| 11. “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” (Emile Durkheim) |
| 12. “Roughly, religion is (1) a community’s costly and hard-to-fake commitment (2) to a counterfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural agents (3) who master people’s existential anxieties, such as death and deception.” (Scott Atran) |
| 13. “A religion is: (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivation seem uniquely realistic.” (Clifford Geertz) |
| 14. “Religion is a social institution that evolved as an integral mechanism of human culture to create and promote myths, to encourage altruism and reciprocal altruism, and to reveal the level of commitment to cooperate and reciprocate among members of the community.” (Michael Shermer) |
| 15. “A religion we will define as a set of beliefs, practices and institutions which men have evolved in various societies, so far as they can be understood, as responses to those aspects of their life and situation which are believed not in the empirical-instrumental sense to be rationally understandable and/or controllable, and to which they attach a significance which includes some kind of reference to the relevant actions and events to man’s conception of the existence of a ‘supernatural’ order which is conceived and felt to have a fundamental bearing on man’s position in the universe and the values which give meaning to his fate as an individual and his relations to his fellows.” (Talcott Parsons) |
| 16. “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” (Karl Marx) |
Table 9.1 lists 16 different definitions proposed by scholars of religion. Definitions numbers 11 and 13, by Emile Durkheim and Clifford Geertz respectively, are the ones most frequently quoted by other scholars. It will be obvious that we are not even close to agreement on a definition. Many of these definitions are written in a convoluted style similar to the language used by lawyers in drafting a contract, and that warns us that we are treading on hotly contested ground.
As a fallback position, could we skirt the problem of defining religion in the same way that we often skirt the problem of defining pornography, by saying, “I can’t define pornography, but I nevertheless know it when I see it!”? No, unfortunately even that fallback position won’t work; scholars don’t agree about whether to recognize some widespread and well-known movements as religions. For instance, there have been long-standing debates among scholars of religion about whether Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shintoism should be counted as religions; the current trend is to count Buddhism but not Confucianism, although Confucianism was usually counted a decade or two ago; Confucianism is now instead usually termed a way of life or a secular philosophy.
These difficulties in defining religion are instructive. They warn us that the phenomena that we lump together as religions contain several different components, which are variously strong, weak, or virtually absent in different religions, different societies, and different stages of the evolution of religions. Religion shades into other phenomena, which possess some but not all of the attributes usually associated with religion. That’s why there is disagreement over whether Buddhism, usually counted as one of the world’s four biggest religions, really is a religion at all or is “just” a philosophy of life. The components commonly attributed to religions fall into five sets: belief in the supernatural, shared membership in a social movement, costly and visible proofs of commitment, practical rules for one’s behavior (i.e., “morality”), and belief that supernatural beings and forces can be induced (e.g., by prayer) to intervene in worldly life. As we shall see, though, it would not make sense to define religion by the combination of all five of those attributes, nor to label as non-religion a phenomenon lacking one or more of them, because one would thereby exclude some branches of movements widely recognized as religions.
The first of these five attributes is the basis of the definition of religion that I offered to my University of California undergraduate students when I first taught a course in cultural geography. I proposed, “Religion is the belief in a postulated supernatural agent for whose existence our senses can’t give us evidence, but which is invoked to explain things of which our senses do give us evidence.” This definition has two virtues: belief in supernatural agents is indeed one of the most widespread characteristics of religion; and explanation, as we shall discuss later, was among the main origins and early functions of religions. Most religions do postulate the existence of gods, spirits, and other agents that we term “supernatural” because they or their provable consequences can’t be perceived directly in the natural world. (Throughout this chapter, I shall repeatedly use the word “supernatural” in that neutral sense, without any of the pejorative connotations sometimes associated with the word.) Many religions go further and postulate the existence of an entire parallel supernatural world—often, a heaven, a hell, or another afterlife to which we ourselves shall be transferred after our death in this natural world. Some believers are so convinced of the existence of supernatural agents that they insist that they have seen, heard, or felt spirits or ghosts.
But I soon realized that my definition was inadequate, for reasons that are also instructive. Belief in supernatural agents characterizes not only religions but also phenomena that no one would consider religious—such as belief in fairies, ghosts, leprechauns, and aliens in UFOs. Why is it religious to believe in gods, but not necessarily religious to believe in fairies? (Hint: believers in fairies don’t meet on a specified day each week to perform certain rituals, don’t identify themselves as a community of fairy-believers separate from fairy-skeptics, and don’t offer to die in defense of their belief in fairies.) Conversely, some movements that everyone considers to be religions don’t require belief in supernatural agents. Numerous Jews (including rabbis), Unitarians, Japanese people, and others are agnostics or atheists but still consider themselves, and are considered by others, to belong to a religion. The Buddha did not associate himself with any gods and claimed that he was “merely” teaching a path to enlightenment that he had discovered.
A big failing in my definition was that it omitted a second attribute of religions: they are also social movements of people who identify themselves as sharing deeply held beliefs. Someone who believes in a god and in a long list of other doctrines that he invented, and who devotes part of every Sabbath to sitting in a room by himself, praying to that god, and reading a book that he has written himself but shown to no one else, doesn’t qualify as practising a religion. The closest actual equivalent to such a person is hermits who live in isolation and devote themselves to prayer. But those hermits arose from a community of believers who provided the hermits’ beliefs, and who may continue to support and visit the hermits. I’m not aware of hermits who devised their own religion from scratch, went off into the desert to live alone, and refused food offerings and discouraged visitors. If someone should show me such a hermit, I would define him as a non-religious hermit or else as a misanthrope, while others might consider him to be a typical religious hermit except for failing the test of sociality.
A third attribute of many religions is that their adherents make costly or painful sacrifices that convincingly display to others the adherents’ commitment to the group. The sacrifice may be of time: e.g., interrupting other activities five times per day to face towards Mecca and pray, or spending part of every Sunday in church, or spending years memorizing a complex ritual, prayers, and songs (possibly requiring learning another language), or devoting two years to missionary activities as a young adult (expected of Mormons), or joining a crusade or a pilgrimage or visiting Mecca at one’s own expense. The sacrifice may be of money or property donated to the church. One may offer a valuable domestic animal: one sacrifices to God one’s own lamb, not some captured wild animal that cost nothing. Or the sacrifice may be of one’s bodily comfort or integrity, by fasting, chopping off a finger joint, circumcising or subincising (splitting lengthwise) the penis, or spilling one’s blood by cutting one’s nose
