Religion is a vast and diverse collection of human experiences, beliefs, values, morality, practices, and attitudes. Trying to define it adequately is an academic exercise that requires the involvement of anthropology, history, sociology, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies, among other fields. The debate about defining religion reflects the fact that it is multifaceted and crosses disciplinary boundaries.
A definition is a system of concepts that allows scholars to communicate what they think religion is. Generally, a definition is not descriptive but analytical, attempting to clarify what religion is and how it functions in the world. The goal of a definition is to identify the main elements that make up religion and the categories or features that distinguish it from other phenomena in the social world.
Some definitions attempt to find a social genus that includes all religions, while others focus on functional aspects that are unique to human beings. A third group focuses on the concept of value and uses it as an organizing principle for understanding all religions. A recent trend in social science is to use the idea of valuation as a framework for studying all religions and cultures.
Historically, the word religion has been used as a generic term for belief systems that share a common worldview or culture. It has also been applied to practices and attitudes that are related but distinct from those belief systems.
Anthropologists have a long history of deconstructing the notion of religion by looking at how it is defined in various cultures. Early anthropologists thought that religion developed as a result of people’s attempts to control uncontrollable parts of the environment, such as the weather or pregnancy and birth. These attempts could be achieved either by manipulation, such as magic, or through supplication, such as religion. Magic tried to control the environment directly, while religion attempted to do so by appealing to a power outside of human control.
Modern anthropologists have also used the ideas of Michel Foucault to examine how the concept of religion has been shaped by historical processes and by preconceptions about what human beings are. This approach has led to a growing awareness that the concept of religion is not objective but a product of social and cultural contexts.
Other scholars argue that the definition of religion as a set of mental states is a Protestant bias and that attention should be focused on the visible institutional structures that produce these mental states. They believe that this will allow them to study the underlying dynamics of religion more effectively and without falling into the trap of trying to describe the nature of the invisible inner state. This approach is known as the formalist strategy. For example, the work of Zeldin (1969) identifies the structure of discontinuous relatedness between an empirical and a superempirical order as definitive of religion. In contrast, other researchers, such as Blasi (1997), have criticized this view of the category for being too monothetic.