Religion is a set of beliefs and ritual behaviors that connect humans to spirituality and supernatural forces. These beliefs and practices can vary widely across different cultures. They can include worship, moral conduct, prayer, and specific rites and rituals. They can also cover ideas about god and gods, life after death, and various ethical or social issues.
Religion may serve to organize people into communities that share a common worldview and purpose. It can promote harmony, peace, and mutual assistance among individuals and groups of all kinds—but it can also promote social conflict, hatred, greed, and war. Over the centuries, individual people and entire nations have been willing to persecute each other in the name of religion.
A fundamental aspect of religion is the belief that it provides a path to an ideal future, whether in this world or the next. It can motivate people to strive for personal and collective goals, such as peace, health, wealth, and wisdom. It can also provide a sense of meaning and purpose to an otherwise mundane existence.
Despite the fact that religion can be so diverse, it tends to operate within similar frameworks and aspires to a similar goal—the salvation of humankind. The most prominent examples of religion are the world’s major faiths: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. These religions have developed their own unique beliefs, practices, and philosophies, but all of them believe that there is a supreme power or god who governs the universe and human affairs.
The study of religion developed into a distinct discipline in the 19th century, in part because of three 19th-century European thinkers—Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx—who analyzed the relationship between religion and society. Their work established the paradigmatic forms of religion we see today and set the stage for much of modern sociology.
Religions are characterized by their belief in a transcendent reality and their adherence to certain ethical and social norms. They are also characterized by their organization and social structures, such as the church, mosque, synagogue, temple, and sweat lodge. They are further defined by their own cultural, ethical, and philosophical perspectives.
In order to maintain their integrity, religious organizations require a system of organization and structure. This means that they have to have boundaries that they can defend. Those boundaries can be literal, such as the borders of a specific country, or they can be more abstract and metaphorical—as when a religious people perceive that secular values and interests are invading their inherited religion.
Ultimately, the study of religion has to find ways of distinguishing between those things that are truly religious from those that only superficially resemble them. A search for an adequate notion of religion will be doomed to failure if it attempts to impose a single definition from above. Likewise, it would be unwise to limit the study of religion to any particular historical context. This will lead to a minimal conception of religion—a lowest common denominator that is not useful in understanding the diversity of religious phenomena.