What Does Religion Mean?
Religion is a term that describes human beings’ relation to that which they regard as holy, sacred, absolute, spiritual, divine, or worthy of especial reverence. It also refers to people’s way of dealing with ultimate concerns about their lives and their fate after death.
Anthropologists (scientists who study human societies and their origins) believe that the first religions developed in response to a need to control uncontrollable parts of the environment, such as weather, pregnancy and birth, or success in hunting. Magic tries to make the environment subject directly to human will through rituals; religion appeals to gods and goddesses for help.
Theological scholars, intellectual historians, and students of political thought legitimately study religious traditions as coherent, inter-generational, scholarly bodies of thought, such as the “Islamic” or “Christian” tradition. They also legitimately study the religions of other cultures, such as those of ancient Rome or Yoruba, or that of China or that of modern Japan, in a similar way.
But one problem with this approach is that different disciplines will work with different conceptions of religion, and so they will have different answers to the question: what does religion mean?
Some scholars have argued that the concept of religion should be studied as a social genus, a category-concept that is a taxon for sets of social practices. In other words, they argue that the term religion names an inevitable feature of the human condition, and so any definition of it should treat it as a universality.