Religion is a broad category that refers to many diverse belief systems and practices. It can include the worship of deities, adherence to particular rules of conduct and morality, the practice of rituals, and an emphasis on certain doctrinal beliefs. It can also refer to specific social behaviors, such as donating money to charity and attending church services. In its broader sense, religion is often thought to be an intangible force that affects people’s lives. However, there are several ways that scholars have tried to define it, and the debate continues over what exactly it means.
Some scholars take a functional approach, trying to understand religion in terms of its societal impact. Emile Durkheim, the first sociological theorist to study religion, argued that any system of beliefs and practices that generates community solidarity can be considered a religion. Others, like the American philosopher Paul Tillich, have used a similar definition: any system of beliefs and practices that organizes a person’s values and provides orientation in life can be called a religion.
More recently, there has been a shift toward a more reflective approach to the idea of religion. Theorists like Clifford Geertz have highlighted the way that some cultures construct concepts of reality in order to control their behavior and cope with life’s stresses. In this way, they have emphasized the social construction of what we think of as “religion.”
The more reflective approach to the concept of religion has led to a move toward polythetic definitions. These take the form of master lists of characteristics that can be found in any given religious phenomenon and claim that any behavior with a large enough number of these features is a religion. One such list, which is commonly referred to as the “prototype” for a religion, includes things such as prayer, attending church services, and the belief in a supreme being.
Another strategy is to look for family resemblances among different things that are called religions. For example, the English philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (see Wittgenstein, Ludwig ) suggested that the varying forms of things that are called games share only a limited number of crisscrossing and partially overlapping features — the kind of resemblance that family members display.
A third way of defining religion is to combine both the substantive and functional criteria: a belief system must have both a metaphysics and an axiology, or set of prescriptions for life, and its effects must be manifested in both a social context and in the lives of individual believers. This approach is favored by scholars such as Robert Schilbrack (see Schilbrack, Robert ).
In many cases, polythetic definitions of religion are being displaced by more monothetic or mixed approaches, based on the recognition that the word religion can mean either the prevailing social structure or the occurrence of transcendental beliefs. However, it is important to note that the emergence of the term religion has gone hand in hand with European colonialism, and there are scholars who have sought to resist its use as an object of cultural study and reclaim its power as an objectively meaningful concept.