Welcome to religion 101 where we will broadly explore religion what it is, and how do we go about studying it
from an academic perspective? And the first order of business is defining "what is religion?"
The biggest problem with trying to define religion is: everybody already thinks they know what it means,
but trust me, it's a lot more complicated than that.
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So what is religion? Sometimes we use the word to define a system of doctrines, or maybe a set of cultural
practice shared by a society, and sometimes we use it to refer to a body of myths, or all these things at the same
time. But what constitutes a religion? What makes Buddhism a religion?
But Aristotle's philosophy not? Why do some people say secular humanism is a religion, and other people are like,
"No, definitely not"? By the end of this video, I hope to have convinced you that religion is a subjective term
with a very blurry definition, and a contested definition - depending on who is using the term.
Our first piece of evidence is that the term religion has shifted meaning over the course of its history.
our English word "religion" really has little to do with the Latin term "religio" - where we get the modern word.
Like I talked about in another video, the Latin word "religio" refers to the socially acceptable cultic duties that
people did for the gods, like sacrificing at a state-funded temple. "Religio" was in opposition to unsanctioned,
suspicious rituals and beliefs which the Romans called "superstitio."
So for example, Christianity was labeled under "superstitio" at first because the Romans saw it as the
wrong way to relate to the gods. But this Roman definition of religion doesn't match our modern definition
of religion, which would encompass both what the Romans thought [of] as "superstitio" and "religio" under
the same concept. Our category of religion is a modern term strongly shaped by the past 100 years of Western scholarship.
It really didn't exist as a category in other cultures, and especially not in ancient Rome.
So who are these western scholars and what were their definitions for religion?
The most minimalist definition comes from the anthropologist E. B. Tyler,who defined religion as belief in supernatural beings.
Back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, anthropologists were obsessed with trying to find the
primitive religion, the religion out of which all religions evolved.
Tyler argued that it was this belief in spirits that was the foundation of all religion: a vague belief in spirits called
animism that eventually evolved into polytheism and finally monotheism. Most anthropologists today reject
this definition as being too simplistic. The religion evolution theory just
doesn't hold up to scrutiny. And not only that, there's a lot more to religion than just believing in supernatural beings.
What is more popular today is defining religion as a fundamentally social phenomenon,
something that reflects the needs and concerns of society above everything else.
Emile Durkheim is probably the most famous champion of this position.
He succinctly defines religion as, "a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things,
that is to say, things set apart and forbidden, beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community,
called a church, all those who adhere to them." Notice his focus on society,
the single unified community that he refers to in his definition. For Durkheim, religion is a form of custom that socializes individuals into a larger community,
and which provides an obligation to that individual to live by the society's rules.
For Durkheim religious beliefs and practices lend an aura of ultimate significance to society and the ideology that the society holds as important.
Like I said, this perspective of religion is very popular among scholars today, and I myself actually lend a lot of my own thinking to Durkheim
Since religion is so complex, some scholars have given up trying to come up with one unified definition for religion
instead they try to argue for a family resemblances definition.
Wittgenstein most famously applied the strategy to games. It might not be possible to find a single
characteristic that we can apply to all games, but it is possible to identify similarities. For example,
There is very little similarity between tic-tac-toe and soccer,
But they have family resemblances enough to fall under our category of a game. They both have rules. They both have opponents. They both are used for leisure.
The philosopher Robert Audi includes on his list characteristics like belief in supernatural beings, a
distinction between sacred and profane, ritual acts focused on these objects, a moral community believed to be sanctioned by divine beings and
etc. According to the strategy not all of these characteristics need to be present to label something as religion,
but if it has five or six of them it probably is a religion. Now I know what you're thinking,
we're a few minutes into this video and all we've gotten is a bunch of different definitions.
What is the one theme, the one unifying concept that will bring all these definitions together?
Ironically the one unifying theme is all of these definitions are coming from Western scholars
from the past 100 years of history. And here's why that's important:
Religion as a category may have been invented by modern Western scholars.
We really want a one or two sentence definition of religion something that we can apply to
religion no matter the cultural context or the belief system.
But as complex as religion is, that might not be possible.
You can probably always find an exception to your definition. It might be more helpful to think of religion as an analytical category of our own design.
Jonathan Z. Smith, one of the greatest scholars of religion, and who I call the Gandalf of religious studies explains it like this:
Religion is not a native term.
It is a term created by scholars for their intellectual purposes and therefore is theirs to define.
It is a second order generic concept that plays the same role in establishing a disciplinary horizon
that a concept such as language plays in linguistics or culture plays in anthropology.
What J. Z. Smith is arguing is that there is no archetypal definition of religion that we can perfectly apply to any culture.
Religion is a subjective
analytical term whose meaning depends on the person using it and on the questions
they use the term to illuminate.
This means that religion is a fundamentally contested concept, and we don't only see this in the world of scholars as they try to define it.
But we see this play out in popular culture.
We have people arguing is Scientology a religion?
Is Jediism a religion?
There is even a famous book that argues Coca-Cola is a religion.
Now, for those of you that wanted a nice tidy definition of religion, I know this might be frustrating.
If you want something that's more concrete and more objective, then I would recommend trying that family resemblances definition.
But for the time being just be aware that religion is a very subjective concept, and a concept that is very
difficult to define. When someone uses the word religion you can now ask yourself, "Are they using this term to define belief in God?
Are they using it to refer to ritual practice? What perspective are they bringing to the term?"
You will recognize that different people will use the word to refer to different things, and this will help you navigate
discussions about religion which too often lack the complexity and nuance that they deserve.
As always, thanks for watching and subscribing, and I'll see you next time.