How to Define and Analyze Religion
Religion is a complex and controversial phenomenon that plays a central role in the lives of about two-thirds of the world’s population. It involves beliefs, practices, and rituals that are often seen as supernatural or superhuman, and it has influenced human history and development in countless ways. Its influence can be seen in such diverse areas as social policy, psychotherapy, and education. Yet it has been difficult to define, and it has been even more difficult to analyze. This has been due to the fact that most people have a deeply personal relationship to religion and are reluctant to let this part of their identity be openly discussed.
There are a number of different approaches to the study of religion. Some scholars take a scientific view, using the tools of anthropology and biology to understand how religion evolved. One of the main theories is that religion developed as a result of humans’ attempts to control uncontrollable parts of their environment. This could be either manipulation, through magic, or supplication, through religion. Magic attempts to directly control the environment, for example through rituals like painting pictures of animals on cave walls in hopes of assuring success in hunting. Religions, on the other hand, attempt to supplication, appealing to higher powers for help.
Another approach is the historical view, studying how religion developed within particular cultural and historical contexts. One of the most important developments in this field was the emergence of comparative religion, which studied how the different religions of the world differed from each other. This was an important step forward, allowing scholars to better understand how religious ideas and beliefs spread and developed over time.
A third way of approaching religion is to focus on its function in society. This can be done by considering the social impact of religion, as the famous 19th-century French philosopher and journalist Émile Durkheim did. For him, religion was the opium of the masses, as it soothed the economic suffering of working-class people.
Other scholars are more critical of the concept of religion, and have called for a new approach to its study. These scholars have criticized the fact that many of the definitions of religion used in sociology, history, and other fields are normative. They have also argued that the modern semantic expansion of the term “religion” went hand in hand with European colonialism, and that we should cease to treat it as an objective concept. This has led to the development of what are called “polythetic” or “multidimensional” approaches to the study of religion, which use a variety of facets to describe it rather than focusing on a single property that all religions must share.