition of “natural religion” also opened the way for comparison of a presumed universal in all societies, an autonomous and bounded essence “in some timeless realm (perhaps a realm of pure doctrine) outside of wider cultural patterns and history” (Flood 1999: 3). Indeed, as part of colonial projects, modern European models of religion were also globalized, with new religious elites in Asia, Africa, and beyond espousing reformed Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, and Buddhist neo-orthodoxies which mimicked Protestant Christianity. Perhaps for this reason, then, religion has often been a concept “set apart” in the arts, humanities and social sciences, and has certainly received much less theoretical attention in diaspora and transnational studies than the closely related notions of ethnicity, race, nation, and hybridity. While some anthropologists have made key interventions, important cultural theorists like Paul Gilroy have not generally been moved to explore religion further, though his examination of black popular culture as a source of redemption draws upon the quasi-theological language of transcend- ence, for example, when he invokes “the transvaluation of all values” (1993: 36) and A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism, First Edition. Edited by Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.