What Is Religion?

Religion is a set of beliefs, practices, codes of recognition and behavior, and institutions that provide a framework for social life and moral values. Religions have an enormously wide scope, embracing ideas about God, the universe, creation and evolution, death, the afterlife, humankind, community, family, work, play, and art. Religions are also social, in that they establish a common language and bring together people from diverse backgrounds and cultures. They form societies, organizing hierarchies and creating institutions such as schools, churches, temples, mosques, synagogues, monasteries, and gurus. They are also aesthetic, in that they are the source of artistic forms such as architecture, music, dance, and poetry and of scientific explorations of the cosmos that issued eventually into the natural sciences.

Religions are also socially active, promoting social action and morality through teachings and teaching tools such as sermons and scriptures, through rituals to mark events in the calendar and commemorate deaths, weddings, births, initiations, and funerals, and through a variety of charities to help those in need. They may also be cultural, helping to shape a national or regional identity by identifying symbols and heroes. Religions are often ecstatic, with high levels of spirituality and emotional engagement, as well as pious and puritanical. They are sacrificial, generous, superstitious, and prayerful, and they may be fanatically exclusive or even ruthless.

In its broadest sense, religion is a framework for human life as project, directed toward acknowledged but largely unknown futures. Religions map the conditions and terms of approval and disapproval, a process that is central to the development of human personalities, groups, and societies. Religions may also make life as project less unpredictable, providing a sense of stability.

For example, religions can teach that all life is sacred. They can give people a sense of purpose and meaning in their lives and in the world around them, a connection to tradition, a basis for moral beliefs and behaviors, and a reason to get up in the morning. Some research suggests that religious people may be healthier than those who are not.

But the incredibly wide range of practices that now are said to fall within the concept of religion raises two philosophical issues for this contested term. One is that the ubiquity of religions makes it questionable whether we should treat this category as a taxon, with a threshold number of characteristics that must be met for a practice to qualify as a “religion.” The other issue is that the disparate practices currently identified by this label do not seem to share any essential properties. Consequently, it might be more useful to treat the concept of religion as a family-resemblance concept, rather than an essence.