What Is Religion?
Religion encompasses all aspects of human life that individuals treat as sacred, divine, spiritual, or worthy of especial reverence. Generally, it also refers to people’s relations with the universe and their concerns about themselves and their fate after death. For some, such beliefs and practices involve disembodied spirits; for others, they are more cosmological, involving the natural world. Still others are atheistic and do not believe in the existence of gods or other supernatural beings.
Because religion is such a widespread phenomenon, it has been the subject of many scholarly attempts to analyze its nature and its role in society. Most of these approaches have been “monothetic,” operating with the classical view that any instance accurately described by a concept will share some defining property, such as an invariant meaning, a common structure or a distinctive set of characteristics. The last several decades, however, have seen the rise of “polythetic” approaches that abandon this classical view and instead treat the category of religion as having a prototype structure.
Polythetic approaches have a number of advantages over monothetic ones. One is that they can incorporate elements of different perspectives into the analysis and can thus offer a more comprehensive picture. In addition, they can make use of the fact that human beings are unable to fully perceive the hidden mental states that underlie their behaviors.
For example, some people define religion as whatever a person’s dominant concern serves to organize his or her values (whether or not the concern involves belief in unusual realities). This approach draws on the basic argument of sociobiology that all religions are early and successful protective systems that have tied together the brain and body, and that the ability to develop these systems is linked to the need for survival.
Another advantage of the polythetic approach is that it can accommodate a wide range of views about what counts as a religion. For example, it is possible that a religion is something that has some social function, such as providing people with maps of time and space so they can understand the events that surround them (religions commonly feature cyclical or linear times, along with commemorative rituals).
It is important to remember that no single definition will fit every situation. This is because a religion is not an entity that exists separate from its culture. Moreover, any definition of religion that is applied to a group of cultures is bound to be a simplification. In order to obtain a more accurate account, scholars need to examine the various cultural variations of religion, using a broad range of methods that can include ethnographic research, comparative studies, textual analysis, and other methodologies. To do this, teachers should use materials that offer first-person accounts of religious practice and beliefs as well as texts that provide detailed analyses of the complexities and nuances of modern-day religions.