Religions provide meaning and purpose in people’s lives, moral guidance and social support. They also offer hope and a sense of meaning to the future. They are the source of art and architecture, music, dance, drama, and literature. They inspire the explorations of the cosmos that issue in the natural sciences. Whether they do so in the form of myths, doctrines or practices, they give shape to human life, creating a context that helps people cope with the many different kinds of limitation which stand across the project of their lives.
They also promote social stability and cohesiveness, and bind individuals to their communities, often organizing hierarchies. They create codes of recognition and of expected behaviour, even beyond the scope of ethics. They may help people deal with their anxieties and depressions, and make them feel safe and secure. Religions often have a profound impact on the lives of children and young people, especially in developing their moral sense and self-control. They encourage people to care for each other, to work together in community and society, and to take action to improve the world and their place within it. In this way they contribute to health, learning, economic well-being, self-control and a sense of belonging. They have a role in the development of social institutions such as hospitals, schools and welfare facilities. They may reduce the incidence of many pathologies, including out-of-wedlock births, crime and addiction, mental illness and poor health, and prejudice and discrimination.
Religious life can be a positive force for peace and social justice, but it can also foster social inequality and conflict, as the history of the world’s religions shows. Individuals, groups and societies have been prepared to persecute others and to go to war over religious differences. It is not easy to avoid this danger. Religious organisations must recognise that they are not an end in themselves, but a means to ends which transcend their own organization-indeed, to the ultimate goal of a shared eschatology.
This is a complex task, and many scholars argue that it is inappropriate to try to define what religion is in an absolute sense. A univocal definition tends to become a lowest common denominator, and one that is of little practical value. It also risks being a source of intolerance, as demonstrated by the continuing debate over the place of homosexuality within Christianity.
The search for an adequate notion of religion must be directed not towards a real or lexical definition but to finding a conception that is adequate to particular historical contexts. Emile Durkheim’s functional approach demonstrates how this can be done. His definition turns on the social function of religion, but it is a functional definition rather than a substantive one, since it accepts that any dominant concern can be defined as a religion (whether or not it involves belief in any unusual realities). It is an approach that paved the way for the comparative treatment of religion which became important during the twentieth century.