Scholarship in religion, including the history of religion, long has been focused on what certain words, texts, rituals, dress, foods, and feelings mean to persons. In that project, they have disclosed their collaboration with the presumption—underlying most Western scholar- ship about religion—that persons engage in religious activities because such activities are meaningful. But meaning, like emotion, is an ambiguous term, and especially so for modernity. Its invocation might have less to do with its adequacy as a category for sorting the experience of modernity than its reflec- tion of religiously grounded bias. Specifically, some scholars wonder whether the preoccupation with meaning is an artifact of Christianity and whether there are instances when we ought to set it aside as a prime criterion—as a