essay about importance of religion

Essays About Religion: Top 5 Examples and 7 Writing Prompts

Essays about religion include delicate issues and tricky subtopics. See our top essay examples and prompts to guide you in your essay writing.

With over 4,000 religions worldwide, it’s no wonder religion influences everything. It involves faith, lessons on humanity, spirituality, and moral values that span thousands of years. For some, it’s both a belief and a cultural system. As it often clashes with science, laws, and modern philosophies, it’s also a hot debate topic. Religion is a broad subject encompassing various elements of life, so you may find it a challenging topic to write an essay about it.

1. Wisdom and Longing in Islam’s Religion by Anonymous on Ivypanda.com

2. consequences of following religion blindly essay by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 3. religion: christians’ belief in god by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 4. mecca’s influence on today’s religion essay by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 5. religion: how buddhism views the world by anonymous on ivypanda.com , 1. the importance of religion, 2. pros and cons of having a religion, 3. religions across the world, 4. religion and its influence on laws, 5. religion: then and now, 6. religion vs. science, 7. my religion.

“Portraying Muslims as radical religious fanatics who deny other religions and violently fight dissent has nothing to do with true Islamic ideology. The knowledge that is presented in Islam and used by Muslims to build their worldview system is exploited in a misinterpreted form. This is transforming the perception of Islam around the world as a radical religious system that supports intolerance and conflicts.”

The author discusses their opinion on how Islam becomes involved with violence or terrorism in the Islamic states. Throughout the essay, the writer mentions the massive difference between Islam’s central teachings and the terrorist groups’ dogma. The piece also includes a list of groups, their disobediences, and punishments.

This essay looks at how these brutalities have nothing to do with Islam’s fundamental ideologies. However, the context of Islam’s creeds is distorted by rebel groups like The Afghan mujahideen, Jihadis, and Al-Qa’ida. Furthermore, their activities push dangerous narratives that others use to make generalized assumptions about the entire religion. These misleading generalizations lead to misunderstandings amongst other communities, particularly in the western world. However, the truth is that these terrorist groups are violating Islamic doctrine.

“Following religion blindly can hinder one’s self-actualization and interfere with self-development due to numerous constraints and restrictions… Blind adherence to religion is a factor that does not allow receiving flexible education and adapting knowledge to different areas.”

The author discusses the effects of blindly following a religion and mentions that it can lead to difficulties in self-development and the inability to live independently. These limitations affect a person’s opportunity to grow and discover oneself.  Movies like “ The Da Vinci Code ” show how fanatical devotion influences perception and creates constant doubt. 

“…there are many religions through which various cultures attain their spiritual and moral bearings to bring themselves closer to a higher power (deity). Different religions are differentiated in terms of beliefs, customs, and purpose and are similar in one way or the other.”

The author discusses how religion affects its followers’ spiritual and moral values and mentions how deities work in mysterious ways. The essay includes situations that show how these supreme beings test their followers’ faith through various life challenges. Overall, the writer believes that when people fully believe in God, they can be stronger and more capable of coping with the difficulties they may encounter.

“Mecca represents a holy ground that the majority of the Muslims visit; and is only supposed to be visited by Muslims. The popularity of Mecca has increased the scope of its effects, showing that it has an influence on tourism, the financial aspects of the region and lastly religion today.”

The essay delves into Mecca’s contributions to Saudi Arabia’s tourism and religion. It mentions tourism rates peaking during Hajj, a 5-day Muslim pilgrimage, and visitors’ sense of spiritual relief and peace after the voyage. Aside from its tremendous touristic benefits, it also brings people together to worship Allah. You can also check out these essays about values and articles about beliefs .

“Buddhism is seen as one of the most popular and widespread religions on the earth the reason of its pragmatic and attractive philosophies which are so appealing for people of the most diversified backgrounds and ways of thinking .”

To help readers understand the topic, the author explains Buddhism’s worldviews and how Siddhatta Gotama established the religion that’s now one of the most recognized on Earth. It includes teachings about the gift of life, novel thinking, and philosophies based on his observations. Conclusively, the author believes that Buddhism deals with the world as Gotama sees it.

Check out our guide packed full of transition words for essays .

7 Prompts on Essays About Religion

Religion’s importance is embedded in an individual or group’s interpretation of it. They hold on to their faith for various reasons, such as having an idea of the real meaning of life and offering them a purpose to exist. Use this prompt to identify and explain what makes religion a necessity. Make your essay interesting by adding real-life stories of how faith changed someone’s life.

Although religion offers benefits such as positivity and a sense of structure, there are also disadvantages that come with it. Discuss what’s considered healthy and destructive when people follow their religion’s gospels and why. You can also connect it to current issues. Include any personal experience you have.

Religion’s prevalence exhibits how it can significantly affect one’s daily living. Use this prompt to discuss how religions across the world differ from one another when it comes to beliefs and if traditions or customs influence them. It’s essential to use relevant statistical data or surveys in this prompt to support your claims and encourage your readers to trust your piece.

There are various ways religion affects countries’ laws as they adhere to moral and often humanitarian values. Identify each and discuss how faith takes part in a nation’s decision-making regarding pressing matters. You can focus on one religion in a specific location to let the readers concentrate on the case. A good example is the latest abortion issue in the US, the overturning of “Wade vs. Roe.” Include people’s mixed reactions to this subject and their justifications.

In this essay, talk about how the most widespread religions’ principles or rituals changed over time. Then, expound on what inspired these changes.  Add the religion’s history, its current situation in the country, and its old and new beliefs. Elaborate on how its members clash over these old and new principles. Conclude by sharing your opinion on whether the changes are beneficial or not.

There’s a never-ending debate between religion and science. List the most controversial arguments in your essay and add which side you support and why. Then, open discourse about how these groups can avoid quarreling. You can also discuss instances when religion and science agreed or worked together to achieve great results. 

Use this prompt if you’re a part of a particular religion. Even if you don’t believe in faith, you can still take this prompt and pick a church you’ll consider joining. Share your personal experiences about your religion. Add how you became a follower, the beliefs that helped you through tough times, and why you’re staying as an active member in it. You can also speak about miraculous events that strengthen your faith. Or you can include teachings that you disagree with and think needs to be changed or updated.

For help with your essay, check out our top essay writing tips !

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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What Role Does Religion Play in Your Life?

Did you attend religious services or observe religious traditions as a child? How has religion shaped who you are today?

By Nicole Daniels and Michael Gonchar

When you were younger, did you attend religious services or participate in religious observations with your family? Did you belong to any kind of religious community? What about now, as a teenager?

Has religion played an important role in your life? If so, in what ways?

In her recent Opinion essay, “ I Followed the Lives of 3,290 Teenagers. This Is What I Learned About Religion and Education ,” Ilana M. Horwitz discusses the effects of a religious upbringing on academic success:

American men are dropping out of college in alarming numbers. A slew of articles over the past year depict a generation of men who feel lost , detached and lacking in male role models . This sense of despair is especially acute among working-class men, fewer than one in five of whom completes college. Yet one group is defying the odds: boys from working-class families who grow up religious. As a sociologist of education and religion, I followed the lives of 3,290 teenagers from 2003 to 2012 using survey and interview data from the National Study of Youth and Religion , and then linking those data to the National Student Clearinghouse in 2016. I studied the relationship between teenagers’ religious upbringing and its influence on their education: their school grades, which colleges they attend and how much higher education they complete. My research focused on Christian denominations because they are the most prevalent in the United States. I found that what religion offers teenagers varies by social class. Those raised by professional-class parents, for example, do not experience much in the way of an educational advantage from being religious. In some ways, religion even constrains teenagers’ educational opportunities (especially girls’) by shaping their academic ambitions after graduation; they are less likely to consider a selective college as they prioritize life goals such as parenthood, altruism and service to God rather than a prestigious career. However, teenage boys from working-class families, regardless of race, who were regularly involved in their church and strongly believed in God were twice as likely to earn bachelor’s degrees as moderately religious or nonreligious boys. Religious boys are not any smarter , so why are they doing better in school? The answer lies in how religious belief and religious involvement can buffer working-class Americans — males in particular — from despair.

Students, read the entire article , then tell us:

What role, if any, did religion play in your childhood? Do you consider religion and religious faith to be important parts of your life? Why or why not?

According to Dr. Horwitz’s research, religious belief and religious involvement help working-class teenage boys achieve academic success. Do you think religion has helped you succeed in the classroom? Why or why not?

Dr. Horwitz discusses some of the social benefits — including a sense of community, a shared outlook on life and the presence of trusting relationships and adult role models — that religion can have for young people. Has religion provided any of these benefits to you? Has it provided other benefits?

Not every person sees religion as beneficial. Are you one of those people? If so, why?

The author explains the importance of “social capital” — the social ties that provide a web of support for families and young people. Do you feel that you are surrounded by a web of support? Does it include family, friends, neighbors, teachers, coaches, religious leaders or others? In what ways do these people — or the communities in which they operate — support you and your family? Do you wish that you had more social capital or a larger web of support? Why or why not?

Dr. Horwitz has found that social class and gender can affect what religion offers teenagers. Do those findings surprise you? Is there anything else from her research that strikes you as unexpected? How so?

What else do you think people should know about teenagers and religion that was not discussed in the essay?

Want more writing prompts? You can find all of our questions in our Student Opinion column . Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate them into your classroom.

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Nicole Daniels joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2019 after working in museum education, curriculum writing and bilingual education. More about Nicole Daniels

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Religion in everyday life, highly religious americans are happier and more involved with family but are no more likely to exercise, recycle or make socially conscious consumer choices.

These differences are found not only in the U.S. adult population as a whole but also within a variety of religious traditions (such as between Catholics who are highly religious and those who are less religious), and they persist even when controlling for other factors, including age, income, education, geographic region of residence, marital status and parental status.

For instance, highly religious people are about as likely as other Americans to say they lost their temper recently, and they are only marginally less likely to say they told a white lie in the past week. When it comes to diet and exercise, highly religious Americans are no less likely to have overeaten in the past week, and they are no more likely to say they exercise regularly. Highly religious people also are no more likely than other Americans to recycle their household waste. And when making decisions about what goods and services to buy, they are no more inclined to consider the manufacturers’ environmental records or whether companies pay employees a fair wage.

These are among the latest findings of Pew Research Center’s U.S. Religious Landscape Study. The study and this report were made possible by The Pew Charitable Trusts, which received support for the project from Lilly Endowment Inc.

Among Christians, believing in God tops the list, with fully 86% saying belief in God is “essential” to their Christian identity. In addition, roughly seven-in-ten Christians say being grateful for what they have (71%), forgiving those who have wronged them (69%) and always being honest (67%) are essential to being Christian. Far fewer say that attending religious services (35%), dressing modestly (26%), working to protect the environment (22%) or resting on the Sabbath (18%) are essential to what being Christian means to them, personally.

The survey posed similar questions to members of non-Christian faiths and religiously unaffiliated Americans (sometimes called religious “nones”), asking whether various behaviors are essential to “what being a moral person means to you.” 4  Among the unaffiliated, honesty (58%) and gratitude (53%) are the attributes most commonly seen as essential to being a moral person. (Findings about non-Christians are discussed in more detail at the end of Chapter 2 .)

The survey shows a clear link between what people see as essential to their faith and their self-reported day-to-day behavior. Simply put, those who believe that behaving in a particular way or performing certain actions are key elements of their faith are much more likely to say they actually perform those actions on a regular basis.

For example, among Christians who say that working to help the poor is essential to what being Christian means to them, about six-in-ten say they donated time, money or goods to help the poor in the past week. By comparison, fewer Christians who do not see helping the poor as central to their religious identity say they worked to help the poor during the previous week (42%).

The same pattern is seen in the survey’s questions about interpersonal interactions, health and social consciousness. Relatively few Christians see living a healthy lifestyle, buying from companies that pay fair wages or protecting the environment as key elements of their faith. But those who do see these things as essential to what it means to be a Christian are more likely than others to say they live a healthy lifestyle (by exercising, for example), consider how a company treats its employees and the environment when making purchasing decisions, or attempt to recycle or reduce waste as much as possible.

Of course, survey data like these cannot prove that believing certain actions are obligatory for Christians actually causes Christians to behave in particular ways. The causal arrow could point in the other direction: It may be easier for those who regularly engage in particular behaviors to cite those behaviors as essential to their faith. Conversely, it may be harder for those who do not regularly engage in particular activities (such as helping the poor) to describe those activities as essential to their faith. Nevertheless, the survey data suggest that Christians are more likely to live healthy lives, work on behalf of the poor and behave in environmentally conscious ways if they consider these things essential to what it means to be a Christian.

But while relatively few people look to religious leaders for guidance on major decisions, many Americans do turn to prayer when faced with important choices. Indeed, among those who are highly religious, nearly nine-in-ten (86%) say they rely “a lot” on prayer and personal religious reflection when making major life decisions, which exceeds the share of the highly religious who say they rely a lot on their own research.

Other key findings in this report include:

• Three-quarters of adults – including 96% of members of historically black Protestant churches and 93% of evangelical Protestants – say they thanked God for something in the past week. And two-thirds, including 91% of those in the historically black Protestant tradition and 87% of evangelicals, say they asked God for help during the past week. Fewer than one-in-ten adults (8%) say they got angry with God in the past week. (For more details on how Americans say they relate to God, see Chapter 1 .)
• One-third of religiously unaffiliated Americans say they thanked God for something in the past week, and one-in-four have asked God for help in the past week. (For more details, see Chapter 1 .)
• Nearly half of Americans (46%) say they talk with their immediate families about religion at least once or twice a month. About a quarter (27%) say they talk about religion at least once a month with their extended families, and 33% say they discuss religion as often with people outside their families. Having regular conversations about religion is most common among evangelicals and people who belong to churches in the historically black Protestant tradition. By contrast, relatively few religious “nones” say they discuss religion with any regularity. (For more details on how often Americans talk about religion, see Chapter 1 .)
• One-third of American adults (33%) say they volunteered in the past week. This includes 10% who say they volunteered mainly through a church or religious organization and 22% who say their volunteering was not done through a religious organization. (For more details on volunteering, see Chapter 1 .) 5
• Three-in-ten adults say they meditated in the past week to help cope with stress. Regularly using meditation to cope with stress is more common among highly religious people than among those who are less religious (42% vs. 26%). (For more details on meditation and stress, see Chapter 1 .)
• Nine-in-ten adults say the quality of a product is a “major factor” they take into account when making purchasing decisions, and three-quarters focus on the price. Far fewer – only about one-quarter of adults – say a company’s environmental responsibility (26%) or whether it pays employees a fair wage (26%) are major factors in their purchasing decisions. Highly religious adults are no more or less likely than those who are less religious to say they consider a company’s environmental record and fair wage practices in making purchasing decisions. (For more details on how Americans make purchasing decisions, see Chapter 1 .)
• Three-quarters of Catholics say they look to their own conscience “a great deal” for guidance on difficult moral questions. Far fewer Catholics say they look a great deal to the Catholic Church’s teachings (21%), the Bible (15%) or the pope (11%) for guidance on difficult moral questions. (For more details, see Chapter 3 .)
• One-quarter of Christians say dressing modestly is essential to what being Christian means to them, and an additional four-in-ten say it is “important, but not essential.” (For more details, see Chapter 2 .)
• When asked to describe, in their own words, what being a “moral person” means to them, 23% of religious “nones” cite the golden rule or being kind to others, 15% mention being a good person and 12% mention being tolerant and respectful of others. (For more details, see Chapter 2 .)

The remainder of this report explores these and other findings in greater depth. Chapter 1 provides greater detail on how Americans from various religious backgrounds say they live their day-to-day lives. Chapter 2 examines the essentials of religious and moral identity – what do Christians see as “essential” to what it means to be a Christian, and what do members of non-Christian faiths and religious “nones” see as essential to being a moral person? Chapter 3 reports on where members of various religious groups say they look for guidance when making major life decisions or thinking about tough moral questions. On most of these questions, the report compares highly religious Americans with those who are less religious and also looks at differences among members of a variety of religious groups. For comparisons of highly religious people with those who are less religious within particular religious groups (e.g., highly religious Catholics vs. less religious Catholics), see the detailed tables .

Profile of those who are highly religious, less religious

As this report highlights, these standard measures of traditional religious practice do not capture the full breadth of what it means to be religious; many respondents also say attributes such as gratitude, forgiveness and honesty are essential to what being religious means to them, personally. Nevertheless, these two indicators (prayer and religious attendance) are closely related to a variety of other measures of religious commitment.

As might be expected, the religious makeup of the highly religious and less religious also are quite distinct. Fully half of highly religious American adults (49%) identify with evangelical Protestant denominations, compared with about one-in-five (19%) of those who are not highly religious. And while only a handful of highly religious people are religiously unaffiliated, about a quarter of less religious respondents (27%) identify as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.”

There also are important demographic differences between the highly religious and those who are less religious. 8  They also are more likely to align with the Republican Party than the Democratic Party, and they are somewhat older, on average, than those who are less religious. However, there are few differences by level of education.

If respondents who seldom or never pray and seldom or never attend religious services are analyzed separately from others who are “not highly religious,” many of these differences are even larger.

• There are many possible ways to define “highly religious.” For example, Pew Research Center used an index of four measures (frequency of prayer, worship service attendance, belief in God and importance of religion) to create a “highly religious” category in a recently published interactive tool titled “ How religious is your state? ” The definition of “highly religious” in this report is based on two of these standard measures of religiosity – self-reported rates of prayer and worship service attendance – that were asked of all respondents in a supplemental survey to the U.S. Religious Landscape Study, the main source of data for this report. ↩
• Some previous studies have found that highly religious Americans Are more likely to volunteer not only for religious causes but also for secular ones. See Putnam, Robert D. and David E. Campbell. 2010. “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us.” Chapter 13, pages 443-454. Some prior studies also have found linkages between religious behavior and better health outcomes, though the reasons for this are debated. See, for example, Blasi, Anthony J. ed. 2011. “Toward a Sociological Theory of Religion and Health.” ↩
• In recent years, religious leaders across a wide range of faiths have urged followers to put their religious beliefs into practice through everyday behaviors such as consumer choices, environmentalism, hospitality, charity, honesty, forgiveness and healthy living. See, for example, Pope Francis’ 2015 environmental encyclical “Laudato Si.” Also see Bass, Dorothy C. ed. 2010. “Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People.” However, the underlying question in this report is not normative – e.g., how religious people should behave in daily life – but sociological: Do Americans who are highly religious by conventional measures (prayer and worship service attendance) also have different beliefs or behave differently from less religious Americans in other areas of life? ↩
• Ideally, the survey would have asked about the “essentials” of religious identity across a wider range of religious groups. For example, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist respondents would have been asked if these behaviors are essential to what being Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist means to them. Because some respondents completed the survey by mail in a paper-and-pencil format, however, it was not feasible to program the questionnaire with language specific to more than a few religious groups. ↩
• Readers should note that surveys may overstate the extent to which respondents engage in volunteering, since people who participate in activities such as volunteering also are more likely to participate in surveys. For more details, see “ The challenges of polling when fewer people are available to be polled .” ↩
• Estimates of the highly religious share of the population come from the 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study national telephone survey. Among respondents in the supplemental survey, 28% are highly religious by the definition employed here, and 72% are not. ↩
• The question asking respondents how important religion is in their lives was asked in a previous wave of the American Trends Panel series of surveys; as a result, not everyone in the supplemental survey to the Religious Landscape Study was asked this question. For more details about the American Trends Panel, see the Methodology . ↩
• For more on the link between gender and religiosity, see Pew Research Center’s report “ The Gender Gap in Religion Around the World .” ↩

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The Concept of Religion

It is common today to take the concept religion as a taxon for sets of social practices, a category-concept whose paradigmatic examples are the so-called “world” religions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism. [ 1 ] Perhaps equally paradigmatic, though somewhat trickier to label, are forms of life that have not been given a name, either by practitioners or by observers, but are common to a geographical area or a group of people—for example, the religion of China or that of ancient Rome, the religion of the Yoruba or that of the Cherokee. In short, the concept is today used for a genus of social formations that includes several members, a type of which there are many tokens.

The concept religion did not originally refer to a social genus, however. Its earliest references were not to social kinds and, over time, the extension of the concept has evolved in different directions, to the point that it threatens incoherence. As Paul Griffiths notes, listening to the discussions about the concept religion

rapidly suggests the conclusion that hardly anyone has any idea what they are talking about—or, perhaps more accurately, that there are so many different ideas in play about what religion is that conversations in which the term figures significantly make the difficulties in communication at the Tower of Babel seem minor and easily dealt with. These difficulties are apparent, too, in the academic study of religion, and they go far toward an explanation of why the discipline has no coherent or widely shared understanding of its central topic. (2000: 30)

This entry therefore provides a brief history of the how the semantic range of religion has grown and shifted over the years, and then considers two philosophical issues that arise for the contested concept, issues that are likely to arise for other abstract concepts used to sort cultural types (such as “literature”, “democracy”, or “culture” itself). First, the disparate variety of practices now said to fall within this category raises a question of whether one can understand this social taxon in terms of necessary and sufficient properties or whether instead one should instead treat it as a family resemblance concept. Here, the question is whether the concept religion can be said to have an essence. Second, the recognition that the concept has shifted its meanings, that it arose at a particular time and place but was unknown elsewhere, and that it has so often been used to denigrate certain cultures, raises the question whether the concept corresponds to any kind of entity in the world at all or whether, instead, it is simply a rhetorical device that should be retired. This entry therefore considers the rise of critical and skeptical analyses of the concept, including those that argue that the term refers to nothing.

1. A History of the Concept

2.1 monothetic approaches, 2.2 polythetic approaches, 3. reflexivity, reference, and skepticism, other internet resources, related entries.

The concept religion did not originally refer to a social genus or cultural type. It was adapted from the Latin term religio , a term roughly equivalent to “scrupulousness”. Religio also approximates “conscientiousness”, “devotedness”, or “felt obligation”, since religio was an effect of taboos, promises, curses, or transgressions, even when these were unrelated to the gods. In western antiquity, and likely in many or most cultures, there was a recognition that some people worshipped different gods with commitments that were incompatible with each other and that these people constituted social groups that could be rivals. In that context, one sometimes sees the use of nobis religio to mean “our way of worship”. Nevertheless, religio had a range of senses and so Augustine could consider but reject it as the right abstract term for “how one worships God” because the Latin term (like the Latin terms for “cult” and “service”) was used for the observance of duties in both one’s divine and one’s human relationships (Augustine City of God [1968: Book X, Chapter 1, 251–253]). In the Middle Ages, as Christians developed monastic orders in which one took vows to live under a specific rule, they called such an order  religio (and religiones for the plural), though the term continued to be used, as it had been in antiquity, in adjective form to describe those who were devout and in noun form to refer to worship (Biller 1985: 358; Nongbri 2013: ch. 2).

The most significant shift in the history of the concept is when people began to use religion as a genus of which Christian and non-Christian groups were species. One sees a clear example of this use in the writings of Edward Herbert (1583–1648). As the post-Reformation Christian community fractured into literal warring camps, Herbert sought to remind the different protesting groups of what they nevertheless had in common. Herbert identified five “articles” or “elements” that he proposed were found in every religion, which he called the Common Notions, namely: the beliefs that

• there is a supreme deity, [ 2 ]
• this deity should be worshipped,
• the most important part of religious practice is the cultivation of virtue,
• one should seek repentance for wrong-doing, and
• one is rewarded or punished in this life and the next.

Ignoring rituals and group membership, this proposal takes an idealized Protestant monotheism as the model of religion as such. Herbert was aware of peoples who worshipped something other than a single supreme deity. He noted that ancient Egyptians, for instance, worshipped multiple gods and people in other cultures worshipped celestial bodies or forces in nature. Herbert might have argued that, lacking a belief in a supreme deity, these practices were not religions at all but belonged instead in some other category such as superstition, heresy, or magic. But Herbert did include them, arguing that they were religions because the multiple gods were actually servants to or even aspects of the one supreme deity, and those who worshiped natural forces worshipped the supreme deity “in His works”.

The concept religion understood as a social genus was increasingly put to use by to European Christians as they sought to categorize the variety of cultures they encountered as their empires moved into the Americas, South Asia, East Asia, Africa, and Oceania. In this context, fed by reports from missionaries and colonial administrators, the extension of the generic concept was expanded. The most influential example is that of anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) who had a scholarly interest in pre-Columbian Mexico. Like Herbert, Tylor sought to identify the common denominator of all religions, what Tylor called a “minimal definition” of religion, and he proposed that the key characteristic was “belief in spiritual beings” (1871 [1970: 8]). This generic definition included the forms of life predicated on belief in a supreme deity that Herbert had classified as religion. But it could also now include—without Herbert’s procrustean assumption that these practices were really directed to one supreme being—the practices used by Hindus, ancient Athenians, and the Navajo to connect to the gods they revere, the practices used by Mahayana Buddhists to connect to Bodhisattvas, and the practices used by Malagasy people to connect to the cult of the dead. The use of a unifying concept for such diverse practices is deliberate on Tylor’s part as he sought to undermine assumptions that human cultures poorly understood in Christian Europe—especially those despised ones, “painted black on the missionary maps” (1871 [1970: 4])—were not on the very same spectrum as the religion of his readers. This opposition to dividing European and non-European cultures into separate categories underlies Tylor’s insistence that all human beings are equivalent in terms of their intelligence. He argued that so-called “primitive” peoples generate their religious ideas when they wrestle with the same questions that all people do, such as the biological question of what explains life, and they do so with the same cognitive capacities. They may lack microscopes or telescopes, but Tylor claims that they seek to answer these questions in ways that are “rational”, “consistent”, and “logical”. Tylor repeatedly calls the Americans, Africans, and Asians he studies “thinking men” and “philosophers”. Tylor was conscious that the definition he proposed was part of a shift: though it was still common to describe some people as so primitive that they had no religion, Tylor complains that those who speak this way are guilty of “the use of wide words in narrow senses” because they are only willing to describe as religion practices that resemble their own expectations (1871 [1970: 3–4]).

In the twentieth century, one sees a third and last growth spurt in the extension of the concept. Here the concept religion is enlarged to include not only practices that connect people to one or more spirits, but also practices that connect people to “powers” or “forces” that lack minds, wills, and personalities. One sees this shift in the work of William James, for example, when he writes,

Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. (1902 [1985: 51]; cf. Proudfoot 2000)

By an “unseen order”, James presumably means a structure that is non-empirical, though he is not clear about why the term would not also include political, economic, or other invisible but human-created orders. The same problem plagues James’s description of “a MORE” operating in the universe that is similar to but outside oneself (1902 [1985: 400], capitalization in the original). The anthropologist Clifford Geertz addresses this issue, also defining religion in terms of an “order” but specifying that he means practices tied to conceptions of “a general order of existence”, that is, as he also says, something whose existence is “fundamental”, “all-pervading”, or “unconditioned” (1973: 98, emphasis added). The practices that are distinctly religious for Geertz are those tied to a culture’s metaphysics or worldview, their conception of “the overall shape of reality” (1973: 104). Like James, then, Geertz would include as religions not only the forms of life based on the theistic and polytheistic (or, more broadly, animist or spiritualist) beliefs that Herbert and Tylor recognized, but also those based on belief in the involuntary, spontaneous, or “natural” operations of the law of karma, the Dao in Daoism, the Principle in Neo-Confucianism, and the Logos in Stoicism. This expansion also includes Theravada Buddhism because dependent co-origination ( pratītyasamutpāda ) is a conception of the general order of existence and it includes Zen Buddhism because Buddha-nature is said to pervade everything. This third expansion is why non-theistic forms of Buddhism, excluded by the Herbert’s and Tylor’s definitions but today widely considered religions, can serve as “a litmus test” for definitions of the concept (Turner 2011: xxiii; cf. Southwold 1978). In sum, then, one can think of the growth of the social genus version of the concept religion as analogous to three concentric circles—from a theistic to a polytheistic and then to a cosmic (or “cosmographic” [Dubuisson 1998]) criterion. Given the near-automatic way that Buddhism is taken as a religion today, the cosmic version now seems to be the dominant one.

Some scholars resist this third expansion of the concept and retain a Tylorean definition, and it is true that there is a marked difference between practices that do and practices that do not involve interacting with person-like beings. In the former, anthropomorphic cases, practitioners can ask for help, make offerings, and pray with an understanding that they are heard. In the latter, non-anthropomorphic cases, practitioners instead typically engage in actions that put themselves “in accord with” the order of things. The anthropologist Robert Marett marks this difference between the last two extensions of the concept religion by distinguishing between “animism” and “animatism” (1909), the philosopher John Hick by distinguishing between religious “personae” and religious “impersonae” (1989: ch. 14–15). This difference raises a philosophical question: on what grounds can one place the practices based on these two kinds of realities in the same category? The many loa spirits, the creator Allah, and the all-pervading Dao are not available to the methods of the natural sciences, and so they are often called “supernatural”. If that term works, then religions in all three concentric circles can be understood as sets of practices predicated on belief in the supernatural. However, “supernatural” suggests a two-level view of reality that separates the empirically available natural world from some other realm metaphorically “above” or “behind” it. Many cultures lack or reject a distinction between natural and supernatural (Saler 1977, 2021). They believe that disembodied persons or powers are not in some otherworldly realm but rather on the top of a certain mountain, in the depths of the forest, or “everywhere”. To avoid the assumption of a two-level view of reality, then, some scholars have replaced supernatural with other terms, such as “superhuman”. Hick uses the term “transcendent”:

the putative reality which transcends everything other than itself but is not transcended by anything other than itself. (1993: 164)

In order to include loa , Allah, and the Dao but to exclude nations and economies, Kevin Schilbrack (2013) proposes the neologism “superempirical” to refer to non-empirical things that are also not the product of any empirical thing. Wouter Hanegraaff (1995), following J. G. Platvoet (1982: 30) uses “meta-empirical”. Whether a common element can be identified that will coherently ground a substantive definition of “religion” is not a settled question.

Despite this murkiness, all three of these versions are “substantive” definitions of religion because they determine membership in the category in terms of the presence of a belief in a distinctive kind of reality. In the twentieth century, however, one sees the emergence of an importantly different approach: a definition that drops the substantive element and instead defines the concept religion in terms of a distinctive role that a form of life can play in one’s life—that is, a “functional” definition. One sees a functional approach in Emile Durkheim (1912), who defines religion as whatever system of practices unite a number of people into a single moral community (whether or not those practices involve belief in any unusual realities). Durkheim’s definition turns on the social function of creating solidarity. One also sees a functional approach in Paul Tillich (1957), who defines religion as whatever dominant concern serves to organize a person’s values (whether or not that concern involve belief in any unusual realities). Tillich’s definition turns on the axiological function of providing orientation for a person’s life.

Substantive and functional approaches can produce non-overlapping extensions for the concept. Famously, a functional approach can hold that even atheistic forms of capitalism, nationalism, and Marxism function as religions. The literature on these secular institutions as functionally religions is massive. As Trevor Ling says,

the bulk of literature supporting the view that Marxism is a religion is so great that it cannot easily be set aside. (1980: 152)

On capitalism as a religion, see, e.g., McCarraher (2019); on nationalism, see, e.g., Omer and Springs (2013: ch. 2). One functionalist might count white supremacy as a religion (Weed 2019; Finley et al. 2020) and another might count anti-racism as a religion (McWhorter 2021). Here, celebrities can reach a religious status and fandom can be one’s religious identity (e.g., Lofton 2011; Lovric 2020). Without a supernatural, transcendent, or superempirical element, these phenomena would not count as religious for Herbert, Tylor, James, or Geertz. Conversely, interactions with supernatural beings may be categorized on a functional approach as something other than religion. For example, the Thai villager who wears an apotropaic amulet and avoids the forest because of a belief that malevolent spirits live there, or the ancient Roman citizen who takes a bird to be sacrificed in a temple before she goes on a journey are for Durkheim examples of magic rather than religion, and for Tillich quotidian rather than ultimate concerns.

It is sometimes assumed that to define religion as a social genus is to treat it as something universal, as something that appears in every human culture. It is true that some scholars have treated religion as pan-human. For example, when a scholar defines religion functionally as the beliefs and practices that generate social cohesion or as the ones that provide orientation in life, then religion names an inevitable feature of the human condition. The universality of religion that one then finds is not a discovery but a product of one’s definition. However, a social genus can be both present in more than one culture without being present in all of them, and so one can define religion , either substantively or functionally, in ways that are not universal. As common as beliefs in disembodied spirits or cosmological orders have been in human history, for instance, there were people in the past and there are people in the present who have no views of an afterlife, supernatural beings, or explicit metaphysics.

2. Two Kinds of Analysis of the Concept

The history of the concept religion above shows how its senses have shifted over time. A concept used for scrupulous devotion was retooled to refer to a particular type of social practice. But the question—what type?—is now convoluted. The cosmic version of the concept is broader than the polytheistic version, which is in turn broader than the theistic version, and the functional definitions shift the sense of the term into a completely different register. What is counted as religion by one definition is often not counted by others. How might this disarray be understood? Does the concept have a structure? This section distinguishes between two kinds of answer to these questions. Most of the attempts to analyze the term have been “monothetic” in that they operate with the classical view that every instance that is accurately described by a concept will share a defining property that puts them in that category. The last several decades, however, have seen the emergence of “polythetic” approaches that abandon the classical view and treat religion , instead, as having a prototype structure. For incisive explanations of the classical theory and the prototype theory of concepts, see Laurence and Margolis (1999).

Monothetic approaches use a single property (or a single set of properties) as the criterion that determines whether a concept applies. The key to a monothetic approach is that it proposes necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in the given class. That is, a monothetic approach claims that there is some characteristic, or set of them, found in every religion and that if a form of life has it, then that form of life is a religion. Most definitions of the concept religion have been of this type. For example, as we saw above, Edward Tylor proposes belief in spiritual beings as his minimal definition of religion, and this is a substantive criterion that distinguishes religion from non-religion in terms of belief in this particular kind of entity. Similarly, Paul Tillich proposes ultimate concern as a functional criterion that distinguishes religion from non-religion in terms of what serves this particular role in one’s life. These are single criterion monothetic definitions.

There are also monothetic definitions that define religion in terms of a single set of criteria. Herbert’s five Common Notions are an early example. More recently, Clifford Geertz (1973: ch. 4) proposes a definition that he breaks down into five elements:

• a system of symbols
• about the nature of things,
• that inculcate dispositions for behavior
• through ritual and cultural performance, [ 3 ]
• so that the conceptions held by the group are taken as real.

One can find each of these five elements separately, of course: not all symbols are religious symbols; historians (but not novelists) typically consider their conceptions factual; and so on. For Geertz, however, any religious form of life will have all five. Aware of functional approaches like that of Tillich, Geertz is explicit that symbols and rituals that lack reference to a metaphysical framework—that is, those without the substantive element he requires as his (2)—would be secular and not religious, no matter how intense or important one’s feelings about them are (1973: 98). Reference to a metaphysical entity or power is what marks the other four elements as religious. Without it, Geertz writes, “the empirical differentia of religious activity or religious experience would not exist” (1973: 98). As a third example, Bruce Lincoln (2006: ch. 1) enumerates four elements that a religion would have, namely:

• “a discourse whose concerns transcend the human, temporal, and contingent, and that claims for itself a similarly transcendent status”,
• practices connected to that discourse,
• people who construct their identity with reference to that discourse and those practices, and
• institutional structures to manage those people.

This definition is monothetic since, for Lincoln, religions always have these four features “at a minimum” (2006: 5). [ 4 ] To be sure, people constantly engage in practices that generate social groups that then have to be maintained and managed by rules or authorities. However, when the practices, communities, and institutions lack the distinctive kind of discourse that claims transcendent status for itself, they would not count for Lincoln as religions.

It is worth noting that when a monothetic definition includes multiple criteria, one does not have to choose between the substantive and functional strategies for defining religion , but can instead include both. If a monothetic definition include both strategies, then, to count as a religion, a form of life would have to refer to a distinctive substantive reality and also play a certain role in the participants’ lives. This double-sided approach avoids the result of purely substantive definitions that might count as religion a feckless set of beliefs (for instance, “something must have created the world”) unconnected from the believers’ desires and behavior, while also avoiding the result of purely functional definitions that might count as religion some universal aspect of human existence (for instance, creating collective effervescence or ranking of one’s values). William James’s definition of religion (“the belief that there is an unseen order, and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto”) is double-sided in this way, combining a belief in the existence of a distinctive referent with the spiritual disciplines with which one seeks to embody that belief. Geertz’s definition of religion also required both substantive and functional aspects, which he labelled “worldview” and “ethos” (1973: ch. 5). To treat religion as “both/and” in this way is to refuse to abstract one aspect of a complex social reality but instead recognizes, as Geertz puts it, both “the dispositional and conceptual aspects of religious life” (1973: 113). [ 5 ]

These “monothetic-set definitions” treat the concept of religion as referring to a multifaceted or multidimensional complex. It may seem avant garde today to see religion described as a “constellation”, “assemblage”, “network”, or “system”, but in fact to treat religion as a complex is not new. Christian theologians traditionally analyzed the anatomy of their way of life as simultaneously fides , fiducia , and fidelitas . Each of these terms might be translated into English as “faith”, but each actually corresponds to a different dimension of a social practice. Fides refers to a cognitive state, one in which a person assents to a certain proposition and takes it as true. It could be translated as “belief” or “intellectual commitment”. Beliefs or intellectual commitments distinctive to participation in the group will be present whether or not a religious form of life has developed any authoritative doctrines. In contrast, fiducia refers to an affective state in which a person is moved by a feeling or experience that is so positive that it bonds the recipient to its source. It could be translated as “trust” or “emotional commitment”. Trust or emotional commitment will be present whether or not a religious form of life teaches that participation in their practices aims at some particular experience of liberation, enlightenment, or salvation. And fidelitas refers to a conative state in which a person commits themselves to a path of action, a path that typically involves emulating certain role models and inculcating the dispositions that the group considers virtuous. It could be translated as “loyalty” or “submission”. Loyalty or submission will be present whether or not a religious form of life is theistic or teaches moral rules. By the time of Martin Luther, Christian catechisms organized these aspects of religious life in terms of the “three C’s”: the creed one believed, the cult or worship one offered, and the code one followed. When Tillich (1957: ch. 2) argues that religious faith is distorted when one treats it not as a complex but instead as a function of the intellect alone, emotion alone, or the will alone, he is speaking from within this tradition. These three dimensions of religious practices—symbolically, the head, the heart, and the hand—are not necessarily Christian. In fact, until one adds a delimiting criterion like those discussed above, these dimensions are not even distinctively religious. Creed, cult, and code correspond to any pursuit of what a people considers true, beautiful, and good, respectively, and they will be found in any collective movement or cultural tradition. As Melford Spiro says, any human institution will involve a belief system, a value system, and an action system (Spiro 1966: 98).

Many have complained that arguments about how religion should be defined seem unresolvable. To a great extent, however, this is because these arguments have not simply been about a particular aspect of society but rather have served as proxy in a debate about the structure of human subjectivity. There is deep agreement among the rival positions insofar as they presuppose the cognitive-affective-conative model of being human. However, what we might call a “Cartesian” cohort argues that cognition is the root of religious emotions and actions. This cohort includes the “intellectualists” whose influence stretches from Edward Tylor and James Frazer to E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Robin Horton, Jack Goody, Melford Spiro, Stewart Guthrie, and J. Z. Smith, and it shapes much of the emerging field of cognitive science of religion (e.g., Boyer 2001). [ 6 ] A “Humean” cohort disagrees, arguing that affect is what drives human behavior and that cognition serves merely to justify the values one has already adopted. In theology and religious studies, this feelings-centered approach is identified above all with the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Rudolf Otto, and with the tradition called phenomenology of religion, but it has had a place in anthropology of religion since Robert Marett (Tylor’s student), and it is alive and well in the work of moral intuitionists (e.g., Haidt 2012) and affect theory (e.g., Schaefer 2015). A “Kantian” cohort treats beliefs and emotions regarding supernatural realities as relatively unimportant and argues instead that for religion the will is basic. [ 7 ] This approach treats a religion as at root a set of required actions (e.g., Vásquez 2011; C. Smith 2017). These different approaches disagree about the essence of religion, but all three camps operate within a shared account of the human. Thus, when William James describes religion as

the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual [people] in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. (1902 [1985: 34])

he is foregrounding an affective view and playing down (though not denying) the cognitive. When James’s Harvard colleague Alfred North Whitehead corrects him, saying that “[r]eligion is what a person does with their solitariness” (1926: 3, emphasis added), Whitehead stresses the conative, though Whitehead also insists that feelings always play a role. These are primarily disagreements of emphasis that do not trouble this model of human subjectivity. There have been some attempts to leave this three-part framework. For example, some in the Humean camp have suggested that religion is essentially a particular feeling with zero cognition. But that romantic suggestion collapses under the inability to articulate how an affective state can be noncognitive but still identifiable as a particular feeling (Proudfoot 1985).

Although the three-sided model of the true, the beautiful, and the good is a classic account of what any social group explicitly and implicitly teaches, one aspect is still missing. To recognize the always-presupposed material reality of the people who constitute the social group, even when this reality has not been conceptualized by the group’s members, one should also include the contributions of their bodies, habits, physical culture, and social structures. To include this dimension mnemonically, one can add a “fourth C”, for community. Catherine Albanese (1981) may have been the first to propose the idea of adding this materialist dimension. Ninian Smart’s famous anatomy of religion (1996) has seven dimensions, not four, but the two models are actually very similar. Smart calls the affective dimension the “experiential and emotional”, and then divides the cognitive dimension into two (“doctrinal and philosophical” and “narrative and mythological”), the conative into two (“ethical and legal” and “ritual”), and the communal into two (“social and institutional” and “material”). In an attempt to dislodge the focus on human subjectivity found in the three Cs, some have argued that the material dimension is the source of the others. They argue, in other words, that the cognitive, affective, and conative aspects of the members of a social group are not the causes but rather the effects of the group’s structured practices (e.g., Asad 1993: ch. 1–4; Lopez 1998). Some argue that to understand religion in terms of beliefs, or even in terms of any subjective states, reflects a Protestant bias and that scholars of religion should therefore shift attention from hidden mental states to the visible institutional structures that produce them. Although the structure/agency debate is still live in the social sciences, it is unlikely that one can give a coherent account of religion in terms of institutions or disciplinary practices without reintroducing mental states such as judgements, decisions, and dispositions (Schilbrack 2021).

Whether a monothetic approach focuses on one essential property or a set, and whether that essence is the substance or the function of the religion, those using this approach ask a Yes/No question regarding a single criterion. This approach therefore typically produces relatively clear lines between what is and is not religion. Given Tylor’s monothetic definition, for instance, a form of life must include belief in spiritual beings to be a religion; a form of life lacking this property would not be a religion, even if it included belief in a general order of existence that participants took as their ultimate concern, and even if that form of life included rituals, ethics, and scriptures. In a famous discussion, Melford Spiro (1966) works with a Tylorean definition and argues exactly this: lacking a belief in superhuman beings, Theravada Buddhism, for instance, is something other than a religion. [ 8 ] For Spiro, there is nothing pejorative about this classification.

Having combatted the notion that “we” have religion (which is “good”) and “they” have superstition (which is “bad”), why should we be dismayed if it be discovered that that society x does not have religion as we have defined the term? (1966: 88)

That a concept always corresponds to something possessing a defining property is a very old idea. This assumption undergirds Plato’s Euthyphro and other dialogues in which Socrates pushes his interlocutors to make that hidden, defining property explicit, and this pursuit has provided a model for much not only of philosophy, but of the theorizing in all fields. The traditional assumption is that every entity has some essence that makes it the thing it is, and every instance that is accurately described by a concept of that entity will have that essence. The recent argument that there is an alternative structure—that a concept need not have necessary and sufficient criteria for its application—has been called a “conceptual revolution” (Needham 1975: 351), “one of the greatest and most valuable discoveries that has been made of late years in the republic of letters” (Bambrough 1960–1: 207).

In discussions of the concept religion , this anti-essentialist approach is usually traced to Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953, posthumous). Wittgenstein argues that, in some cases, when one considers the variety of instances described with a given concept, one sees that among them there are multiple features that “crop up and disappear”, the result being “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing” (Wittgenstein 1953, §68). The instances falling under some concepts lack a single defining property but instead have a family resemblance to each other in that each one resembles some of the others in different ways. All polythetic approaches reject the monothetic idea that a concept requires necessary and sufficient criteria. But unappreciated is the fact that polythetic approaches come in different kinds, operating with different logics. Here are three.

The most basic kind of polythetic approach holds that membership in a given class is not determined by the presence of a single crucial characteristic. Instead, the concept maps a cluster of characteristics and, to count as a member of that class, a particular case has to have a certain number of them, no particular one of which is required. To illustrate, imagine that there are five characteristics typical of religions (call this the “properties set”) and that, to be a religion, a form of life has to have a minimum of three of them (call this the “threshold number”). Because this illustration limits the number of characteristics in the properties set, I will call this first kind a “bounded” polythetic approach. For example, the five religion-making characteristics could be these:

• belief in superempirical beings or powers,
• ethical norms,
• worship rituals,
• participation believed to bestow benefits on participants, and
• those who participate in this form of life see themselves as a distinct community.

Understanding the concept religion in this polythetic way produces a graded hierarchy of instances. [ 9 ] A form of life that has all five of these characteristics would be a prototypical example of a religion. Historically speaking, prototypical examples of the concept are likely to be instances to which the concept was first applied. Psychologically speaking, they are also likely to be the example that comes to mind first to those who use the concept. For instance, robins and finches are prototypical examples of a bird, and when one is prompted to name a bird, people are more likely to name a robin or a finch than an ostrich or a penguin. A form of life that has only four of these characteristics would nevertheless still be a clear example of a religion. [ 10 ] If a form of life has only three, then it would be a borderline example. A form of life that has only two of these characteristics would not be included in the category, though such cases might be considered “quasi-religions” and they might be the most interesting social forms to compare to religions (J. E. Smith 1994). A form of life that only had one of the five characteristics would be unremarkable. The forms of life that had three, four, or five of these characteristics would not be an unrelated set but rather a “family” with multiple shared features, but no one characteristic (not even belief in superempirical beings or powers) possessed by all of them. On this polythetic approach, the concept religion has no essence, and a member of this family that only lacked one of the five characteristics— no matter which one —would still clearly be a religion. [ 11 ] As Benson Saler (1993) points out, one can use this non-essentialist approach not only for the concept religion but also for the elements within a religion (sacrifice, scripture, and so on) and to individual religions (Christianity, Hinduism, and so on).

Some have claimed that, lacking an essence, polythetic approaches to religion make the concept so vague that it becomes useless (e.g., Fitzgerald 2000: 72–3; Martin 2009: 167). Given the focused example of a “bounded” approach in the previous paragraph and the widespread adoption of polythetic approaches in the biological sciences, this seems clearly false. However, it is true that one must pay attention to the parameters at work in a polythetic approach. Using a properties set with only five elements produces a very focused class, but the properties set is simply a list of similarities among at least two of the members of a class, and since the class of religions might have hundreds of members, one could easily create a properties set that is much bigger. Not long after Wittgenstein’s death, a “bounded” polythetic approach was applied to the concept religion by William Alston who identified nine religion-making characteristics. [ 12 ] Southwold (1978) has twelve; Rem Edwards (1972) has fourteen and leaves room for more. But there is no reason why one might not work with a properties set for religion with dozens or even hundreds of shared properties. Half a century ago, Rodney Needham (1975: 361) mentions a computer program that sorted 1500 different bacterial strains according to 200 different properties. As J. Z. Smith (1982: ch. 1) argues, treating the concept religion in this way can lead to surprising discoveries of patterns within the class and the co-appearance of properties that can lead to explanatory theories. The second key parameter for a polythetic approach is the threshold number. Alston does not stipulate the number of characteristics a member of the class has to have, saying simply, “When enough of these characteristics are present to a sufficient degree, we have a religion” (1967: 142). Needham (1975) discusses the sensible idea that each member has a majority of the properties, but this is not a requirement of polythetic approaches. The critics are right that as one increases the size of the properties set and decreases the threshold number, the resulting category becomes more and more diffuse. This can produce a class that is so sprawling that it is difficult to use for empirical study.

Scholars of religion who have used a polythetic approach have typically worked with a “bounded” approach (that is, with a properties set that is fixed), but this is not actually the view for which Wittgenstein himself argues. Wittgenstein’s goal is to draw attention to the fact that the actual use of concepts is typically not bound: “the extension of the concept is not closed by a frontier” (Wittgenstein 1953, §67). We can call this an “open” polythetic approach. To grasp the open approach, consider a group of people who have a concept they apply to a certain range of instances. In time, a member of the group encounters something new that resembles the other instances enough in her eyes that she applies the concept to it. When the linguistic community adopts this novel application, the extension of the concept grows. If their use of the concept is “open”, however, then, as the group adds a new member to the category named by a concept, properties of that new member that had not been part of the earlier uses can be added to the properties set and thereby increase the range of legitimate applications of the concept in the future. We might say that a bounded polythetic approach produces concepts that are fuzzy, and an open polythetic approach produces concepts that are fuzzy and evolving . Timothy Williamson calls this “the dynamic quality of family resemblance concepts” (1994: 86). One could symbolize the shift of properties over time this way:

Wittgenstein famously illustrated this open polythetic approach with the concept game , and he also applied it to the concepts of language and number (Wittgenstein 1953, §67). If we substitute our concept as Wittgenstein’s example, however, his treatment fits religion just as well:

Why do we call something a “religion”? Well, perhaps because it has a direct relationship with several things that have hitherto been called religion; and this can be said to give an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name. (Wittgenstein 1953, §67)

Given an open polythetic approach, a concept evolves in the light of the precedents that speakers recognize, although, over time, what people come to label with the concept can become very different from the original use.

In the academic study of religions, discussions of monothetic and polythetic approaches have primarily been in service of developing a definition of the term. [ 13 ] How can alternate definitions of religion be assessed? If one were to offer a lexical definition (that is, a description of what the term means in common usage, as with a dictionary definition), then the definition one offers could be shown to be wrong. In common usage, for example, Buddhism typically is considered a religion and capitalism typically is not. On this point, some believe erroneously that one can correct a definition by pointing to some fact about the referents of the term. One sees this assumption, for example, in those who argue that the western discovery of Buddhism shows that theistic definitions of religion are wrong (e.g., Southwold 1978: 367). One can correct a real or lexical definition in this way, but not a stipulative definition, that is, a description of the meaning that one assigns to the term. When one offers a stipulative definition, that definition cannot be wrong. Stipulative definitions are assessed not by whether they are true or false but rather by their usefulness, and that assessment will be purpose-relative (cf. Berger 1967: 175). De Muckadell (2014) rejects stipulative definitions of religion for this reason, arguing that one cannot critique them and that they force scholars simply to “accept whatever definition is offered”. She gives the example of a problematic stipulative definition of religion as “ice-skating while singing” which, she argues, can only be rejected by using a real definition of religion that shows the ice-skating definition to be false. However, even without knowing the real essence of religion, one can critique a stipulative definition, either for being less adequate or appropriate for a particular purpose (such as studying forms of life across cultures) or, as with the ice-skating example, for being so far from a lexical definition that it is adequate or appropriate for almost no purpose.

Polythetic definitions are increasingly popular today as people seek to avoid the claim that an evolving social category has an ahistorical essence. [ 14 ] However, the difference between these two approaches is not that monothetic definitions fasten on a single property whereas polythetic definitions recognize more. Monothetic definitions can be multifactorial, as we have seen, and they can recognize just as many properties that are “common” or even “typical” of religions, without being essential. The difference is also not that the monothetic identification of the essence of religion reflects an ethnocentrism that polythetic approaches avoid. The polythetic identification of a prototypical religion is equally ethnocentric. The difference between them, rather, is that a monothetic definition sorts instances with a Yes/No mechanism and is therefore digital, and a polythetic definition produces gradations and is therefore analog. It follows that a monothetic definition treats a set of instances that all possess the one defining property as equally religion, whereas a polythetic definition produces a gray area for instances that are more prototypical or less so. This makes a monothetic definition superior for cases (for example, legal cases) in which one seeks a Yes/No answer. Even if an open polythetic approach accurately describes how a concept operates, therefore, one might, for purposes of focus or clarity, prefer to work with a closed polythetic account that limits the properties set, or even with a monothetic approach that limits the properties set to one. That is, one might judge that it is valuable to treat the concept religion as structurally fuzzy or temporally fluid, but nevertheless place boundaries on the forms of life one will compare.

This strategy gives rise to a third kind of polythetic approach, one that stipulates that one property (or one set of properties) is required. Call this an “anchored” polythetic definition. Consistently treating concepts as tools, Wittgenstein suggests this “anchored” idea when he writes that when we look at the history of a concept,

what we see is something constantly fluctuating … [but we might nevertheless] set over against this fluctuation something more fixed, just as one paints a stationary picture of the constantly altering face of the landscape. (1974: 77)

Given a stipulated “anchor”, a concept will then possess a necessary property, and this property reintroduces essentialism. Such a definition nevertheless still reflects a polythetic approach because the presence of the required property is not sufficient to make something a religion. To illustrate this strategy, one might stipulate that the only forms of life one will consider a religion will include

(thereby excluding nationalism and capitalism, for example), but the presence of this property does not suffice to count this form of life as a religion. Consider the properties set introduced above that also includes

If the threshold number is still three, then to be a religion, a form of life would have to have three of these properties, one of which must be (A) . An anchored definition of religion like this would have the benefits of the other polythetic definitions. For example, it would not produce a clear line between religion and nonreligion but would instead articulate gradations between different forms of life (or between versions of one form of life at different times) that are less or more prototypically religious. However, given its anchor, it would produce a more focused range of cases. [ 15 ] In this way, the use of an anchor might both reflect the contemporary cosmological view of the concept religion and also address the criticism that polythetic approaches make a concept too vague.

Over the past forty years or so, there has been a reflexive turn in the social sciences and humanities as scholars have pulled the camera back, so to speak, to examine the constructed nature of the objects previously taken for granted as unproblematically “there”. Reflexive scholars have argued that the fact that what counts as religion shifts according to one’s definition reflects an arbitrariness in the use of the term. They argue that the fact that religion is not a concept found in all cultures but rather a tool invented at a certain time and place, by certain people for their own purposes, and then imposed on others, reveals its political character. The perception that religion is a politically motivated conceptual invention has therefore led some to skepticism about whether the concept picks out something real in the world. As with instrumentalism in philosophy of science, then, reflection on religion has raised doubts about the ontological status of the referent of one’s technical term.

A watershed text for the reflexive turn regarding the concept religion is Jonathan Z. Smith’s Imagining Religion (1982). Smith engages simultaneously in comparing religions and in analyzing the scholarly practice of comparison. A central theme of his essays is that the concept religion (and subcategories such as world religions , Abrahamic faiths , or nonliterate traditions ) are not scientific terms but often reflect the unrecognized biases of those who use these concepts to sort their world into those who are or are not “like us”. [ 16 ] Smith shows that, again and again, the concept religion was shaped by implicit Protestant assumptions, if not explicit Protestant apologetics. In the short preface to that book, Smith famously says,

[ T ] here is no data for religion . Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy. (1982: xi, italics in original)

This dramatic statement has sometimes been taken as Smith’s assertion that the concept religion has no referent. However, in his actual practice of comparing societies, Smith is not a nonrealist about religion . In the first place, he did not think that the constructed nature of religion was something particular to this concept: any judgement that two things were similar or different in some respect presupposed a process of selection, juxtaposition, and categorization by the observer. This is the process of imagination in his book’s title. Second, Smith did not think that the fact that concepts were human products undermined the possibility that they successfully corresponded to entities in the world: an invented concept for social structures can help one discover religion—not “invent” it—even in societies whose members did not know the concept. [ 17 ] His slogan is that one’s (conceptual) map is not the same as and should be tested and rectified by the (non-conceptual) territory (J. Z. Smith 1978). Lastly, Smith did not think that scholars should cease to use religion as a redescriptive or second-order category to study people in history who lacked a comparable concept. On the contrary, he chastised scholars of religion for resting within tradition-specific studies, avoiding cross-cultural comparisons, and not defending the coherence of the generic concept. He writes that scholars of religion should be

prepared to insist, in some explicit and coherent fashion, on the priority of some generic category of religion. (1995: 412; cf. 1998: 281–2)

Smith himself repeatedly uses religion and related technical terms he invented, such as “locative religion”, to illuminate social structures that operate whether or not those so described had named those structures themselves—social structures that exist, as his 1982 subtitle says, from Babylon to Jonestown.

The second most influential book in the reflexive turn in religious studies is Talal Asad’s Genealogies of Religion (1993). Adopting Michel Foucault’s “genealogical” approach, Asad seeks to show that the concept religion operating in contemporary anthropology has been shaped by assumptions that are Christian (insofar as one takes belief as a mental state characteristic of all religions) and modern (insofar as one treats religion as essentially distinct from politics). Asad’s Foucauldian point is that though people may have all kinds of religious beliefs, experiences, moods, or motivations, the mechanism that inculcates them will be the disciplining techniques of some authorizing power and for this reason one cannot treat religion as simply inner states. Like Smith, then, Asad asks scholars to shift their attention to the concept religion and to recognize that assumptions baked into the concept have distorted our grasp of the historical realities. However, also like Smith, Asad does not draw a nonrealist conclusion. [ 18 ] For Asad, religion names a real thing that would operate in the world even had the concept not been invented, namely, “a coherent existential complex” (2001: 217). Asad’s critical aim is not to undermine the idea that religion exists qua social reality but rather to undermine the idea that religion is essentially an interior state independent of social power. He points out that anthropologists like Clifford Geertz adopt a hermeneutic approach to culture that treats actions as if they are texts that say something, and this approach has reinforced the attention given to the meaning of religious symbols, deracinated from their social and historical context. Asad seeks to balance this bias for the subjective with a disciplinary approach that sees human subjectivity as also the product of social structures. Smith and Asad are therefore examples of scholars who critique the concept religion without denying that it can still refer to something in the world, something that exists even before it is named. They are able, so to speak, to look at one’s conceptual window without denying that the window provides a perspective on things outside.

Other critics have gone farther. They build upon the claims that the concept religion is an invented category and that its modern semantic expansion went hand in hand with European colonialism, and they argue that people should cease treating religion as if it corresponds to something that exists outside the sphere of modern European influence. It is common today to hear the slogan that there is no such “thing” as religion. In some cases, the point of rejecting thing-hood is to deny that religion names a category, all the instances of which focus on belief in the same kind of object—that is, the slogan is a rejection of substantive definitions of the concept (e.g., Possamai 2018: ch. 5). In this case, the objection bolsters a functional definition and does not deny that religion corresponds to a functionally distinct kind of form of life. Here, the “no such thing” claim reflects the unsettled question, mentioned above, about the grounds of substantive definitions of “religion”. In other cases, the point of this objection is to deny that religion names a defining characteristic of any kind—that is, the slogan is a rejection of all monothetic definitions of the concept. Perhaps religion (or a religion, like Judaism) should always be referred to in the plural (“Judaisms”) rather than the singular. In this case, the objection bolsters a polythetic definition and does not deny that religion corresponds to a distinct family of forms of life. Here, the “no such thing” claim rejects the assumption that religion has an essence. Despite their negativity, these two objections to the concept are still realist in that they do not deny that the phrase “a religion” can correspond to a form of life operating in the world.

More radically, one sees a denial of this realism, for example, in the critique offered by Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1962). Smith’s thesis is that in many different cultures, people developed a concept for the individuals they considered pious, but they did not develop a concept for a generic social entity, a system of beliefs and practices related to superempirical realities. Before modernity, “there is no such entity [as religion and] … the use of a plural, or with an article, is false” (1962: 326, 194; cf. 144). Smith recommends dropping religion . Not only did those so described lack the concept, but the use of the concept also treats people’s behavior as if the phrase “a religion” names something in addition to that behavior. A methodological individualist, Smith denies that groups have any reality not explained by the individuals who constitute them. What one finds in history, then, is religious people, and so the adjective is useful, but there are no religious entities above and beyond those people, and so the noun reifies an abstraction. Smith contends that

[n]either religion in general nor any one of the religions … is in itself an intelligible entity, a valid object of inquiry or of concern either for the scholar or for the [person] of faith. (1962: 12)

More radical still are the nonrealists who argue that the concepts religion, religions, and religious are all chimerical. Often drawing on post-structuralist arguments, these critics propose that the notion that religions exist is simply an illusion generated by the discourse about them (e.g., McCutcheon 1997; 2018; Fitzgerald 2000; 2007; 2017; Dubuisson 1998; 2019). As Timothy Fitzgerald writes, the concept religion

picks out nothing and it clarifies nothing … the word has no genuine analytical work to do and its continued use merely contributes to the general illusion that it has a genuine referent …. (2000: 17, 14; also 4)

Advocates of this position sometimes call their approach the “Critical Study of Religion” or simply “Critical Religion”, a name that signals their shift away from the pre-critical assumption that religion names entities in the world and to a focus on who invented the concept, the shifting contrast terms it has had, and the uses to which it has been put. [ 19 ] Like the concept of witches or the concept of biological races (e.g., Nye 2020), religion is a fiction (Fitzgerald 2015) or a fabrication (McCutcheon 2018), a concept invented and deployed not to respond to some reality in the world but rather to sort and control people. The classification of something as “religion” is not neutral but

a political activity, and one particularly related to the colonial and imperial situation of a foreign power rendering newly encountered societies digestible and manipulable in terms congenial to its own culture and agenda. (McCutcheon & Arnal 2012: 107)

As part of European colonial projects, the concept has been imposed on people who lacked it and did not consider anything in their society “their religion”. In fact, the concept was for centuries the central tool used to rank societies on a scale from primitive to civilized. To avoid this “conceptual violence” or “epistemic imperialism” (Dubuisson 2019: 137), scholars need to cease naturalizing this term invented in modern Europe and instead historicize it, uncovering the conditions that gave rise to the concept and the interests it serves. The study of religions outside Europe should end. As Timothy Fitzgerald writes, “The category ‘religion’ should be the object, not the tool, of analysis” (2000: 106; also 2017: 125; cf. McCutcheon 2018: 18).

Inspired by the post-structuralist critiques that religion does not apply to cultures that lack the concept, some historians have argued that the term should no longer be used to describe any premodern societies, even in Europe. For example, Brent Nongbri (2013), citing McCutcheon, argues that though it is common to speak of religions existing in the past, human history until the concept emerged in modernity is more accurately understood as a time “before religion”. His aim is “to dispel the commonly held idea that there is such a thing as ‘ancient religion’” (2013: 8). Citing Nongbri, Carlin Barton and Daniel Boyarin (2016) argue that the Latin religio and the Greek thrēskeia do not correspond to the modern understanding of religion and those studying antiquity should cease translating them with that concept. There was no “Roman religious reality”, they say (2016: 19). These historians suggest that if a culture does not have the concept of X , then the reality of X does not exist for that culture. Boyarin calls this position “nominalism”, arguing that religion is

not in any possible way a “real” object, an object that is historical or ontological, before the term comes to be used. (2017: 25)

These critics are right to draw attention to the fact that in the mind of most contemporary people, the concept religion does imply features that did not exist in ancient societies, but the argument that religion did not exist in antiquity involves a sleight of hand. None of these historians argues that people in antiquity did not believe in gods or other spiritual beings, did not seek to interact with them with sacrifices and other rituals, did not create temples or scriptures, and so on. If one uses Tylor’s definition of religion as belief in spiritual beings or James’s definition of religion as adjusting one’s life to an unseen order— or any of the other definitions considered in this entry —then religion did exist in antiquity. What these historians are pointing out is that ancient practices related to the gods permeated their cultures . As Nongbri puts it,

To be sure, ancient people had words to describe proper reverence of the gods, but … [t]he very idea of “being religious” requires a companion notion of what it would mean to be “not religious” and this dichotomy was not part of the ancient world; (2013: 4)

there was no “discrete sphere of religion existing prior to the modern period” (2019: 1, typo corrected). And Barton and Boyarin:

The point is not … that there weren’t practices with respect to “gods” (of whatever sort) but that these practices were not divided off into separate spheres …. (2016: 4)

Steve Mason also argues that religion did not exist in antiquity since religion is “a voluntary sphere of activity, separate in principle” from politics, work, entertainment, and military service (2019: 29). In short, what people later came to conceptualize as religion was in antiquity not a freestanding entity. The nominalist argument, in other words, adds to the definition of the concept religion a distinctively modern feature (usually some version of “the separation of church and state”), and then argues that the referent of this now-circumscribed concept did not exist in antiquity. Their argument is not that religion did not exist outside modernity, but that modern religion did not exist outside modernity.

These post-structuralist and nominalist arguments that deny that religion is “out there” have a realist alternative. According to this alternative, there is a world independent of human conceptualization, and something can be real and it can even affect one’s life, whether or not any human beings have identified it. This is true of things whose existence does not depend on collective agreement, like biochemical signaling cascades or radioactive beta particles, and it is equally true of things whose existence does depend on collective agreement, like kinship structures, linguistic rules, and religious commitments. A realist about social structures holds that a person can be in a bilateral kinship system, can speak a Uralic language, and can be a member of a religion—even if they lack these concepts.

This realist claim that social structures have existed without being conceptualized raises the question: if human beings had different ways of practicing religion since prehistoric times, why and when did people “finally” create the taxon? Almost every scholar involved in the reflexive turn says that religion is a modern invention. [ 20 ] The critique of the concept religion then becomes part of their critique of modernity. Given the potent uses of religion —to categorize certain cultures as godless and therefore inferior or, later, to categorize certain cultures as superstitious and therefore backwards—the significance of the critique of religion for postcolonial and decolonial scholarship is undeniable. Nevertheless, it is not plausible that modern Europeans were the first to want a generic concept for different ways of interacting with gods. It is easy to imagine that if the way that a people worship their gods permeates their work, art, and politics, and they do not know of alternative ways, then it would not be likely that they would have created a concept for it. There is little need for a generic concept that abstracts a particular aspect of one’s culture as one option out of many until one is in a sustained pluralistic situation. The actions that today are categorized as religious practices—burial rites, the making of offerings, the imitation of divinized ancestors—may have existed for tens of thousands of years without the practitioners experiencing that diversity or caring to name it. Nevertheless, it is likely that a desire to compare the rules by which different people live in relation to their gods would have emerged in many parts of the world long before modernity. One would expect to find people developing such social abstractions as cities and then empires emerged and their cultures came into contact with each other. From this realist perspective, it is no surprise that, according to the detailed and example-filled argument of Barton and Boyarin (2016), the first use of religion as a generic social category, distinct from the concept of politics , for the ways that people interact with gods is not a product of the Renaissance, the Reformation, or modern colonialism at all, but can be found in the writings of Josephus (37–c. 100 CE) and Tertullian (c. 155–c. 220 CE). [ 21 ] From the realist perspective, it is no surprise to see the development of analogous terms in medieval China, centuries before interaction with Europeans (Campany 2003, 2012, 2018) and in medieval Islam (Abbasi 2020, 2021). The emergence of social kinds does not wait on language, and the development of language for social kinds is not only a Western project. If this is right, then the development of a concept for religion as a social genus is at least two thousand years old, though the social reality so labeled would be much older.

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• Turner, Bryan S., 2011, Religion and Modern Society: Citizenship, Secularization and the State , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511975660
• Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871 [1970], Primitive Culture , two vols., London: John Murray, 1871; vol. 2 reprinted as Religion in Primitive Culture , Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1970.
• Vásquez, Manuel A., 2011, More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Weed, Eric, 2019, The Religion of White Supremacy in the United States , Lanham, MD: Lexington.
• Whitehead, Alfred North, 1926, Religion in the Making , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Williamson, Timothy, 1994, Vagueness , London: Routledge.
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1953 [2009], Philosophical Investigations , G. E. M. Armstrong (trans.), Oxford: Basil Blackwell; reprinted: 4 th edition, Malden: Blackwell, 2009.
• –––, 1974, Philosophical Grammar , Anthony Kenny (trans.), Oxford: Blackwell.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Nye, Malory, 2020, “ Religion is Not a Thing ”, Religion Bites , 31 January 2020.
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Essay on Importance of Religion | Purpose, Role & Importance in Life

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Religions provides the base, an ideology for living. Throughout the years, the religions have been important part of our lives. The following essay focuses on religion, importance of religions and what role religion has to play in life.

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Essay on Religions | Meaning, Purpose & Importance of Religion in Life

It simply means a set of beliefs and rituals that people hold sacred, which in most cases is the belief in some form of higher power or powers. In a sense, it is a very personal belief system. Religion is important because it serves as a moral guide for how people are expected to act in their world. For some, it provides a sense of peace and comfort. For others, it can provide a sense of purpose in life.

Major Religions of World

There are so many religions in the world, it would be hard to cover just five of those religions. Christianity is the largest religion with over 2 billion followers all over the world.

Islam is the second largest religion in the world with around 1.5 billion followers today, which originated from middle-east. Hinduism is the third largest religion in the world with over 900 million followers. It originated from India and Nepal and it has some flexibility in its beliefs. Buddhism is the fourth largest religion in the world, with over 500 million followers around the globe. It originated from middle-east and China.

>>>>>>>> Also Read:    Essay on Charity Begins at Home

Judaism is the fifth largest religion in the world with over 14 million followers around the globe. It originated from middle-east and Africa. Jainism is the major religion in India and has around 4 million followers all over the world. It originated from India. Baha’i is the major religion in Iran with 2 million followers around the world. It originated from Israel and Syria. Sikhism is the major religion in India with 23 million followers all over the world. It originated from Middle East.

Founders of Religions:

There is no single founder of the major world religions. Most of them evolved over centuries. However, founders like Gautam Buddha, Jesus Christ and Prophet Muhammad are the major founders of three major world religions Buddhism, Christianity and Islam respectively.

Importance of Religions in Life

• Religion provides a sense of community / belonging to something greater than ourselves. Many people have the need to be part of something bigger, and religion provides that. Belonging to a group of like-minded believers gives people a sense of purpose and fulfillment.
• Religion provides a sense of identity. In the face of ever-changing trends and fads, religion gives people a sense of belonging to something more timeless and constant—a bond that transcends time.
• Religion can unite people in service towards a common good. Whether it is in the form of relief efforts during times of natural disasters, or fighting for social justice, people’s ability to work together on shared challenges is strengthened when there is a common belief system to unite them.
• Religion brings hope, comfort and peace during difficult times. Many people have turned to religion when faced with a terminal illness or a loved one is taken away from them through death. In those moments, it shines as a beacon of hope and provides inspiration.
• It is a source of guidance and provides lessons on how to live. Many religions provide practical advice for individuals on how to lead a moral life. We can all learn from each other, and religion provides a baseline for what is right and wrong.
• It gives a structure / a set of rules for how to live life. Having a religion provides a framework on what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior, as well as how to answer the difficult questions of the universe, such as “What happens after I die?”
• Religion can be a source of comfort for those who are grieving. Many people rely on their faith in times of crisis, when there seems to be no explanation for what is happening around them. Offering emotional support and comfort, religion can provide solace to those who may be confused or uncertain.

Religions Spread Peace & Love

All religions basically preach the message of love, peace and compassion. They provide the best way for humanity to find true happiness and believe that all human beings are equal. We all have been made from one essence and we must learn to live together as a collective whole

Role of Religion in Modern World

Today, many people are abandoning religion because they do not believe in the existence of God. They are thus creating their own path without religious guidance, which can be dangerous. People have become increasingly self-centered, and are unable to look beyond their own needs without some form of spirituality.

Religion still plays a very important part as it affects people’s thinking and concerns as well as defines and ratifies their behavior and morals. It also brings unity amongst the people of a particular faith and guides them to be good human beings as well as to help others in need.

>>>>>>> Read Also:     Essay on Beggars 

Religion helps make people connect to their inner-self and also look beyond. It is a source of hope for many, particularly in times of crisis. It brings us together to fight for a common cause and motivates us to be compassionate towards others. It is an important part of our life that shouldn’t be ignored or overlooked, for our own good.

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Essay Samples on Religion

Composing your student essay about religion, it’s essential to research your subject first and avoid controversial subjects. The trick is to provide a clear structure that will focus on theological aspects of things. When you strive to compare different religions, do not write in a biased tone and work on your compare-and-contrast essay. The body parts of your religion essay must start with a good topic sentence as you address a particular concept or the roots of some religious notions. It’s always good if you can find reliable sources to support the facts. If you are not sure about some source or an idea that must be explored, you can either talk to an academic advisor or focus on a good religion essay example that we have prepared for you. These will help you get a basic idea of how such essays must be written. See the introduction part in every essay sample provided and don’t forget to stay respectful as you work on the differences and similarities. Check your grading rubric requirements twice. Regarding a good thesis statement, religious essays should only pose assumptions or compose specific claims that are supported with another sentence to avoid misreading or confusion.

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• Why Is Religion So Important In Culture?

• More than 1.2 billion people today do not consider themselves religious, associate themselves as atheists, agnostics, or secular.
• Religion can be a key factor in the cultural identity of many people, influencing their behavior and traditions.
• Rituals, sacrifices, prayer, art, are one of the many ways people show their allegiance to a particular religion.

There are more than 10,000 religions in the world, some of which you probably never heard of or knew they existed. The majority of the world population is associated with Christianity (the largest religion), Islam, and Hinduism. However, around 1.2 billion people are without religious affiliation, those that associate themselves as atheists, agnostic, or secular.

Religion and culture have both been subjects of much scholarly debate throughout history, and remain in the spotlight of many discussions. Their relationship is complicated at best, and not easy to explain, but they are both important in the lives of humans and how they construct and make sense of the world around us. Even the terms themselves, "religion" and "culture," ask for explanations that are out of the scope of this article. However, we will try to make this as simple as possible.

Why Is It Hard To Define Religion?

Ever since the 9/11 attacks on the United States of America, there has been a significant increase in the study of religion and its impact on society and culture. Because of the attacks, there has been a growth of interest in the religion of Islam, as well as the increase in the critique of Islam. However, it also reinforced fundamentalism in faith, which provides a way of dealing with the plethora of choices offered by our societies.

Anthropologists like Clifford Geertz considered religion to be a cultural system, containing symbols that establish powerful moods and motivations by constructing a realistic order of existence. No academic will tell you an identical definition of religion or agree over what exactly makes a religion. However, many will agree that religion is a system of different behaviors and practices and that every religion has its set of morals, ethics, and sacred sites dedicated to figures they respect (they can be people, supernatural beings, or any form of transcendence that provides guidance or afterlife).

Religion incorporates the relation of human beings to supernatural, spiritual aspects of existence. Religious practices are one of the most common ways people show their allegiance or respect towards a particular religion. Such practices can be, or not, limited to rituals, sacrifices, prayer, art, the commemoration of the dead , going to churches, and many more, extending into various facets of human culture that we witness and experience daily.

The Cultural Importance Of Religion

"God is Dead," said Nietzsche , alluding to the secularization in the West, and the decline of the idea that a divine entity governed our universe. Because of the scientific revolution, the post-enlightenment period of history no longer needed God, according to Nietzsche. Today, more than 1 billion people are those with no religious affiliation, but can we be responsible for creating our value systems and moral guidelines without the divine intervention?

Even if we think we are, can religion ever be fully removed from our daily life and our culture? Whatever the answer is, it might not be important in exploring the ways of how religion is linked with cultural beliefs . Religion influences cultures, but it is also influenced by culture. Religion can play a big part in the cultural identity of people, influencing how they dress, what and when they eat, and how they behave.

Many of the cultural traditions are closely associated with religion, and many religious practices and behaviors have become so rooted in the daily lives of people all over the world that it is hard to make a distinct difference between culture and religion.

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Why is Religion Important Essay

If we are not governed by a set of values, then our principles and idea of right and wrong are only based on opinion. The Nazis were not evil. They had a set of values that do not match many of the values that exist today. If they had kept to the religious promises they made the Vatican as they rose to power, then they would have had a hard time taking life in the way they did. My hypothesis is that religion is a human creation, but without some form of faith in more than human opinion, we are lost because only have ourselves to account to.

Human nature is bad. We are not born with a knowledge of right or wrong. That is why people turn out so differently. It is not because a person is born good or bad, but the way they are treated and the values they are taught is what makes them the person they become. Religion has sets of rules that people follow on mass. These rules are more than laws with punishments and rewards, they are based on a set of values, and those are the things that help a person grow to be well adjusted.

Imagine kids without the rule of parents. If a child was allowed to run around and do what he or she wished in an unchecked manner, then children would kill themselves by accident, become sociopaths, and become savages. There would be no way of knowing what would happen. Kids need a parental figure to give out rules and teach values, and that is what religion does for adults. It gives them a set of values and rules to live by.

We are taught what is right and wrong, and religion allows a certain unification that governments are unable to instill. The law tells us not to kill. We are not born with that knowledge. We are born to kill, which is why kids are often merciless insect (and pet) killers. We have both eyes facing front, which means we are born predators. The law tells us not to kill and not to steal. Most will never do such things, and part of that is due to religion. Religion came up with the idea that we shouldn’t kill and steal long before the law did.

The law simply tells us what to do, but religion tries to explain why we should do things. One may say that we do not do things because the law tells us not to, and that is a good enough reason for them, but it is too black and white for most people. Religion helps us shape values so we can make our own choices. For example, the law may say do not kill, but religion (the good religions) teaches us the sanctity of life, so if we had to kill a single person in order to save thousands–then religion allows us to make that choice where the law does not.

The law is the government’s way of trying to instill values, but they simply cannot do it with rules alone. The government would hope that if you follow the law, then you will see why it works and learn your values that way–but it is doing it all backwards. With peace-loving and good religions that do not condone killing, such as any religion “other than” the Arian brotherhood, Islam, and Satanism, you are taught why something is wrong so that you may then choose what you do. Good religions that do not condone killing say you can break the law because you have choices, but it first gives you the reasons and values needed to make the right decision (which usually involves following the law).

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Essay on The Importance of Religion in the World

We live in a world today filled with: low self-esteem, bullying, hate crimes, lying, abuse, child molestation, depression, racism, addiction(s), murder, corruption, violence, rape, self-mutilation, witchcraft, pornography, sexual immorality, broken hearts, hatred, greed, eating disorders, jealousy, suicide, starvation, torture, hypocrisy, and death. Religion is important because it teaches people about themselves. It gives them hope for a future free from all this sorrow and heartache, and through stories, parables, and quotes from prudent prophets of old said to be hearing the voice of God , or recalling evidence of miracles and extreme faith it provides a lifeline to God, and spiritual fulfillment. It teaches people morals, principal, …show more content…

This goes to say that there would be no government, hypocrisy, violence, rebellion, greed, divorce, power-trips, control freaks, war, bad parents, or anarchy. Parents would govern their own household and teach their children Gods will for their lives according to the bible which would be considered their daily bread of life, so that by the time the child has matured into adulthood they would be whole-heartedly devoted to Christlikeness by the unconditional love and perfect example their parents would imbue them with. Surprisingly, I’m not really the religious type. I believe in God, and have a personal relationship with him. Although I have seen miracles preformed in God’s name, heard his voice, felt his encumbering love and compassion wash over me, tasted his amazing blessings, and been shown his never-ending mercies, there was once a time where even though I have been baptized since the age of four, have grown up in the church/private school, and have received the gift of the holy spirit /spoken in tongues for as long as I can remember…I questioned the legitimacy of God’s presence in my life, or His existence at all. I saw religion as a way to shelter and brainwash multitudes of

World History Argumentative Paper- Religion’s Effect on Society

• 5 Works Cited

From the start of civilization, religion has played a crucial role in the development of most societies. The proof of its influence is evident in the way daily life was carried out. Religion had the power to affect everything from social status to common law, thus dominating a large portion of the culture. In ancient Egyptian, Islamic, and Indian society, religion had the capacity to establish how the average person would conduct their daily life.

What Does Religion Mean To You Essay

Religion is most basically defined as the belief and worship of a higher power, more specifically a belief in one or many Gods. Although no two religions are exactly the same, all religions are based off of some belief. My own personal belief is based off of Catholicism. While I do not agree with all the teachings of the catholic church, I do believe that Jesus is our lord and savior. He symbolizes hope and forgiveness for me and is a constant in my life.

Why Religion Is Good Or Bad Essay

Religion is constructed on faith and belief of an individual even though it is the individual choice to follow it or not. It has stirred a lot of debates for years; those who are trying to prove that God exists throughout history and follow to modern day. While, those who are atheist are trying to prove their point of God does not exist. There are still more and more theories and debate over the subject of religious view. It is a matter of theism versus atheism; new and old philosophers have joined the debate and all with different sides to another philosopher’s theory or view on the matter. In this paper, I will attempt to illustrate the reasons given by Louis Pojman of why religion is good or bad, as well as evaluating Bertrand Russell argument about religion. This can define the meaning of life and the creation of life as we know it. It can change views or switch sides for there is always another explanation to exactly what religion is all about and having a superior ruler that created all.

Brave New World Essay

Religion forms as a method for dealing with life and the world it makes up. It answers the questions that are beyond science and logic. It eliminates the question of "Why?", and brings the fellow believers together to cope with the community and personal problems. People come to religion to find stability, a sense of understanding, and help from other believers. These are the needs that religion fulfills.

Religion In Brave New World By Mustapha Mond

“A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.” - Albert Einstein. While Albert Einstein is most certainly correct about the idea of religion not being a necessity for an individual or a society as a whole, religion still has a large influence over society whether it is necessary or not. And with the large influence of religion comes the large importance of religion.

American Grace: The Importance Of Religion In The United States

Through out history religion has played a major role in history. For many people who settled in Northern New England came for religious freedom and the colonies were spread because of that. Believing in religion is often the spiritual thing that they lead their life with. Robert Putnam, in his book, American Grace; How Religion Divides and Unites Us claims that religion, when taken in high doses is toxic to civil life, this is true to an extent. Although many people can agree with his claim he isn’t completely right because religion can still be beneficial for people who truly believe in it. Its true religion has set back society a few steps with the prosecution of many innocent people and the deaths of thousands of people but, religion has also helped many people get through hardships they face.

Essay on World Religion Final Hum 130

In this paper I will be discussing what I learned about Christianity and Islamic faiths. How that even though these two religions have differences that they have core similarities and history that show that they have more in common than they do not have in common. I will discuss my interview at a Christian church and what I learned from it. Then I will discuss how much all the religions I have studied in this class have in common. Touching on their philosophies, beliefs, virtues and traditions and any areas that show areas they have in common.

Religion In Beowulf

Religion has been important to mankind since he discovered that he could think. Especially when the questions arose on where man came from. Thus, the invention of a supreme being and ideas on how man came about. In a time before scientific discovery, man had tales of the beginning of life on Earth. The stories were passed down from generation to generation and each corner of the world had their own take on how life was created.

Pei was asking me the biggest decision that makes me started studying again. I shared about how God saved me when I was in my lowest point and He was the One who brought me into the light. She was surprised as she said that she would only find someone to express her sadness, instead to Buddha. They would only go to the Chinese Temple when they need money or asking for peace and health upon them. I was happy that finally I got the chance to share the main point of my faith! I shared her some Bible verses about Christ carries our burdens and sadness, especially John 14 where Jesus comforts His disciples.

Social Conditioning Influences

Religion has been out for many years, and many people believe that religion is important, because it helps them to figure out what is right and what is wrong. Even though it helps in the sense of morality, it has also somewhat ruin society in a way where people today seem to isolate each other from many other cultures because they are not the “same”. Because of religion, people are always trying to go by what their religion tells them, in other words, people go by their beliefs throughout life. One example of religion used in an everyday life, is when sinning in the Christian religion, is known to be a horrible idea and if you do not follow the religion exactly you will be sent to hell rather than heaven. Also, Christians have a specific way of dressing. Girls should wear a long skirt and are not allowed to wear jeans because it does not follow what the bible says. Not to forget that depending on your gender or sex is an should be the only good way of living, which means that changing genders is not okay. Religion has also created stereotypes. For example, women should be nurturing, and men should be the men of the house. Religion separates the importance of being human beings and manages the way someone can think or

Essay on Why Is Religion Important?

In this essay we will discuss the importance of religion in society. We will attempt to explain why societies have religions and what functions their belief system has for them. We will also ask if these functions are now out-dated and if religions have any meaningful function in today's world or are they just stained glass windows into a bygone era? 'Religion' can be defined by two main groupings. 'The inclusive definition' covers all topics and subjects of a persons life including, not only, their belief in a deity but also their belief and belongingness to music, sport and any other interests the person may hold. 'The exclusive definition' refers to just their belief system regarding a 'supra-human' (Browne 2005, p. 311). It is mainly

My Utopi My Vision Of A Perfect Society

The forests would be kept as nature to look at and not destroy. All people could believe whichever religion they wanted. Children would be taught education about all subjects. There would be no hurtful comments made to people about appearance and looks. If people need anything people would be friendly and share if they have what the other person needs. If a law is broken the person or people would be sentence to working on the farms for a few weeks growing crops and.

Without Religion Research Paper

Whinking back to some of my first days in English and World History class, I can remember my teacher asking about religion. Why was it important? How did I feel about it? Without religion, where would the world be today? I was honestly puzzled, because you usually wouldn't sit back and think about things such as this. In response to her questions, I would say that I feel religion is important because it gives aid to helping people understand themselves and others. I feel that religion is important because humans need something to look up to. Such as a God, a Goddess, Buddha, or even many Gods. We need something that can encourage cooperation and tolerance among relative strangers. Without religion, I feel that there would be no grounded morality

Example Of A Worldview Essay

However, over the years, my faith began to wane. I don’t know If I always doubted my religion, but slowly over the years I began to slowly slip away from my religious upbringing. This all culminated in a youth camp my church held when I was around thirteen years old. During this youth camp, we were scheduled to do all sorts of service work and spiritual experiences. I had been told for years that this camp was where people finally “experienced” God, and where people finally saw God’s impact in their lives. While I appreciated the service work I got to do for others, I never had any spiritual experiences, and this moment really impacted me, and caused me to doubt the existence of a higher

Religion and Civilization Essay

• 2 Works Cited

They became the cornerstone of many earlier and later civilizations. Even today many countries, especially those in the Middle East, have religious leaders who work with the government to enact laws and “guide” the spiritual aspect of the lives of their citizens. Unfortunately, with such strong beliefs and convictions can come conflict. This conflict can be on a small scale, such as discrimination against those who don’t share the same beliefs to full-scale war which was the case in the first Crusades. In more recent times we have seen mass genocides of people based in part on religious beliefs such as the annihilation of the Jews during the Second World War. Today we see it played out in acts of terrorism, jihads. Religion is a powerful tool that can be used both to help and enrich the lives of people or used as justification for intolerance against others.

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Home — Essay Samples — Religion — Religious Freedom — Freedom of Religion

Freedom of Religion

• Categories: Religious Freedom Religious Tolerance

About this sample

Words: 693 |

Published: Jan 30, 2024

Words: 693 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

Table of contents

Historical context of freedom of religion, the significance of freedom of religion, challenges and dilemmas in ensuring freedom of religion, case studies of freedom of religion in practice.

• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract. Penguin Classics, 2003.
• Jefferson, Thomas. The U.S. Constitution.
• Walker, Phil. Religious Freedom. McGraw-Hill, 2021.
• Hill, Jonathan P. The Freedom to Be Different: Religious Diversity in the US. Harvard University Press, 2018.

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How Does Shakespeare Use Banqou In Macbeth

In Shakespeare's didactic tragedy, Shakespeare uses Banqou's character to make a clear assertion about the importance of religion, using him as an example of what happens if you stray from god. Throughout the play, Shakespeare uses Banqou's character to deliver a clear message about the importance of resisting the temptations of evil, although it may be a struggle. Shakespeare advocates turning to God for support. The internal battle Banqou experiences emphasises his humanity and allows the audience to connect with him on a deeper level than they can Macbeth. We first see this religious nature of Banqou come to light in Act 1 Scene 3 after meeting the witches. Banqou says, 'If you can look into the seeds of time'. Here, we see him try to use …show more content…

Although Banqou suffers a moral decline similar to Macbeth, it is neither as severe nor as rapid. Shakespeare's source material for the play was Holinshed's chronicles. A history book in which there is the genuine tale of Macbeth. However, the play of Macbeth differs from this book because, in the book, Banqou is involved in the murderous plot to kill Duncan. Although Banqous's consciousness remains clear after meeting the witches as the play progresses, his temptation grows. Like Macbeth, he says he can no longer sleep soundly and admits to his son Fleance that he is struggling to restrain 'cursed thoughts' and is troubled by the prophecies of the three sisters. However, there are significant differences between Macbeth and Banquo. When Banquo feels his temptation growing, he asks his son Fleance to take his sword. This demonstrates that only Macbeth takes matters into his own hands and embarks on his bloody campaign of violence. Banquo is morally stronger and doesn't succumb to the prophecies. Banqou doesn't have the same humour and ambition as Macbeth. We can assume Shakespeare changed the original tale of Banqou to paint him in a more positive light because it was believed that King James the First (Shakespeare patreon) was a descendant of Banqou. The imperative verb 'take' conveys a sense of urgency and importance. This suggests Banquo has dark thoughts and does not trust himself to act on them. In this way, Shakespeare highlights the difference between the two

More about How Does Shakespeare Use Banqou In Macbeth

Origins of Religion Response Essay

Introduction, origins of religion, works cited.

In the book, the second chapter on the origin of religion is the important since it is speculative and fascinating, as the author suggests. The author notes in the introduction that a number of studies are simply concerned with explaining the reasons why people are religious, but they do not delve into the issue touching on the origin of religion. The focus of the chapter is to report on where religious ideas and practices came from.

Moreover, the chapter evaluates the idea of God or supernatural powers since such powers are sacred forces that influence the behaviour of individuals in a number of ways. The author is of the view that answers to the origin of religion are numerous, even though they can be grouped into a few categories.

To establish the real origin of religion, the use of scientific methods is inadequate hence the use of theories is the only valid method of tracing the origins of religion. Before proceeding to look at the theories that the author provides regarding the origin of religion, it is prudent to define sociology of religion.

Sociology of religion refers to the study of cultural beliefs, practices, and forms of organizations. Sociologists study religion through some of the established tools and methods. Sociological explanation of the origin of religion is very different from the views of other scholars from different fields.

Prehistoric people had no reason to trace the origin of religion since they were not concerned with understanding the dynamics of society. In the modern society, religion plays a critical role of uniting people.

This paper discusses various theories that explain the origin religion in the modern society. Religion in the modern society is very complex, unlike in the traditional society whereby it was considered an individual’s belief system.

Revelation is one of the theories that sociologists employ in trying to explain how people started worshiping the supernatural being. The author notes that people believed in God, who was the creator, in the early days of Christianity. In this regard, God was the originator of all religions in the world, including the traditional ones. The theory suggests that God created everything on earth, including people.

In the Garden of Eden God instituted some principles and laws that were supposed to govern the first man. Later on, God would pass his message through prophets, as he did in the Old Testament. Through this process, he was creating religion since he expected people to follow his commandments. A number of religions believe in this theory, including Buddhism, Christianity, and Judaism.

Gautama Buddha claimed that he had a revelation, which inspired him to spread the Buddha teachings. Mormonism was inspired by a revelation that was in form of golden plates that were buried in a hill referred to as Cumorah in New York State (Johnstone 23).

One of the founders of religion, John Smith, claimed that God gave him the power to interpret and translate what was in the plates. In the Islamic religion, Muhammad claimed to have received visions from one of the angels referred to as Gabriel in a cave near Mecca.

Christian theologians who claim that they received direct revelation from God for the gift of true religion hold the natural knowledge of God theory (Johnstone 23). Those who believe in the Holy Bible give such explanations. In fact, the existence of other religions disturbs them so much.

In this regard, Christian theologians wonder how other religions came about since God revealed himself through the chosen people of Israel. The theory answers their question since it claims that people have a fundamental knowledge regarding the existence of God.

Johnstone is of the view that all human beings are born with an elementary knowledge of the heavenly, which is a basic awareness that God or some power is, in due course, responsible for what they witness around them (24). Other religion, other than Christianity, tries to be aware of their surrounding and make sense out of the little knowledge they have in relation to God.

Anthropologists have a different theory explaining the origins of religion. According to anthropological theories, religion emerged as a response to the experiences of various individuals, who tried to construe the world around them. Individuals in the traditional society came across awesome, mysterious, and terrifying events that forced them to reconsider their religious positions.

Some of these terrifying events include sickness, thunder and lightning, earthquakes, tidal waves, and floods (Johnstone 24). Many people sought to find the real causes of these horrifying events. Traditional religious systems were relied upon in explaining these events, which facilitated the growth of religion. People would then allocate causes for the so-called natural observable facts, as well as other recurrent incidents.

Within anthropological explanations, at least two schools of thoughts exist, one of them being naturalistic school headed by Max Muller. This school of thought insists that physical acts of nature, such as storms, sunrises, and tides, contributed to the development of religion (Muller 88).

In this regard, individuals in the prehistoric societies were fearful and defenceless since they existed at the mercy of these horrifying events. Some were worried why a tragic even would happen to them and not other people. Such individuals were of the believe that all natural disasters were either caused by human beings or other human-like agents since they witnessed people killing each other and pushing rocks.

Through this reasoning, this believe, believe in sprits was eminent since individuals thought that some agents must be hiding somewhere, with the power to natural disasters, such as death. Edward Tylor led a different school of thought that held an animistic view, which believed in personal experiences, such as dreams and reflections (Johnstone 25).

Psychologists have a different view as regards the origin of religion, which treats the origin of religion in terms of people’s emotional needs (Johnstone 25). As anthropologists focused on cognitive needs in explaining inexplicable events, psychologists are more focused on giving an emotional explanation.

In this regard, they note that people are always in need of maintaining an emotional stability whenever they experience danger, uncertainty, and interference. People ask themselves how they would get out of danger, particularly when faced with disruptions such as sickness, accident, and threats of death.

An individual would wonder why a disaster would happen to him or her or even to those he or she loves. At this stage, an individual tries to make sense out of the disaster by asking how he or she can find strength to move on. An individual would be aiming at finding some hope in the future. Brown was of the view that religion is a response to constant threats to security, safety, and future existence (12).

Sociologists offer a different explanation concerning the origins of religion. In fact, sociologists do not use the term origins, but instead they employ the word correlates in their analysis of religion to explain its origins. This means that religion is an ever-present aspect in the lives of individuals. Sociologists are focused on establishing the relationships between modern religion and other social forces.

According to modern sociologists, religion is everywhere meaning that tracing its origins would be an exercise in futility since it exists in a number of varieties. George Simmel was one of the sociologists who analyzed religion, as well as its interactions with other social variables. He was of the view that a number of no-religious aspects influence tremendous effect to various forms of religions in the modern society.

In this regard, a number of views and prototypes of expressions frequently referred to as spiritual are also found in other areas of life (Johnstone 30). These patterns are general ingredients of social interactions. They include adulation, loyalty, fervour and worship. Durkheim analyzed the role of religion in legitimizing social values and norms. Through setting standards, religion offers divine sanctions for human behaviour.

When people come together to perform rituals, their feeling of unity is strengthened. Durkheim went ahead to discuss two important concepts, which are totem and totemic principle. He observed that a totem is an object or something alive, including a bird, an animal and plants (Johnstone 31). The object is not so important to human life, but what matters is what the object worships.

Brown, Laurence. Advances in the Psychology of Religion . Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1985. Print.

Johnstone, Ronald. Religion in Society: Sociology of Religion . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2007. Print.

Muller, Max. Anthropological Religion . Whitefish: Kessinger Publication, 2005. Print.

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IvyPanda . 2019. "Origins of Religion." June 3, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/origins-of-religion/.

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Origins of Religion." June 3, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/origins-of-religion/.

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