Religion is an important feature of human culture. It provides people with meaning in their lives, and it creates social cohesion. It can be comforting, but it can also be terrifying. It can even be useful in providing health benefits, such as improved coping with stress. Many scholars have sought to understand it, and many have used different approaches.
Most have been “monothetic,” meaning that they operate with the classical view that every instance accurately described by a concept will share some defining property that puts it in the category. Recently, however, there has been a resurgence of “polythetic” approaches, which treat concepts like religion as having a prototype structure. For incisive discussions of these ideas, see Smith (1982) and Laurence (2001).
The essence of religion is the recognition by man of his dependence upon Divine assistance, and of his consequent obligation to bring himself into friendly communion with the Deity or deities in whom he recognizes the source of his perfection and happiness. This awareness is a source of hope, and it engenders the desire to bring oneself into obedience to God’s commands.
This obedience is embodied in a series of social practices, such as the performance of rites and rituals. While these practices vary widely from society to society, they always involve a belief in supernatural forces that are believed to control the world. This belief and the corresponding practices, institutions, and governing rules constitute religion. The emergence of this universal phenomenon has been the subject of much study, and it has led to a number of different definitions for religion.