Despite doubts that range from Sigmund Freud to modern psychologists, religion continues to play a vital role in the lives of a majority of the world’s population. Religions are characterized by engagement with postulated superhuman powers, involving complexes of prescribed practices for realizing human goods and avoiding evils.
Traditionally, scholars have analyzed the concept of Religion as a taxon, classifying groups of practices into a category-concept called “religion.” The most obvious examples are the so-called world religions, including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. Such approaches are called monothetic because they operate with the classical view that every instance of a concept will accurately be described by a single defining property.
Recent work, however, challenges this view. The most important of these developments is the recognition that many religious beliefs, experiences, and practices do not involve belief in a distinctive kind of reality. This shift toward a functional definition of religion echoes the work of Emile Durkheim, who defined religion as whatever system of practices unite a group into a moral community, whether or not those systems include belief in unusual realities.
Moreover, these functional definitions of religion mesh with research by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his former graduate student Jesse Graham that shows how religion co-evolved with morality to create the structures for binding people into large moral communities. Because of this, unlike some other types of social institutions that change quickly, most religions and religious/spiritual practices are viscous; they change at a slower pace and often retain older features while adding new ones.