What Is Religion and Why It Is So Difficult to Define?

Few things are more controversial than religion. In its name, we have seen the greatest acts of goodness but also the cruelest wars and persecutions. For many people it is essential in their lives, and a significant amount of people are ready to kill or suffer death in defense of their faith. Yet, despite its obvious significance and importance, not a wholesome definition has been able to be established. In this exercise we will try to explain the difficulties of describing religion by offering a definition first and analyzing its flaws and strengths and see how and why that fails to include certain spiritualities which frequently are regarded as religions.

At a recent discussion, the following definition was offered for “religion”: “Organic system of rules and beliefs about how to relate to others and God”^[1]. This definition seems to cover some religions to some degree as it points to a vertical (people-God) and a horizontal (people-people) relationships, includes a deity and reflects the organic set of rules. There are certain religions, however, such as certain forms of Buddhism where there is no belief in any God, and some spiritualities or religions are more focused on the individual relationship with God, on an inner quest, than the relationships with others. It also seems to disregard polytheist religions, since it is only pointing to one God. Some people who may agree on the proposed definition would probably argue that certain Eastern spiritualities cannot be regarded religions as such, but simply spiritualities, and some of these spiritualities are in fact more than happy of not being regarded as religion.

Certainly, most of the offered definitions on religion “tend to suffer from one of two problems: they are either too narrow and exclude many belief systems which most agree are religions, or they are too vague and ambiguous, suggesting that just about anything and everything is a religion”^[2] . As we have pointed out, the definition used at the beginning of these lines may be considered to be too rigid and would exclude certain forms of Buddhism and certain Asian spiritualities which, again, most people would agree to be a religion.

But why is it so difficult to define? The first difficulty you came across when trying to venture a definition is the huge diversity of religions very different amongst themselves. Even some people’s approach to sport does not fall any short of living it as their “religion”. They have even gone as far as creating the “Maradonian Church”, which, in December 2011, counted with 80,000 followers in over 60 countries^[3] 

In some cultures, moreover, there is no specific word for religion because it was so natural for them that it does not separate from reality. That is the case of the Arabic word “din” or the Sanskrit “dharma”, which are also used to describe many other things such as custom, law, constitution, government, submission, obedience, way of life, etc. (din) or custom, duty, order, truth, law, morality, justice, ethics, etc. (dharma).

This same idea seems to be in the mind of Brad Herling, a member of the AAR (American Academy of Religion), who in 2004 recognized that difficulty of defining religion. In his own words: “Because it crosses so many different boundaries in human experience, religion is notoriously difficult to define. Many attempts have been made, however, and while every theory has its limitations, each perspective contributes to our understanding of this complex phenomenon”.^[4] Certainly, as you can see at the website launched by the AAR, from which we have quoted Mr. Herling, there are several fields and their interactions with religion which have inspired people to venture a definition of religion: Religion and Nature, Divinity, the Sacred, Meaning, Profound Experiences, the Social, Science, Power…religion as Ultimate Concern or religion as psychological.

Looking at the etymology is not very helpful either, since it is not very clear if it comes from the Latin word “RELIGARE” (to tie, to bind), “RELEGERE” (to reread, to study closely a text, to study carefully) or “RELIGERE” (to recover). The Romans in fact distinguished between “cultus deorum”, or worshipping of the gods and the term “religio”, coined by Cicero, which can be described as “appropriate relationships with the God.

If we try to define religion in terms of searching for an identifiable nature or essence, we would be inclined to think about the Sacred, the Holy as opposed to the profane. In that sense, it is very interesting to read the classic 1917 by Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige, translated into English as The Idea of the Holy, where he emphasize that feeling of mystery, of reverence, of awe, which we are meant to experience when we experience religion. Do we have that feeling of being before something mysterious, not rational, fascinating and frightening at the same time?  That element of sacredness, of awe, which Otto claims to be at the very heart of all religions, was further explained by C.S. Lewis at the introduction to The Problem of Pain. Tempting and reasonable though it is to assume that element of a transcendent God or gods at the very heart and nature of religions, if we do that, as pointed out before, we would be leaving out certain Eastern spiritualities such as Confucianism, Taoism or some forms of Buddhism.