Religion is a set of social practices that are shared by people who are members of a particular society. They include beliefs and rituals, and their common characteristic is that they generate social cohesion and orientation in life.
Sociologists have tried to explain religion in terms of the social conditions that make it possible, focusing on the conditions for its emergence and the functions that it serves. Emile Durkheim, for example, argued that religions were essential to social stability and that they generated social cohesion even in societies where religion was not the dominant social institution. He also stressed the important role that religion played in shaping human culture and in promoting social inequality and conflict.
This approach to religion has influenced many other theories of social behavior and sociological theory. It has also prompted a debate about the nature of religious belief and how it should be defined.
Several important philosophers have used a variety of approaches to define religion. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, suggested that religion is a response to ultimate reality and that it is the most intense of all forms of valuation.
Other scholars, such as Charles James, suggested that religion is the experience of the divine and that it is a subjective experience. Unlike Aquinas, however, James did not develop a general definition and did not require all of the features he identified to be present in all religions. He did not distinguish between sacred and profane beliefs or practices, nor did he impose an empirical-nonempirical distinction on the matter (James 1902:40).
The British folklorist Sir James Frazer (1854-1941) provided a foundation for theories of the emergence of religion in his major work, The Golden Bough. He based his thesis on an analysis of the evidence from early societies that shows that they started with magic and that this led to belief in supernatural powers that needed to be propitiated, which is what religion is about.
Another influential theorist was Alfred North Whitehead, who argued that religion is the result of social construction, which is the process through which societies construct their own rules and beliefs. This concept of religion is very similar to that proposed by Freud, who in Totem and Taboo argued that primordial societies were organized around small groups of people, each dominated by a single father.
Although this approach to the genesis of religion has been very influential, it has been criticized by anthropologists for being too simplistic and insufficiently revealing of the real nature of religion. Nevertheless, it remains one of the most convincing and important models for a scientific understanding of religion.
Psychologists, too, have a strong interest in the genesis of religion. Sigmund Freud and his followers, for example, have interpreted the emergence of religion as an attempt to resolve the Oedipus complex, the emotional conflicts that arise in early human development between sons toward their mothers and daughters towards their fathers.
A more recent theoretical effort to understand the genesis of religion is found in a polythetic approach that seeks to sort social phenomena by their properties. This kind of classification can provide surprising patterns and co-appearances that would not otherwise have been expected, and the threshold number of characteristics for a given class can help determine the explanatory power of a theory.