Religion

Defining Religion

Durkheim's classic definition, paraphrased above, is always the starting point for sociologists, especially his recognition that religion involves at least two dimensions, a cognitive or propositional one and a ritual or behavioral one. He deferred to commonsense social constructions to the extent of accepting Buddhism as a religion, despite the absence of theism in its classic formulations. Thus, for Durkheim, not theism but “the sacred” must be the defining characteristic of the phenomenon. He also insisted that religion pertained to a moral community: a “private religion” would be a contradiction in terms. Durkheim's influence was not least in setting off extensive discussion on what came to be called “substantive” versus “functional” definitions of religion, the former corresponding to Durkheim's “sacred”—what religion is—and the latter to his “community”—what religion does. In the middle of the century, the possibility that the future might belong to one or another of the warring political ideologies of the time gave theorists [Page 635]reason to assess the potential of movements such as fascism or communism as functional successors to the religions of the past. By the end of the century, however, those possibilities seemed increasingly remote, and conceptual attention reverted to the substantive question of what it is that defines religion. The desideratum was a definition that would encompass not only the conventionally recognized world religions (i.e., Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, etc.) but also newer, smaller, more indigenous and more subaltern religions such as Scientology, Wicca, Voodoo, and Shamanism. As with Durkheim, at issue was whether attributes such as gods (or goddesses), the supernatural, and the sacred could sufficiently capture this diversity without privileging one or another variant. Just as “god” may be a limiting concept confined to the Abrahamic faiths, so also “the sacred” may carry its own theological baggage. Recently, Rodney Stark, in One True God (2001), has proposed not a new definition but a proposition that only religions with a personal, monotheistic god have power to shape history. In this view, some religions, especially the Abrahamic faiths, are more powerful than others, especially Buddhism. Many of those who oppose Stark's formulation of rational choice theory (see below) would agree at least that there is something distinctive about religion by definition that should not be lost in the urge to generalize about all human activity. The result of these two discussions (i.e., the one in regard to Durkheim's definition of religion, the other in regard to the critique of rational choice theory) is that for the purposes of social theory, religion remains what it is conventionally taken to mean.

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