Despite being a key concept throughout the history of the discipline, sociology's relationship with the category of religion is a complicated one. Although scholars often point to the theological and Eurocentric legacies embedded in the notion of religion, theoretical efforts often tend to focus on finding "less biased" ways to conceptualize it (epistemic dimension), while maintaining the assumption regarding some transhistorical essence called "religion" (ontic dimension) as unproblematic. To illustrate the limitations of this strategy, I examine some of the proposals whose explicit aim is to go beyond what is regarded as sociology's Eurocentric and Christian "default view" of religion. I argue that these attempts at revisions, while motivated by solid reasons concerning religion's legacy, amount to an exercise in "ontological gerrymandering" that reinforces Western intellectual (and political) hegemony. By selectively relativizing cultural perspectives while withholding the category of religion itself from historical considerations, this approach naturalizes the concept altogether rather than addressing its fundamental issues. To avoid the pitfalls associated with employing arbitrarily historicized concepts, I suggest that the field would benefit from an appreciation of the work done in the Critical Religion and Discursive Sociology of Religion frameworks. Sociologists who adopt a reflexive approach would be able to construe "religion" as a historically situated object rather than a tool of sociological inquiry, thus highlighting its unstable and contested uses and their political ramifications.