Religion is the human community’s response to those fundamental questions of origin, meaning, and destiny which have confronted humanity since the earliest times. It offers structure, a code of ethics, and a sense of purpose to its followers; often, too, it provides a promise of an afterlife. It is the source of most of our art and architecture; it has provided food, clothing, shelter, entertainment, and many of our cultural forms and traditions. It is the major resource for the exploration of the cosmos which issued, eventually, as the natural sciences; and it has always constituted, even in its most tawdry incarnations, a substantial part of our collective social experience.

In theory, the term “religion” may be used to refer to any system of belief or a way of life. In practice, however, most scholars use it only for those systems which have been given a name. This practice has created a problem, because it is impossible to critique stipulative definitions of religion. Inevitably, if one definition is accepted, another must be rejected. The critics of this approach have tended to argue that any form of human activity which is not a religion can be regarded as a religion by merely adding the name. This is an inherently reductive view of religion because it ignores the fact that religious activities are often performed scrupulously, generously, ecstatically, ritually, devotedly, sacrificially, puritanically, superstitiously, and in other ways which may be difficult to define.

More positively, scholars such as Clifford Geertz have emphasized the importance of analyzing the symbolic meanings of actions which people take as religious. These meanings are not invariably derived from religious texts, but rather from the patterns of social recognition and behavior which are generated by specific rituals. In contrast to anthropologists such as Geertz, other scholars have criticized this emphasis on the subjective, and have sought to bring a more analytical and disciplinary approach to the study of religion, by insisting that any set of practices may be called a religion as long as it has certain characteristics, and that these features are not necessarily derived from a belief in some supernatural entity.

There are still others who, like Emil Durkheim and Paul Tillich, have based their definitions on functional rather than ontological criteria. These definitions assume that, as Durkheim argued, religion is simply whatever is the dominant concern which unites the members of a society into a cohesive unit. They have also assumed that religions provide maps of time and space which enable people to recognize the many limitations which are (or may be) faced by their lives, and to deal with them in a variety of ways. In this context, it should be noted that all religions involve a sense of “futurehood,” but that the nature and shape of these futures varies widely. For some, they are seen as linear and progressive, leading to a glorious consummation; for others, they are cyclical, with life being lived repeatedly in a circle of rebirths or reappearances, and for others still, the future is wholly unknown.