 A watershed text for the reflexive turn regarding the concept religion is Jonathan Z. Smith’s Imagining Religion (1982). Smith engages simultaneously in comparing religions and in analyzing the scholarly practice of comparison. A central theme of his essays is that the concept religion (and subcategories such as world religions, Abrahamic faiths, or nonliterate traditions) are not scientific terms but often reflect the unrecognized biases of those who use these concepts to sort their world into those who are or are not “like  us”.[16]  Smith shows that, again and again, the concept religion was shaped by implicit Protestant assumptions, if not explicit Protestant apologetics. In the short preface to that book, Smith famously says,