What Is Religion?
Religion is that which a person values highly enough to be willing to live by and even die for. It is also the primary source of value in human life. People can have faith in science or their family, but in fact there are few other sources of the sort of value that religion provides. It is the way that value is expressed and transmitted from one generation to another and it provides answers to questions of great importance.
Religions are systems for monitoring, coding, protecting, and transmitting information that has been tested and winnowed over time to have proven to be of a great deal of value. The information that is protected and transmitted may be in a wide range of forms: practical and ritual; experiential and emotional; narrative or mythical; doctrinal and philosophical; ethical and legal.
Religious information enables people to see their place in the world; to recognize who they are and why they are there, what is important to them and where they are going. It enables them to feel safe and secure. It provides them with meaning and purpose in their lives, a sense of order, and entertainment. It helps them to know what is right and wrong, and how to behave in the face of life’s challenges. It helps them to find comfort in times of distress and provide hope for the future.
People do things religiously: scrupulously, generously, ecstatically, sacrificially, prayerfully, puritanically, ritualistically, and in many other ways. They may do them in a variety of contexts: at home, at school, in the workplace, in the community, and on pilgrimage. They may do them privately or in groups and may do them with a mixture of fervor and irreverence. In this way they create worlds of confidence, worlds in which they can be sure they are doing the right thing and that they will ultimately succeed at what is most important to them.
A number of definitions of religion exist, and they have been described as monothetic and polythetic. Monothetic approaches tend to define religion in terms of inner mental states or in terms of disciplinary practices. Polythetic approaches, on the other hand, tend to treat religion as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon.
Edward Burnett Tylor, for example, defined religion in 1871 as “belief in spiritual beings”. Ninian Smart, in his book The World’s Religions, wrote that narrowing the definition of religion in this way would exclude a great deal of what was most significant and could lead us to overlook much that is valuable about it. It might be better to use a broader definition of religion such as that offered by Durkheim, which turns on the function of creating solidarity among people, or Paul Tillich’s functional approach which defines religion as whatever dominant concern serves to organize a person’s values, whether they involve belief in unusual realities or not. Alternatively, one might adopt Michel Foucault’s genealogical approach in which one defines religion as the totality of all the social and cultural structures that make up a particular system of belief and behavior.