Most of the world’s 6.5 billion people participate in one religion or another. It’s hard to define, but it seems to be a fundamental human experience and need. From Christianity to Hinduism to Scientology, the world’s major religions differ in doctrine but are similar in practice.
The academic study of religion has been greatly enhanced by advances in anthropology, history, archaeology, and sociology. This growth of systematic knowledge has led to more sophisticated and nuanced approaches to the study of religion.
Until recently, most analyses of religion relied on what scholars call “monothetic-set definitions”, which are based on the classical idea that every instance of a concept will have certain properties that distinguish it from other instances. However, over the past forty years or so, there has been a movement in the social sciences to treat concepts as more complex than they have traditionally been treated, and this shift toward “polythetic” approaches is especially evident in the case of religion.
Scholars are exploring a range of possibilities for what the polythetic approach might look like. For example, some scholars have rejected the notion of a “thing” or “object” that is religious and instead proposed that a religion can be defined as whatever dominant concerns organize a person’s values, regardless of whether those concerns involve belief in unusual realities. Other scholars have taken a functionalist approach, such as Durkheim’s, which focuses on the role that religion plays in creating solidarity in society.