Those interpretations hinge on the translation of emotion into morality, aesthetic standards, beliefs, and rituals, all characteristic features of culture rationally structured and meaningfully arrayed. Such an approach is useful, and in some cases leads to important beachfronts in the exploration of religion as an emotional phenomenon. But, like Reddy’s French who were constrained in their emotional lives by a social discipline that rendered emo- tion as sentimentalism, scholarship in this area risks missing potentially key aspects of emotion in religion by construing the emotional lives of people as inherently meaningful simply because they are lived within recognizable com- munities in historically definable milieus