Religion has played a major role in human history and continues to shape many aspects of global culture. It influences fashion, media, war, peace, colonization, enslavement and abolition, laws and law enforcement, marriage practices, education, health, economies, art, and much more. In sociological functional terms, religion is any unified system of beliefs and practices that functions to unite people into a moral community.
Emile Durkheim developed a taxonomy of types of religion, and this approach is widely used in the social sciences. His definition of religion includes beliefs and practices such as prayer, sermons, commemoration or veneration of deities or saints, trances, feasts, sacrifices, matrimonial and funerary services, art, music, and public service. He also emphasized that all religions have a common goal: “to produce a generalized feeling of moral belonging and a sense of ethical obligation”.
Sociological theorist Edward Burnett Tylor defined religion as a belief in spiritual beings and a system of moral values, organized and regulated by a supreme being or group of supreme beings. His work was instrumental in developing a need for comparative studies of religions, and it prepared the way for more modern developments.
Karl Marx, a revolutionary socialist, looked at the social impact of religion. He thought that religion reflected the class structure of society and that it perpetuates inequality and is a false remedy for working-class economic suffering. His famous statement was that “religion is the opium of the people”.
Max Weber studied the social impact of religion and focused on the idea of discipline. He developed a theory of how religions develop and grow, and how they become institutionalized and organized. He believed that there is a progression of religions from polytheism, to monotheism, and finally to atheism. He also believed that the development of a religion was usually followed by a period of decline and stagnation.
Some scholars have looked at how the definition of religion shifts according to the culture, and have criticized the arbitrary nature of this social taxon concept. There has been a movement to reflexively examine the notion of religion and to explore the idea that there is no essence to this concept, as there is with other abstract concepts used to sort cultural types such as literature or democracy.
Other scholars have suggested that it may be possible to define religion as a natural kind, such as water or gold, and that this could provide a causal explanation for why the various features of what we call religion are reliably found together. However, this idea faces difficulties and raises a number of philosophical issues that are similar to those that would arise for other abstract concepts used to sort cultural types such like race or literature. It is also worth noting that the definition of religion tends to skew toward theistic Western religions and away from non-theistic Eastern religions such as Buddhism. For this reason, it is unlikely that any one definition will be able to capture all the religious phenomena that exist in the world.