Essentialism underwrites a great deal of religious anthropology directly: doctrines holding that human beings possess a fixed nature made in the image of God, that a particular deity has an essential nature shared identically across multiple persons, or that a soul retains its essential character across successive lives all depend on essentialism being true in at least some restricted domain, even where the wider metaphysical debate is never explicitly raised.
Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka Buddhism poses the position's sharpest rival, since sunyata denies precisely what essentialism affirms, that anything, including a person, possesses a fixed, independent, defining nature at all, treating even apparently stable kinds as dependently arising and therefore empty rather than essentially anything.
Nominalism presses a different, Western objection, denying not that things have stable natures in some loose sense but that general kinds themselves, humanity, redness, triangularity, are anything over and above the individual things we group under those labels using a shared name, a dispute that runs directly into the medieval problem of universals this atlas tracks under its own heading. Essentialism found an influential modern proponent well outside religion: Saul Kripke's 1970 lectures, published in 1980 as Naming and Necessity, revived the idea that objects and natural kinds have essential properties fixed by their origin or underlying structure, a technical philosophical argument that reopened serious debate on a question theology, in its own idiom, had never stopped asking.