David martin does not believe in “religion”; that is, he does not think that religious belief, practice and speech can be reduced to a neat corpus of essentials that can be treated as a discrete form of human activity. Those most guilty of doing this, in his eyes, are the eloquent anti-religious apologists of our time, determined to present religion as the sort of thing that can be isolated, categorised, judged and set aside, on the grounds of its supposed essential features (irrationality, intolerance, violence and so forth). For Martin, “religious” ways of speaking and behaving are varieties among others of the narratives we use to give shape to our common projects and identities. The idea that there is a myth-free, timeless, empirically grounded picture of reali