Exploring the Multifaceted Definitions of Religion

What exactly is religion? At first glance, the question seems almost too obvious – most people associate religion with temples, prayers, sacred texts, or weekly rituals. But once you begin to look more closely, the answer becomes remarkably complex. Scholars, philosophers, and theologians have debated the definition of religion for centuries, and no single answer has won universal acceptance. The difficulty lies in the fact that religion is, at once, intensely personal and profoundly social, emotionally driven and intellectually structured, rooted in culture yet reaching toward something beyond it. Exploring how different thinkers have approached this question doesn’t just clarify what religion is – it reveals what human beings, at their deepest level, care about most.

Why defining religion is harder than it looks 🔗

The word religion itself has a complicated origin. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the term derives from the Latin religio, which carried meanings close to “scrupulousness,” “felt obligation,” and “devotedness” – and was used in contexts that had nothing necessarily to do with gods. Over centuries, the word evolved, expanded, and was eventually exported by European Christians to categorize the belief systems of cultures they encountered across the Americas, Africa, and Asia. By the time scholars began formally studying it, “religion” was already a loaded, contested concept carrying centuries of assumptions.

Today, as Britannica notes, the philosophy of religion concerns itself with the philosophical appraisal of human religious attitudes – not just the gods or sacred objects themselves, but the way people relate to them. That relational dimension – the attitude of the person – turns out to be one of the most important keys to understanding what religion really is.

The substantive approach: defining religion by what it contains 🔗

Some thinkers try to define religion by identifying a core element, a kind of irreducible minimum, that all religions share. These are called substantive definitions, and they focus on what religion is made of – its essential content.

E. B. Tylor and “belief in spiritual beings” 🔗

One of the earliest and most influential substantive definitions came from the Victorian anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917). As the Stanford Encyclopedia explains, Tylor sought to identify the common denominator across all world religions, which he called a “minimal definition.” His answer was simple: religion, at its core, is the belief in spiritual beings. This definition was significant because it was deliberately inclusive – it made room for the animist practices of Indigenous peoples and the elaborate theology of Christianity within the same conceptual framework, arguing that they were all engaged in the same fundamental human activity.

Tylor’s definition was both useful and limiting. It could accommodate a wide range of religious traditions, but it struggled to account for systems like certain forms of Buddhism, which do not centre on belief in a supreme divine being. A definition tied entirely to “spiritual beings” risks excluding traditions that many would unambiguously call religious.

Rudolf Otto and the “numinous” 🔗

The German theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) approached religion not through beliefs but through a particular kind of experience. In his landmark work The Idea of the Holy (1917), Otto argued that at the heart of all religious life is the encounter with what he called the numinous – a term he coined to describe a mysterious, awe-inspiring, and wholly distinct power that draws and simultaneously overwhelms the person who encounters it. He described this as the experience of mysterium tremendum et fascinans: a mystery that is both terrifying and deeply attractive. For Otto, this felt encounter with the sacred was the original source from which doctrines, rituals, and institutions later grew. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy situates this within the broader tradition of phenomenological approaches to religion, which examine what religious experience actually feels like from the inside, before any theological interpretation is imposed.

The functional approach: what does religion do? 🔗

Other thinkers are less interested in what religion contains and more focused on the role it plays – what it does for individuals and societies. These are functional definitions, and they have been especially influential in sociology and psychology.

Émile Durkheim and the social function of religion 🔗

The French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) argued that religion is fundamentally a social phenomenon. In his classic study The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), he defined religion as a unified system of beliefs and practices relating to sacred things – things set apart from the ordinary, profane world. Crucially, for Durkheim, these sacred objects and rituals bind people together into a moral community, a church. Religion, on this view, is not primarily about metaphysical truths but about social cohesion. As an open Introduction to Philosophy textbook notes, Durkheim’s legacy extends beyond formal religion – his framework has been used to explain the intense, ritualistic devotion people display toward national symbols and flags, which function as secular “sacred objects” with their own taboos and reverence.

William James and individual religious experience 🔗

William James (1842-1910), the Harvard philosopher and psychologist, took a sharply different view. Where Durkheim focused on communities, James focused on the individual. In his landmark work The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), James defined religion as the feelings, acts, and experiences of individuals in their solitude, insofar as they perceive themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider divine. For James, the institutional church was secondary – it was the original, first-hand religious experience of the individual that was primary, and from which all creeds, doctrines, and rituals were later derived.

James also brought a pragmatist lens to the question. According to EBSCO’s research overview of the work, James argued that the value of religion lies in its usefulness to the individual – its capacity to produce what he called “more life,” a richer and more satisfying human existence. Whether a religious belief is metaphysically true matters less, in his view, than whether it genuinely transforms the person who holds it. This was a radical reframing: religion was to be judged not by its doctrines but by its fruits.

Structural and cultural approaches 🔗

Mircea Eliade and the sacred vs. the profane 🔗

The Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) offered an approach centred on the structure of religious experience. In his influential work The Sacred and the Profane (1957), Eliade argued that religious life is organised around a fundamental distinction between the sacred – a transcendent reality set apart from ordinary experience – and the profane, the mundane world of everyday existence. Religion, for Eliade, is the way in which human beings create a meaningful cosmos, an ordered world, out of the raw material of experience by orienting themselves toward the sacred. As noted in the open textbook on philosophy, unlike Durkheim, Eliade saw religion as a phenomenon in its own right rather than a mere expression of social forces – the sacred has its own distinct quality that cannot be reduced to sociology.

Ninian Smart’s seven dimensions 🔗

The British philosopher of religion Ninian Smart (1927-2001) argued that no single definition could capture the full texture of religious life. Instead, he proposed a multi-dimensional framework for understanding religion. As summarised in a ScienceDirect overview, Smart identified seven dimensions of religion: the practical and ritual, the experiential and emotional, the narrative or mythic, the doctrinal and philosophical, the ethical and legal, the social and institutional, and the material. No one tradition exhibits all these dimensions in the same way, but together they describe the full range of what religion involves. This framework is valuable precisely because it resists reductionism – it refuses to collapse religion down to any single element.

Religion as attitude: the most compelling definition 🔗

Of all the approaches examined here, one of the most philosophically compelling is the idea that religion is, at its core, an attitude – or a sum of attitudes – constituting a way of life. This view shifts attention away from institutions, doctrines, and external practices toward the inner orientation of the individual person.

A philosophical essay published on Religion Online articulates this position clearly: religion is best understood as the totality of an individual’s sincere attitudes and predispositions toward what serves as the final expression of their primary interest or deepest concern. On this view, external religious forms – temples, rituals, creeds – are the downstream effects of prior inner attitudes. The institutions of religion grew up only after, and as a result of, certain attitudes first felt by individuals and subsequently shared with a group.

Paul Tillich and “ultimate concern” 🔗

No thinker has articulated the attitude-centred view of religion more powerfully than the twentieth-century theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich (1886-1965). In his widely influential work Dynamics of Faith (1957), Tillich argued that religion, in its most basic sense, is ultimate concern. Faith, for Tillich, is not a set of propositions to be accepted on authority; it is the state of being grasped by something of unconditional, infinite importance – something to which a person surrenders their whole being.

What makes Tillich’s definition so powerful is its breadth. As the Bishop’s Encyclopedia of Religion notes, Tillich held that virtually anything – money, nation, justice, fame, a political cause – can become someone’s ultimate concern, and therefore their “god.” Religion, on this account, is not the exclusive property of those who attend a place of worship. Every human being has some ultimate concern, whether or not they call it religious. The question is not whether you have an ultimate concern, but whether what you are ultimately concerned about is truly ultimate – infinite rather than finite, unconditional rather than provisional.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (as cited by Wikipedia), the essence of religious attitudes for Tillich is this ultimate concern, experienced as sacred, numinous, or holy – something so overwhelming in value that all else appears secondary and demands total surrender. Faith as ultimate concern, Tillich argued, is not a movement of any single faculty of the mind; it is an act of the total personality, uniting intellect, will, and emotion in a single, centred orientation.

This dimension – sincerity and the wholeness of personal commitment – is critical. A Dialogue Journal essay on Tillich’s theology draws out an important implication: religion, understood as ultimate concern, must be grounded in what is truly ultimate. When a person’s ultimate concern is directed at something finite – a nation, an ideology, a person – Tillich calls this idolatry. True religion is distinguished by the genuineness of its ultimate object.

Religion as a way of life 🔗

What the survey of these definitions reveals is a consistent underlying thread: religion is not merely a cognitive system of beliefs or a set of external practices. It is, at a deeper level, a way of life – a comprehensive orientation of the self toward what matters most. Whether expressed through Durkheim’s focus on sacred community, James’s emphasis on transformative personal experience, Eliade’s structuring of the cosmos around the sacred, or Tillich’s concept of ultimate concern, each definition points to the same fundamental insight: religion is about how a person – and a community – organises their existence in relation to what they take to be of supreme value.

A scholarly article in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications proposes a useful working definition from this angle: religion is the engagement with ultimate realities and ultimate dimensions of experience in cognitive, existential, and practical ways. This definition is deliberately broad, encompassing the full diversity of world religions while keeping the focus on what is most philosophically significant – the relationship between the person and whatever they regard as ultimate.

The key word throughout all these definitions, from James’s solitary individual to Tillich’s total personality, is sincerity. A religion that is merely inherited, performed out of habit, or adopted for social conformity does not, on the best accounts, fully deserve the name. What distinguishes genuine religious life is the authentic commitment of the person – the sincere attitude, held with the whole self, toward an ultimate concern that gives meaning and direction to everything else.

What do you think? If religion is fundamentally an attitude toward what a person values most deeply, does that mean every human being is, in some sense, religious – whether or not they identify with a formal tradition? And if so, what responsibility does that place on each person to examine honestly what their own “ultimate concern” actually is?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concept-religion/
2. https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophy-of-religion
3. https://iep.utm.edu/religion/
4. https://pimaopen.pressbooks.pub/introphilosophy/chapter/7-1-what-is-religion/
5. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674932258
6. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/varieties-religious-experience-william-james
7. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/philosophy-of-religion
8. https://www.religion-online.org/article/toward-a-definition-of-religion-as-philosophy/
9. https://curatingtheology.org/blog//paul-tillich-on-the-nature-of-faith
10. https://jamesbishopblog.com/2020/09/19/paul-tillich-religion-as-ultimate-concern/
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Tillich
12. https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/religion-and-ultimate-concern-an-encounter-with-paul-tillichs-theology/
13. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-018-0182-9