The ‘hermeneutic of experience’ was soon adopted by a host of scholars interested in religion, the most influential being William James, and today many have a difficult time imagining what else religion might be about. Yet prior to Schleiermacher, insists Proudfoot, religion was simply not under- stood in such terms, and it is thus incumbent upon us to reject the perennialist hypothesis in so far as it anachronistically imposes the recent and ideologically laden notion of ‘religious experience’ on our interpretations of premodern phenomena