Religion is a range of social-cultural systems (designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations) that generally organize people into groups and are distinguished by their shared values. It includes the ascription of worth and value to certain activities, the creation and maintenance of moral standards, and the ascription of authority and power. It can also include a belief in gods and other supernatural beings, and it often includes a metaphysics describing cosmological orders and relationships.
The concept of Religion has long been contested, and the senses it takes on are many. In this article, we look at how the semantic range of the concept has shifted over time and how it is classified as a “monothetic-set” concept or a “functional” concept.
The term was originally used to refer to scrupulous devotion to a particular deity, and the first versions of the concept of Religion were substantive definitions, which determined membership in this category by the presence of a belief in some distinctive kind of reality. However, in the twentieth century, there was an emergence of a functional approach which defined the concept of Religion by its role in human life, and this is exemplified by Emile Durkheim’s definition of Religion as whatever system of practices unite a group into a moral community (whether or not it involves belief in unusual realities).
Some of these new functional definitions are broad enough to encompass much of what has been called ‘organized religion’. Others are more restrictive and narrowly apply to specific faiths. For example, Edward Tylor’s minimal definition limits the concept of Religion to a belief in spiritual beings, and Paul Tillich’s defines it as whatever major concern dominates a person’s life, whether or not it involves beliefs in unusual realities. These are functionally defined and therefore single criterion monothetic definitions.
Other philosophers have viewed the notion of Religion differently, and have sought to understand it as an abstract social taxon which can be defined by family resemblance rather than strict substance. Kwame Anthony Appiah, for instance, has warned that perhaps there is no such thing as a religion, or at least that vast generalizations about religion are risky.
The most common characteristic of religions is that they provide maps to the many different kinds of limitation which stand across the project of human lives, whether these are cosmological orders (for example, reincarnation and the afterlife), ethical standards (including codes of recognition and expected behaviour), or the ascription of worth to particular activities. In this way they enable people to deal with or even to accept the limitations which stand in their path, and, at a deeper level, provide a framework for understanding human life as it unfolds. In its most creative and healthy forms, religions also help people to cope with their own mortality by providing a way for them to explore the potential of the future and the past and a means of dealing with the many regrets and sorrows which can be attached to any life lived.