Defining religion

In line with my putting passing thoughts down as they occur to me, in this post I will discuss some of the questions regarding how to define religion such that it becomes an explicandum for natural accounts of religion.

The term religion has many different meanings in context. Dictionary definitions try to capture the folk meanings, which they do in several ways. One is to take the content of religious traditions as the definienda – beliefs, doctrines, gods asserted, and so on. Another is to take some “typical” religion – almost always Abrahamic religions – as the exemplar and then try to find sufficient resemblance with it for religions outside that tradition. Sociological approaches, such as that exemplified by Clifford Geertz, treat religion as ritualised behaviour of a certain symbolic form. Others treat it as an existential set of rituals which are intended to relieve anxiety, often regarding death. Still others treat religion as an attitude or set of responses to a “supernatural” realm.

I think that these are all to some extent question begging. That is, they presume what they strive to establish. For each of these definitions, one may find substantial or frequent exceptions, religions that are not concerned with death, traditions that are not doctrinal, ritualisations that are not separable into religious and non-religious for some society or other. In particular I regard the so-called “World religions” (basically Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and by parity of reasoning, Buddhism and Hinduism and Confucianism honorifically) as, in their present form, the outliers; they are not typical of religions and systematically mislead us in our inferences about other religious traditions and institutions.

To understand religion, I think we need to specify that the “typical” form of religions are the kinds one finds in Papuan, East African, and more recently in Central and South American folk religions. The religions of the high population density European and Asian regions are not any the less real or divergent; but they are what happens to folk religions in such circumstances. Folk religions end up as large scale institutions in large scale societies, because everything does. But folk religions are how they begin, and these are usually quite specific in form.

Consider the example I recently gave, María Lionza in Venezuela. There are local figures who have been deified by report and tradition, who represent a subsection of the population, syncretise the religious traditions of invaders and indigenes, and which serves to unify those who are unable to otherwise share in the resources of the new social structures. The figures of the pantheon are all humans who have died. María herself is the Queen of these adherents. This is a political structure the people share that the invaders do not, or if they do, must subjugate themselves to.

Religions begin as cults of this kind. They either act as eponymous representations of a political status quo, or they are representations of alternative political structures to the status quo. Still, to be a religion, these ritual traditions and cults cannot be identical with the political structure or else they are not, as it were, a religion at all; they are just a particular social order. If democracy is the shared political value of all Americans, for instance, then advocacy and protection of democracy cannot be a “religion” of America – it just is the social fabric of America. But if democracy is something that is separable from American polity, and which some propound as a core value system while others have competing (let’s say, Republican) values, then it may be regarded as a religion.

When folk religions, as I call them, have spread throughout a social order, such that all members of the religion are ipso facto members of the society and vice versa, then we might say that we have a secondary case of inseparability. In such a case, the religion would be separable only honorifically. But since societies are fluid and in competition with their neighbours, it is unlikely that even state sponsored cults (such as the Graecoroman pantheons) will be the sole ritual set in a society. Influences will tend to differentiate the cults from the overall political scheme. Hence even in Rome you have those who dedicate themselves to Jupiter, others to Minerva, and so on, and then there are the local gods of place and hearth.

But in small societies at village size, you do not have such differentiation. In so-called shamanistic religions, all members of the village share in the rituals and behaviours, just as they do for other social rituals, and nothing is to be gained from making a distinction between these rituals.

So I would say that a religion is what happens when some cultic practices are differentiated out from the overall social structure. This, of course, doesn’t tell us which rituals are significant. More on that another time…