 Taking seriously the striking plurality of human forms of religious life leads to a second significant question. What theorizations of religion are most adequate for feminists to work with? Before this question can be addressed with all the philosophical rigor its complexity demands, feminists must face up to the fact that religion is a potent dimension of the lives and desires of contemporary women around the world; therefore, philosophizing it away as superstition, reactionary ideology, false consciousness, irrational belief, or premodern, outmoded hangover simply calls into question, not the phenomenon of religion, but the grasp of feminist philosophy itself on its subject matter. In our time, the elementary forms of religious life cannot be critiqued along the same old lines that Western secular modernity has taken for granted. In the past, Marxians and Freudians could provide theoretical fuel for the critique of religion for generations of readers, but their general theory of religion as a function of projection (of class interests or of the father-image) is severely outdated. Since we cannot divide reality into what is “really there” and what is “humanly projected”, and since there is no clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties that are “in us”, projection theories of religion (or of anything else) rest on a purely suppositional basis. They lack explanatory value.