What Is Religion?

Is it a stupid question? Everybody already knows what religion is. But asking is not as stupid as it first appears, because defining religion is surprisingly difficult, culturally contingent, and closely tied to how human beings make sense of existence.

Why Is Our Definition Written This Way?

There is no single scholarly consensus on what constitutes a religion. The above definition merges classical views to capture two main ways religion is studied in sociology and anthropology. Here, we examine what religion purports to be and what it claims to accomplish through the perspectives of four highly respected scholars.

What Religion Is

“Organized system of beliefs … centered on the sacred …” This borrows from the sociologist Émile Durkheim. In his 1912 work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, he defined religion as a “unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things.” For Durkheim, the sacred is fundamentally social, not necessarily supernatural. It emerges from collective effervescence, the intense, contagious energy generated when human beings gather together in a group. Because the power of the group is so much greater than that of any individual, humans may project that social pressure outward, interpreting it as a divine or sacred force. For Durkheim, the sacred is empirically real; it is a disguised form of society itself.

“Transcendent, superempirical …” This draws on Max Weber, who examined the ways religious beliefs about unseen powers and extraordinary realities shape human action. His approach contrasts with Durkheim’s emphasis on religion's social origins by shifting attention toward subjective meaning and individual action.

Although they were contemporaries, are widely recognized as founders of modern sociology, and were aware of each other’s work, Weber and Durkheim never conducted a sustained public debate over their theories of religion. They provided two fundamentally different approaches to understanding religion, one emphasizing its social origins and functions, the other its subjective meaning and influence on human action.

Durkheim looked at religion from the outside in, examining how society produces sacred symbols and rituals. Weber looked at it from the inside out, examining how beliefs about unseen realities influence individual behavior and, in turn, the course of history.

What Religion Does

“Addresses ultimate concerns …” This terminology comes from the existential theologian Paul Tillich. Tillich described faith as the “state of being grasped by an ultimate concern,” a concern that addresses fundamental questions of purpose, meaning, and destiny.

“Origin, purpose, morality, suffering, death …” This reflects anthropological frameworks, particularly those of Clifford Geertz. Geertz defined religion as a system of symbols that establishes powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence.

Strength of the Definition

By incorporating these perspectives, our definition of religion avoids being either too narrow (which would exclude nontheistic religions such as Buddhism) or too broad (which might inadvertently include secular political movements). It views religion simultaneously as a social anchor (Durkheim), a source of subjective meaning and motivation (Weber), an existential anchor (Tillich), and a cultural map (Geertz).

It leaves aside specifically Marxist and feminist interpretations of religion while distinguishing religious traditions from secular commitments such as sports fandom and nationalism, even when those commitments exhibit quasi-religious characteristics.

Etymology

Etymology offers insight into the origins and historical evolution of the word religion.

The word derives from Latin religio (obligation, scrupulousness, reverence, or religious observance). Proposed roots include relegere (“to read or consider again carefully”) and religare (“to bind”). Historically, the term shifted from meanings associated with piety and religious obligation toward a broader social category encompassing diverse traditions, which we classify by names that loosely hint at their teachings, doctrines, and dogmas: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, among others.

Typical elements include beliefs about gods or ultimate reality, sacred texts, rituals and worship, moral codes, and institutional forms. Not every tradition fits every criterion equally. Some forms of Buddhism, for instance, emphasize personal practice and insight over gods. Thus, the word religion has evolved to encompass both belief and action: what religion is and what it does. Religion is one of several overlapping ways human beings interpret existence and the experience of consciousness.

Religion and Other Systems of Belief and Knowledge

Other frameworks also systematically organize beliefs and claims about reality. The distinctions are imperfect and sometimes overlapping, but their core differences concern method, domain, authority, and the status of claims.

Science systematically organizes knowledge of the observable world and is deliberately limited to claims that can be tested and revised. Religion often makes claims about nonempirical or ultimate realities accepted on the basis of revelation, tradition, or experience rather than empirical falsification.

Philosophy systematically organizes reasoned inquiry into many of the same ultimate questions religion addresses, but treats its claims as open to rational critique and does not require the combination of sacred authority, ritual, and communal practice that typically characterizes religion.

Ideology systematically organizes beliefs to guide collective action and social order. It can acquire quasi-religious features, including sacred histories, dogma, and community, but its primary orientation is generally worldly power and practical outcomes rather than a transcendent sacred reality.

Worldview is the broadest category: any coherent or partly coherent framework of basic beliefs about what is real, true, good, and valuable. Religion is one important source of worldviews; philosophy and ideology are others. Secular humanism, scientism, and naturalism can function as worldviews without being religions under substantive definitions.

Mythology and religion are distinct but overlapping areas of study and practice. Mythology can be studied as literature, history, or psychology independently of active religious worship. Carl Jung viewed mythology as an expression of the human psyche rather than merely a collection of outdated superstitions.

Truth

The importance assigned to explicit truth claims varies among religious traditions, particularly in the relative emphasis placed on orthodoxy (correct belief) and orthopraxy (correct practice). The expectation that religion must center on an extensive catalog of literal, historical, or metaphysical propositions has been particularly influential in Western discussions of religion, shaped by Christian theology and Greek philosophy. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam include explicit theological truth claims while also prescribing religious practices. Within Eastern and Dharmic traditions, orthopraxy often receives greater emphasis than orthodoxy. All fall within the definition of religion proposed here.