Religions are social structures that shape people’s values, beliefs, and behaviors. They can bring communities together and offer comfort, but they also have the power to divide and create stress. Religions evolve as they adapt to the needs of people in different cultural contexts, adjusting their beliefs and practices over time. This is true even for the most ancient human societies and can be seen in today’s religious groups in the world.
Scholars have argued about the nature of religion for more than two millennia. The debates have typically focused on whether or not to include in the category of “religion” beliefs and/or mental states, and how to describe the nature of those beliefs and practices. Some scholars have promoted what is called a “monothetic” approach to the concept, while others have advocated for a “polythetic” approach. Whether monothetic or polythetic, the debates have all been in service of developing definitions.
Substantive definitions of religion rely on belief in a distinctive kind of reality and exclude phenomena such as magic, art, or science from the category. A prominent version of this approach dates back to Emile Durkheim (see Durkheim, Emile ) who defined religion as whatever system of beliefs and practices unite individuals into one moral community. In the early twentieth century, scholars influenced by Continental philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault began to raise awareness about how substantive definitions of the concept of religion are inextricably linked with the ideologies that support them.
In response to the realization that substantial definitions of religion were largely created by and for European colonialism, some scholars began to question the assumption that they are a valid and useful way to understand the phenomenon. This led to the development of a variety of alternatives to traditional definitions. These alternative approaches, sometimes called “stipulative” or “functional” definitions, drop the belief in a unique kind of reality and instead define religion as whatever beliefs and practices generate social cohesion and orientation in life.
A number of sociological functionalists have argued that religion is inevitable in all cultures, and this view has gained a large following among some scholars. Other sociologists have applied psychoanalytic theory to the concept of religion. Freud, for example, posited that religion arose in primordial societies as the result of unresolved feelings about and toward fathers, thereby creating a set of taboos around interfamily sexual relations.
Still other anthropologists have developed sociological interpretations of religion in the light of evolutionary thought. They interpreted religion as an expression of a pre-conscious desire to connect with both animate and inanimate things, and they viewed it as a precursor to animism. Some of these interpretations have also incorporated elements of naturalism, and they have tried to link primitive religion with the emergence of language.