"Christians had severed the traditional bond between religion and a 'nation' or people. The ancients took for granted that religion was indissolubly linked to a particular city or people. Indeed, there was no term for religion in the sense we now use it to refer to the beliefs and practices of a specific group of people or of a voluntary association divorced from ethnic or national identity. The idea of an association of people bound together by a religious allegiance with its own traditions and beliefs, its own history, and its own way of life independent of a particular city or nation was foreign to the ancients. Religion belonged to a people, and it was bestowed on an individual by the people or nation from which one came in or in which one lived." - James C. Russell