There is an important connection between religion and race which has gone largely unexplored in the current literature of race; that being the place of race as a grounding reality for the current understanding of religion. With Modern Religion, Modern Race Theodore Vial seeks to explore this connection in a novel way. Where most literature approaches the matter from the implicit vantage point of the dominant players in the transatlantic slave trade (England, Holland, Spain and Portugal), thereby privileging racial discourses that ask how religion shapes the construction of the idea of race, this book takes as its starting point an analysis of how the interplay of race and religion also shapes the understanding of religion as an object of study. The work does so by centring its exploration in the work of German intellectuals generally understood to be the founders of the modern study of religion such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schleiermacher. With this turn, Vial seeks to offer an account of religious studies, as such, which understands its deep implication in the formation of the particular hierarchies of power in modernity which are grounded in notions of race. He believes this is an important corrective because much of the literature about these thinkers and their project takes insufficient notice of the way their accounts of religion as a conceptuality reify the notions of inherence and immutability which make race so intractable.

Vial is most interested in demonstrating the ways Kant and Schleiermacher's conceptual location of religion in the spirit essentialises it in such a way that it becomes a constitutive element in the making and interpretation of peoples. Religious practice then becomes a display of what is most inherently true of a people or culture. Given that this narration of the import of religion is unfolding at the historical moment in which western hegemony is moving towards its zenith, it is not surprising that the religion which becomes the measure is that of western Europe (more specifically, western Protestantism on Vial's account). In this schema religion becomes not just the inherent feature of peoples and cultures but also what will become the dominant sense-making category of modernity – race. Religion and race in this way become the bases which underlie the sorts of essentialisation upon which civilisational hierarchies are built. The importance of this observation becomes clear when we recall that the rationalisations for the colonial projects underway in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have these hierarchies at their centre. What Vial then helps us see is that very way ‘religious studies’ is conceived in the modern academy implicates it as a rationalising discourse for the intellectual superstructure of Western dominance of the world during the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Were I to identify one shortcoming of the work, it would be a common oversight in explorations of race and culture in modernity: namely, inadequate notice of the implicit agreements in the construction of historical framing of human history. Central to the assumptions of Kant, Schleiermacher and their contemporaries was that the biblical framing of history was accurate. So, the period of human development was roughly 7,000 or so years. We can lose sight of this because of intellectual challenges to the veracity of miracle stories emerging during the period. This truncated understanding of human history facilitated a belief that races and cultures existed contemporaneously as they had historically. Thus, the ‘current state’ of races and cultures is a true reflection of their essential character. Notice of these assumptions would have invited us into additional ways of understanding the mutually essentialising character of religion and race as discourses in modernity.

The intervention Modern Religion, Modern Race makes is a re-evaluation of the very foundation of religious studies, not only as a discipline but also as a cultural force in the shaping of the modern world. Perhaps most important, Theodore Vial provides a significant way to interpret what from my perspective is the most pernicious and enduring element of racial discourse in modernity: that the idea of races, cultures and religions are essentially the same through time and not reactive to the changing circumstances of human history. Challenging this falsehood is critical at this historical moment in which stultified caricatures of religion as a proxy for race, and vice versa, are being deployed in the global arena in ways which threaten the very existence of our species.