Religion is a broad term that refers to a variety of beliefs, traditions and practices that are based on faith in the supernatural or transcendent. It often encompasses moral codes, rituals and an array of ideas about the world, humanity and its purpose in existence. Different religions can vary widely in their teachings, cultural expressions and traditions, but all play a major role in shaping societies.
Throughout history, attempts to define the concept of religion have varied in scope and depth. In its early sense, it referred to a specific belief in spiritual beings or an explanation of the origin and nature of life. In the late nineteenth century, it began to be used as a label for the set of social practices that share certain common features or a description of the underlying motives that unite them. More recently, scholars have turned away from these “monothetic” definitions and have embraced a more open polythetic approach to the term.
The concept of religion has become an extremely contested one, owing in part to the fact that its semantic range is constantly shifting. It has been adapted from the Latin religio, which meant scrupulous devotion or conscientiousness. This was later retooled to be a generic social genus or cultural type, and more recently to be a category for the diverse forms of life that people create and live by in order to find meaning, value and faith in their lives.
While there are many other sources of value for human beings, religion is the primary vehicle through which this is encapsulated and shared among groups of people. It is also the source of a powerful sense of belonging that, in some cases, causes people to be willing to live according to and die for their beliefs.
It is not surprising, then, that the study of religion has become an important field for academic inquiry. However, there are two important issues that have arisen as the concept of religion has shifted over time.
The first is that there is a tendency to confuse questions about the nature of religion with those about the validity of religious beliefs, and that this confusion leads to controversies that have hindered the development of methodologies and understandings of the subject. The second issue is that the controversies have made it difficult to settle on a single, comprehensive definition of the term that can be agreed upon by all scholars. This has led to the development of several competing definitions for religion, each of which has its own merits and drawbacks. Nevertheless, these debates and the resulting variations in the concept of religion have helped to refine our understanding of this fundamental aspect of human life.
