It is clear that there are implications for our studies if we presume religion to be an inner trait, sentiment, belief, or experience that can only be expressed publicly in some secondary manner. For in this case, the actual nature of religion always eludes the observer's grasp – since they are left with what some have called its secondary aspects or its externals – making the academic study of religion an impossibility. Implicit here is the distinction between how participants understand this thing we call religion and how non-participants understand it, suggesting that in order to study religion we need to develop some tools to distinguish these two viewpoints from each other.

The commonly described distinction between studying about religion and studies that are religious (or theological) brings to mind what is commonly called the insider/outsider problem – an issue present in Andrew Scott Waugh's efforts to use only local names for the mountains he identified during his early mapping of India (although, in naming Peak 15 after Colonel Everest, he hardly followed his own rule). Because much of the original work on the insider/outsider problem was done in fields outside the academic study of religion, it is only fitting to open a discussion of the insider/outsider problem with reference to the work carried out in the field of Linguistics.

From linguists, anthropologists and then scholars of religion borrowed two technical terms – emic and etic.