Religious belief and behavior have many purposes, ranging from comfort to guidance to moral principles to community and connection to tradition. Some religions may even encourage healthy behaviors, as research on health and longevity suggests. These are some of the reasons why some people choose to be members of a particular religion, and why the concept of religion is so important and yet so elusive.
Religions differ from one another in their beliefs and practices, but they all have certain common characteristics: They are usually organized into communities; they share a sacred object of devotion, such as a god or a group of gods; they have a system for the transmission of ideas, such as scripture or holy texts; they usually have ritualized behaviors that are believed to be part of the divine experience; they often include codes of ethical behavior; they usually have a leader with almost godlike status. Some scholars, including Durkheim and Tillich, have defined religion in functional terms rather than in substantive or doctrinal terms. For example, Durkheim defines religion as whatever serves to organize society’s values, and Tillich defines it as a “dominant concern” that organizes a person’s values (though he also mentions that some people have no dominant concerns).
Historically, scholarly attempts to define religion have been stipulative or normative. This is because it is not possible to know what the essence of religion is, and a social category that is evolving can have different definitions in different cultural milieus. These stipulative definitions are the product of their own historical epoch and the theories of human origins that were current at those times.
A newer trend has been toward a more open or polythetic definition. The idea is that it is useful to allow the term religion to be used in a variety of ways, and so we need to focus on how the concept functions in the various contexts in which it is applied. This does not mean that scholars are giving up on the study of religions, but rather that they are recognizing that the term is being used differently in different contexts.
Attempts at a definition of religion have also been critiqued for being ethnocentric, as well as for failing to take into account the fact that any definition of religion is going to be an essentially arbitrary construction. For this reason, some scholars have argued that it is useful to study the concept of religion only within the contexts in which it is applied and not to seek a lexical definition. Other scholars have defended the use of an arbitrary stipulative definition, on the grounds that it allows them to compare religions in a way that would not be possible with a more normative or substantive definition. For instance, stipulative definitions can be useful for comparing the development of religious ideas in different cultures, as is the case with animism, preanimism, animatism and manism, which are all based on the assumption that they are primitive or archaic stages of religion.