What Is Religion?

This book purports to be about something called “religion,” but what do we mean when we say “religion”? To what are we referring? Asking this question leads us into a number of difficult theoretical issues—some of which are considered in Chapter 2—but here we will attempt a simple answer.

The short answer to the question is that this book generally uses the word “religion” in the contemporary, colloquial, everyday sense. When we talk about “religions,” we will refer to cultural traditions such as Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and so on.

In saying this, however, we are not offering a definition of religion—we are just pointing out how the word is typically used. This is the way we normally do things. If one is chatting with a two-year-old child still learning basic English vocabulary, and she wanted to know what a car was, one probably wouldn't offer a technical definition; one wouldn't say “a car is a human transportation device with four wheels and a combustion engine.” Instead, one would probably just point: “See that? That's a car.”

Why not offer some sort of official definition of religion? The problem is that we cannot formulate an official definition that fits with the everyday colloquial use of the word. Usually when we try to formulate a definition, we look at all the different things that word is applied to, and try to see what they have in common with each other.