Are you religious?

In an interesting essay reviewing a book about the role of "religion" in government, a few paragraphs explaining the original understanding of the word:

The English term “religion,” or the Latin religio, originally derives from the Latin verb religare, or “to bind again” (as in “ligation”). The noun religio, in the classical sense, was not conceived as a specific set of beliefs or propositional truth-claims among others. Rather, it was a sort of virtue or characteristic: one who is “religious” has the property of holding fast, or fidelity. That is why the term “religious life,” in the Middle Ages, was not a descriptor of one’s personal theological conviction. Rather, it referred to those who had bound themselves to a particular monastic or lay rule of life. In other words, almost everyone was Christian, but the phrase “the religious” referred to those who’d adopted a particular set of intense devotional practices.

On this older paradigm, individuals exemplifying the virtue of religio were those capable of seeing God as “what He is, namely the summit of all goodness, the truth of things, the light by which the mind operates” and so choosing to “sedulously revere Him in act, in goodness, in truthfulness of speech, in clarity of mind, in love,” as Wilfred Cantwell Smith notes. On this view, crucially, religion was not something other than natural; rather, it was a particular disposition toward the apex or limit condition of reality itself. “Since philosophia is the love and pursuit of truth and wisdom, and since truth and wisdom are, precisely, God, it follows that true philosophia and true religio are identical.” ....

“Religion” is not some zone of private belief or set of axiomatic commitments; rather, theology is the love and knowledge of God that orients the Christian way of life. It cannot be privatized, interiorized, or ever depoliticized. ....

John Ehrett, "The Problem with 'Religion'," Mere Orthodoxy, May 19, 2026.