This article examines the claim, which several important scholars have seemed to endorse, that belief is a historically and culturally contingent mental state. This claim has radical implications, and I try to reconstruct the assumptions about belief that could motivate it and consider whether these assumptions are well founded. But their concern is often rather inchoate. Christianity is an enormously heterogeneous phenomenon.
It is also not clear what follows if the association between belief and religion is distinctively Christian, especially for the use of the concept in the study of non-Christian religions.
Christians have often foregrounded belief when judging whether someone counts as a genuine Christian. Yet it does not follow that non-Christians do not have beliefs, or that what people believe does not β to some degree at least β define them as the beings they are.
In addition to these specific problems we might ask a broader question about the historicity of belief. We are familiar with claims that particular psychological states are culturally specific and therefore historically contingent. Could this be true of belief? Several scholars have hinted at the possibility. These claims often appear alongside and not always clearly distinguished from other arguments that have more modest implications β for instance, that the emphasis we place on belief when thinking about religious life is unusual and culturally specific, an argument compatible with a universalist conception of belief.
But the claims are there, and they are, potentially, important enough to warrant careful assessment. My concern in this article is to determine whether a true and informative case can be made for them. There is therefore no anthropological or historical concept of belief. Over the course of this article I will suggest that scholars proposing the more ambitious arguments for the historical and cultural contingency of belief have been insufficiently attentive to this question, and that their arguments rest on misrepresentations of the meaning of belief ascriptions.
