Second, the Western conception of religion, born in the Enlightenment, has been shaped and reinforced by colonialism, conquest, and the idea of a non-Western "Other".
Long states, "While the reformist structure of the Enlightenment had mounted a polemic against the divisive meaning of religion in Western culture and set forth alternate meanings for the understanding of the human, the same ideological structures through various intellectual strategies paved the ground for historical evolutionary thinking, racial theories, and forms of color symbolism that made the economic and military conquest of various cultures and peoples justifiable and defensible".
[5] Religious scholars attempted empirical methodology based on Enlightenment principles of rationality but worked from upper-class, white, cisgender, heterosexual, male assumptions, which also implicitly located other peoples and religions as inferior.
Long points to the Enlightenment as the time in which "religion and cultures and peoples throughout the world were created anew through academic disciplinary orientations–they were signified".
[7] Such language functions to uphold the status quo and the primacy of white Western culture: "it exists primarily to keep the others in their place.
"[7] He describes how Black communities' criticism of the United States cultural system reflects both an internalizing and rejection of Western Enlightenment ideas.
Long claims that the creation of the category of religion was a result of colonization in efforts to deem the "other" people and culture as inferior outsiders.
In order to create these labels, "forms of evolutionary thinking… re-named and re-created 'others' within languages and categories that the colonizers could understand in a nefarious process of translation".
Long explains how describing the "primitives" as "others" provides a significance to the West by offering a civilization that can be contrasted to Western norms.
The term cargo cult was first coined by anthropologists studying South Pacific Island civilizations in the late nineteenth century.
When these "primitive" civilizations engaged in international trade with Western societies, modern technology and cultural imperialism were just some developments that had not made it to their communities yet.
Thus, as technology that allowed for efficient manufacturing processes was largely unknown to them, cargo cults were centered around the idea that the mass availability of goods and services was made possible through spiritual means.
The central belief system of cargo cults was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Western culture: they believed that these societies with an abundance of goods obtained them through deceit, malice, or even by mistake.
Some argued that, within this trade relationship, cargo cults were "portrayed as primitive peoples suffering from a grave misunderstanding of their role in systems of mass production, resource distribution, and Western commodity fetishism".