Religion is the name people give to all the ways in which they deal with ultimate concerns, whether these concern gods or spirits; the broader human community and natural world; or their lives after death. These relations and concerns are characterized by beliefs that people hold, practices they engage in, texts they consider scriptures, and values they cherish.
Historically, most attempts to analyze this phenomenon have been “monothetic” in the sense that they treat every instance of religion as sharing some defining property that puts it in the category. These approaches are, however, now being replaced by more complex analyses of religions as multifaceted or even multidimensional assemblages. Ninian Smart’s famous anatomy of religion has seven dimensions, for example.
Some modern scholars, notably Emile Durkheim and Paul Tillich, take what is sometimes called a functional approach to religion. Instead of focusing on the presence of a belief in some particular kind of reality, these approaches take as their starting point the premise that any form of life that organizes the values of its members into a moral community can be considered a religion (see, for example, Nongbri 2013: ch. 5).
This functional understanding of religions has become a cornerstone of sociobiology, which claims that religions are early and for millennia successful protective systems that are tied to the potentialities of the human brain and body. This perspective is often misinterpreted as a claim that all religions are false, but the basic argument of sociobiology is correct: Religions have value, not because they happen to be true but because they serve important purposes in people’s lives.