Ironically, one of the most debated questions in religious studies is the definition of religion. In most disciplines there is at least a general consensus about how to define the subject of inquiry. Biochemistry is the study of the chemical substances and vital processes occurring in living organisms. Astronomy is the scientific study of matter in outer space with particular attention paid to the positions, dimensions, distribution, motion, composition, energy, and evolution of celestial bodies and phenomena. Clear disciplinary boundaries are not limited to the hard sciences, however. If you study English Literature it is plain to everyone what the subject of your inquiry is, even though one’s individual study within that discipline may be focused on Medieval, Renaissance, Romantic, Victorian or Modern texts. Such transparency about the topic at hand simply does not exist in religious studies.
Despite the difficulties caused by this definitional deficiency, there are some good reasons why scholars of religious studies equivocate about what religion is. Since definitions have political significance, one’s definition of religion determines one’s position in ongoing power-struggles. Religious studies departments in the liberal, secular academy see themselves as doing something different from religiously affiliated seminaries and so they do not take up theological methods to understand religion. Indeed various theological methods may constitute part of the religious phenomena which a scholar of religion needs to explain. A scholar of religious studies usually approaches religion as a set of practices, texts, myths, attitudes and social relations. Although they study Troeltsch, Tillich, Barth and Niebuhr along with Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard and Hegel as part of the history of modern religious thought, the theories and methods scholars of religion use to explain religion most often come from the social sciences following classical social scientists like Freud, Durkheim, Weber as well as more contemporary ones like Peter Berger, Robert Bellah, Mary Douglas Clifford Geertz and even Pierre Bourdieu.
The perennial question, of course, is whether or not a social scientific analysis of religion works. Religionists often contend that social scientists offer only reductive or material definitions (which undergird full-fledged theories) of religion and that they cannot actually elucidate anything about religion per se since these social scientists make religion into psychology, sociology or anthropology instead of religion. Other religionists who want to allow social scientists to analyze religion with the tools of their disciplines suggest they limit their work to questions of origin and function and avoid questions of meaning and truth. In other words, some religionists would say that social scientists can explain the cause of religion but not interpret its meaning. Still others think the distinction between explanation and interpretation is a difficult one to maintain.
Here are some randomly chosen attempts to define religion:
“Religion is fluid and full of life, at every moment drawing on the direct touch of God; extremely inward, personal individual and abrupt; most lively [at times] farthest from the church.”
“Religion, in the largest and most basic sense of the word, is ultimate concern . . . manifest in the moral sphere as the unconditional seriousness of moral demand . . . in the realm of knowledge as the passionate longing for ultimate reality . . . in the aesthetic function of the human spirit as the infinite desire to express ultimate meaning.”
(Theology of Culture)
His best known definition: “the feeling of absolute dependence”
Lesser known: “Religion is for you at one time a way of thinking, a faith, a particular way of contemplating the world, and of combining what meets us in the world: at another, it is a way of acting, a peculiar desire and love, a special kind of conduct and character. Without this distinction of a theoretical and practical you could hardly think at all, and though both sides belong to religion, you are usually accustomed to give heed chiefly to only one at a time” (On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers)
“A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices about sacred things which beliefs and practices unite al those who adhere to them into one single moral community termed Church”
Religion is “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”
“Religion is a set of symbolic forms and acts which relates man to the ultimate condition of his existence.”
“We shall tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an afterlife; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.”
I am interested in how you would define religion and why. Is religion mostly about beliefs and practices? Are religious feelings relevant? How? What about history, tradition and texts? Is religion a private affair or a public affair or both? Definitions that are too narrow tend to fall prey to the WAB (What About Buddhism?) objection while definitions that are too broad are easily criticized for defining everything from Nazism to basketball as religion.