Thoughtful Thursday: What IS Religion, Anyway?
If you think you're not religious, read this. Here are some answers to an impossible question.
Welcome to my new, very sporadic, Thoughtful Thursday column! This column, published in addition to the spiritual guides and interfaith calendars, is a direct response to reader requests for specific types content over the last several months. I want to give these questions and topics their own space to breathe and be discussed. In coming weeks, I’ll be defining liberation theology, wrestling liberating messages out of some of the most challenging and politically charged/othering texts in the Bible, and more. Feel free to submit questions and topics of interest to you, and I’ll see what I can do.
This week’s topic has arisen from questions from readers about where religion fits into the modern era. What does it even mean to be religious? Are we living in a post-Christian world? A post-religious world? A secular milieu? What might it mean to live intentionally in this liminal time of institutional deconstruction? I can’t promise I’ll answer all those questions in this one post—we’ll come back to similar topics in the future. However, today I’ll present a buffet of options for how to even attempt to answer the question, “what is religion?” Be warned—you might finish this reading even more confused than before!
Why Traditional Definitions of Religion Don’t Really Work
People often wonder why I’m so obsessed with thinking about religion. My question is, why wouldn’t a person be obsessed with it? Don’t you see the signs of religion everywhere out there in the world—things being closed on Sundays (ahem, Sabbath), the prevalence of religious rhetoric (for better or, usually, for much, much worse) in American politics, literature, our systems of power? I simply find religion too important and omnipresent to not constantly interrogate, criticize, reimagine, and appreciate. But I think partly, my obsession comes down to definitions of religion itself—and the knowledge that it’s a much bigger category than we might imagine.
Merriam-Webster puts forward what I would call a pretty standard definition of religion:
1 a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices
2 a. (1)the service and worship of God or the supernatural
(2) commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance
b : the state of a religious (a nun in her 20th year of religion)
3: a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith
4 archaic : scrupulous conformity : CONSCIENTIOUSNESS
If you look at the second definition within the Merriam-Webster writeup, you’ll notice “the service and worship of God or the supernatural” as a requisite. That gets a little contentious, since plenty of religious people are nontheistic (not centered around a belief in a deity). Scholars debate ad nauseam, for example, whether Buddhism should be classified as theistic or nontheistic.
You’ll also notice that beliefs figure quite heavily into the Merriam-Webster definition, which is a very Western, pretty Protestant metric for defining religion. In Judaism, for example, belief tends to matter much, much less than action, ritual, and belonging.
You might notice a trend here: most default definitions of religion revolve around Christian assumptions and values—the primacy of faith over works, the definition of a sacred space as an indoor area consecrated by a spiritual authority, even the notion of an organized and litigiously defined set of institutions and communities. All of these are deeply, deeply rooted in European and American Christianity. Even the framework for religion put forward by the American Academy of Religion—the three Bs of Beliefs, Behavior, and Belonging—seems to imply a certain set of Western assumptions.
So what? You might say. This is just a definition. It’s still flexible. But the perils of a too-narrow definition include none other than suppression of religious minorities and, in some cases, cultural genocide.
Two prominent examples of dangerously narrow definitions of religious protection—as enshrined in the US Constitution— come from Bear’s Ears and Mauna Kea. Both are incredibly sacred lands to many different indigenous groups, but both have undergone protected legal and political battles, hotly debated in the public eye. The debates over these get all kinds of complex and buried in legalistic language, but at the heart you can see that definitions of religion uphold racist policies suppressing a whole host of indigenous sites, practices, communities, and gatherings. Our implicit definition of religion comes to decide what reflexively is protected and assumed (Sundays, Christmas, you name it) versus what must undergo intense interrogation and litigation to simply exist.
Three Possible Scholarly Definitions
Now that we know why definitions of religion matter— and why they're so fraught— let’s see some ways in which scholars the selves define religion. The first video is from Jonathan Z Smith, the preeminent critic of defining religion at all. He makes some compelling arguments:
Paul Lakeland and Tracy Pintchman, seen below, offer slightly more measured approaches to defining religion, but they both express a bit of an allergy to it. Notice that Paul Lakeland’s definition aims to exclude Marxism, while Tracy Pintchman’s definition aims to include it— a curious disagreement!
Dr. Pintchman’s preference for using the Seven Dimensions framework is a common one shared by many scholars. Created by Ninian Smart, a prominent early champion of the field of religious studies, it offers looser guidelines for broadly describing what could be considered religious.
However, you might notice as you read through the list of dimensions that lots of groups, institutions, and cultural practices could fit within this framework. Lots of companies, for example, have guiding origin stories, elaborate frameworks for policies of conduct and mission, key practices and annual gatherings that take the form of ritual...one might also think of the cult of celebrity around performers like Taylor Swift and Beyonce, people’s faith in that ‘invisible hand’ of the market…. You might start to think, as JZ Smith does, ‘what isn’t religion?’
Okay, so What ISN’T Religion?
I don't have a good answer for you here except to say that I think we are fundamentally beings who like to feel rooted to community and a sense of something sublime and larger than ourselves. In a deeply ‘unchurched’ time, as the jargon goes, where are people going to have this feeling? David Loy famously argues people are turning to capitalism itself. Others point to smaller institutions— workout classes like Soulcycle, for example. Then there’s always football. And I think it's important to take people’s quests for meaning and belonging seriously.
At the end of the day, I leave the question to you, too— how do you define religion? What do you prioritize, and what do you leave out? What are the implications of this omission? What does religion provide, and where do you see people seeking it out? Feel free to comment below!