This a good one… on the surface it seems like this should be an easy question to answer. But it turns out that ones answer is highly dependent on ones own affiliation or experiences with religion. And the first rule of defining a thing is that you cannot use the word in the definition, but in this case you kind of have to.

John Greene and friends run down all of the popular attempts at coming up with a universal definition of what religion is:

  • Religion is frameworks that help people organize, shape, and make sense of their lives
  • Religion is the belief in a higher power
  • Religion doesn’t have to have a higher power, but it needs a shared belief
  • Religion is correct practice
  • Religion is a special sphere of society, set apart from the rest of life
  • Religion is a personal private relationship with the divine

Problem with some of these definitions is that some of them could lead to recognizing devotion to Taylor Swift or Star Wars or Anime (or LEGO?) as a form of religion. 

I don’t know when I purchased this book, but back in 2006 I finally got around to reading it and wrote a brief reflection on what I’d learned from Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths by Paul Veyne. I was floundering through my second attempt at being a devout Evangelical Christian and the book helped me remember my research and practices when I was a religious studies and biblical studies major and my brief dabbling with anthropology and academic theology. Basically it was essential that I look at things from a much broader perspective than my own experiences being a morally compromised human practicing Calvary Chapel christianity in Southern California in the 2000s. 

I knew, for example, that as much as my Christian friends liked to read the Book of Psalms and think that God was talking directly to them living in 21st century America, that that was pretty much like treating the Bible like some kind of Ouija board or Magic-8 ball. Whatever the message that the writer was trying to convey to his ancient audience, we were largely ignoring or flat out ignorant of the actual context and possible mindset behind this poetic literature. As a writer, that annoyed me.

In Veyne’s book, I was also reminded that even though these ancient readers would have no concept of things like germ theory or quantum physics that didn’t mean that they were all stupid or superstitious. While some, no doubt, tried to take advantage of the lack of understanding of others, we also have to consider that they were also trying to do the best they could with the information that they had. Hell, the peoples of the South Pacific islands were navigating the Pacific Ocean by the stars and with very few instruments centuries before the European colonizers showed up. And there was certainly a level of “natural medicine” that was effective, even though they might have misattributed the reasons for their successes. Basically I needed to step away from “understanding” things solely based on my own experiences as someone who happened to come into existence in the 1960s, got involved in the Southern California Jesus Movement and then got an education in Religious Studies and Biblical Studies from the Jesuits at LMU and then 1980s Biola University/Fuller Seminary. That alone would lend one to recognize that all of this different and contradictory dogmas cannot all be True. At the same time, there had to be some truth here or they wouldn’t have persisted for all of these centuries (that’s the anthropologist in me speaking). 

And here I am, another 20-years removed from the above narrative, engaging in the dialogue about religion and belief and the human desire and need to know. I love that the attempt to come up with a universal definition of religion itself defies a single definition that doesn’t also happen to be applicable to almost any human individual or community effort (like sports or fandom!). I also find sad that this thing we call “religion,” that has found so many different forms of expression and so many different attempts to understand “existence,” that we tend to be unable to see the common desire that we all have to understand said existence or that having so many different versions is kind of the point, given how many different ways humans have found to survive in this place during so many different eras and places. 

Too bad we can’t appreciate that some of us are naturally left-handed and some of us are right-handed, yet both are able to function perfectly fine in our given worlds and there should be no need, given that we have two hands, that any form of handedness be the only accepted form of handedness. Does it work for you? Fine, enjoy your life, my friend. There is no need for me to try to correct you because I’m left handed and you’re not. Given the thousands of religions that have existed over humanity’s existence, we should be able to celebrate all these different varieties instead of killing each other because we don’t share the same gods or beliefs. Given how we do so much better when we work together, it just seems wrong that we have this history of killing each other because we don’t honor the same household gods. 

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Tags: Crash Course Religions, defining religion, in bad faith, personal religious history, religion

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