Religion refers to human beings’ relation to that which they regard as holy, sacred, absolute, spiritual, divine, or worthy of especial reverence. It consists of beliefs, experiences, and institutions. The notion of religion is also reflected in human beings’ acclaim of the divine, their reverence for certain texts and persons, their rituals, their attitudes toward nature and humanity, their morality, their eschatology, their philosophies, and their conception of life after death.
Traditionally, scholars have classified societies in terms of the three religious dimensions of their cultures: beliefs, practices, and institutions. However, this approach tends to overlook the fact that a belief or practice can belong to more than one religion. The result is that the idea of religion becomes a sort of social taxon that merely classifies cultures rather than explaining how they differ from each other.
In the nineteenth century, a different approach to the study of religion was developed. Emile Durkheim defined religion as whatever system of practices unite a number of people into a single moral community (whether or not those practices involve belief in unusual realities). Paul Tillich followed suit with a definition that turns on the functional role that a form of life can play in a person’s life. Both these approaches, in defining religion substantively or functionally, treat it as an inevitable feature of all human cultures. Whether or not this is true, the concept is so widely used that it is important to examine its implications.