The final of my seminar of religious studies class was to define the word religion in one sentence and then explain that one sentence in 250-300 words. This is what I came up with. An atheist friend said she was surprised at how rational it sounded, and my professor said Russell T. McCutcheon would probably like my definition. Personally, even though I have immense respect for McCutcheon, I found the first compliment much more flattering.
Religion is a conceptual category used by people to group sets of practices and teachings.
Religion as a conceptual category was originally produced by a variety of discursive processes and culturally conditioned assumptions with a distinctly Euro-Protestant flavor. The cultural functions of the Euro-Protestant set of practices and teachings were abstracted into an idealized (if somewhat inchoate) form, with the intention of being equally applicable in all social and historical contexts. Divorced this way from its original physical representation, the Euro-Protestant concept of religion was then projected outward into history and society to group human phenomena into distinct units, which were classified as “religions” based upon the assumption that they fulfilled an identical function in human life. The cultural assumptions that were unconsciously incorporated into the original (Euro-Protestant) definition of religion tend to confuse rather than elucidate the human phenomena that are the focus of the academic study of religion. For religion to be a coherent and useful conceptual category that is truly applicable in a variety of social and historical contexts, then, special care must be taken to avoid a definition of religion that assumes a basic social or historical function.
Instead, the two essential features grouped by the conceptual category of religion are practices and teachings. Religious practices are ritual processes regularized and performed by human beings; religious teachings are disciplinary rules or codes that are meant to govern certain aspects of human behavior. Since human beings use religious practices and teachings to fulfill a variety of functions, and since human beings are the ultimate curators of religious practices and teachings, religion as a conceptual category must be defined as the grouping of distinctly human phenomena.
