Table 9.1 lists 16 different definitions proposed by scholars of religion. Definitions numbers 11 and 13, by Émile Durkheim and Clifford Geertz respectively, are the ones most frequently quoted by other scholars. It will be obvious that we are not even close to agreement on a definition. Many of these definitions are written in a convoluted style similar to the language used by lawyers in drafting a contract, and that warns us that we are treading on hotly contested ground.
As a fallback position, could we skirt the problem of defining religion in the same way that we often skirt the problem of defining pornography, by saying, “I can’t define pornography, but I nevertheless know it when I see it!”? No, unfortunately even that fallback position won’t work; scholars don’t agree about whether to recognize some widespread and well-known movements as religions. For instance, there have been long-standing debates among scholars of religion about whether Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shintoism should be counted as religions; the current trend is to count Buddhism but not Confucianism, although Confucianism was usually counted a decade or two ago; Confucianism is now instead usually termed a way of life or a secular philosophy.
These difficulties in defining religion are instructive. They warn us that the phenomena that we lump together as religions contain several different components, which are variously strong, weak, or virtually absent in different religions, different societies, and different stages of the evolution of religions. Religion shades into other phenomena, which possess some but not all of the attributes usually associated with religion. That’s why there is disagreement over whether Buddhism, usually counted as one of the world’s four biggest religions, really is a religion at all or is “just” a philosophy of life. The components commonly attributed to religions fall into five sets: belief in the supernatural, shared membership in a social movement, costly and visible proofs of commitment, practical rules for one’s behavior (i.e., “morality”), and belief that supernatural beings and forces can be induced (e.g., by prayer) to intervene in worldly life. As we shall see, though, it would not make sense to define religion by the combination of all five of those attributes, nor to label as non-religion a phenomenon lacking one or more of them, because one would thereby exclude some branches of movements widely recognized as religions.
The first of these five attributes is the basis of the definition of religion that I offered to my University of California undergraduate students when I first taught a course in cultural geography. I proposed, “Religion is the belief in a postulated supernatural agent for whose existence our senses can’t give us evidence, but which is invoked to explain things of which our senses do give us evidence.” This definition has two virtues: belief in supernatural agents is indeed one of the most widespread characteristics of religion; and explanation, as we shall discuss later, was among the main origins and early functions of religions. Most religions do postulate the existence of gods, spirits, and other agents that we term “supernatural” because they or their provable consequences can’t be perceived directly in the natural world. (Throughout this chapter, I shall repeatedly use the word “supernatural” in that neutral sense, without any of the pejorative connotations sometimes associated with the word.) Many religions go further and postulate the existence of an entire parallel supernatural world—often, a heaven, a hell, or another afterlife to which we ourselves shall be transferred after our death in this natural world. Some believers are so convinced of the existence of supernatural agents that they insist that they have seen, heard, or felt spirits or ghosts.
But I soon realized that my definition was inadequate, for reasons that are also instructive. Belief in supernatural agents characterizes not only religions but also phenomena that no one would consider religious—such as belief in fairies, ghosts, leprechauns, and aliens in UFOs. Why is it religious to believe in gods, but not necessarily religious to believe in fairies? (Hint: believers in fairies don’t meet on a specified day each week to perform certain rituals, don’t identify themselves as a community of fairy-believers separate from fairy-skeptics, and don’t offer to die in defense of their belief in fairies.) Conversely, some movements that everyone considers to be religions don’t require belief in supernatural agents. Numerous Jews (including rabbis), Unitarians, Japanese people, and others are agnostics or atheists but still consider themselves, and are considered by others, to belong to a religion. The Buddha did not associate himself with any gods and claimed that he was “merely” teaching a path to enlightenment that he had discovered.