Religion is the foundation of many humanitarian services – medical ministries, food aid, clean water, and more. The vast majority of people working in these fields are members of faith groups. It’s also true that religions teach a number of moral and ethical values, such as treating others with respect and compassion, practicing gratitude, and being kind to the environment. Yet, despite these benefits, critics of religion often focus on negative things done in its name.
It might seem avant garde today to talk of a multidimensional network or “assemblage” that is religion, but the idea of defining a set of social practices in terms of their distinctive role in life is not new. Christian theologians in antiquity used the term nobis religio to refer to a multifaceted or multidimensional complex of practices, including, but not limited to, belief.
In modern times, there have been two competing ideas of what religion is. Most scholars have been attempting to create what is called a “monothetic definition”, which assumes that any practice that is accurately described by the concept will share a defining feature that puts it in that category. For example, Emile Durkheim defined religion in terms of its social function: it is whatever groupings of practices unify a number of people into a single moral community (whether or not those practices involve beliefs in unusual realities).
But other scholars have rejected this notion of what religion is, and some have tried to define the concept by dropping the idea that it has a defining property. One such approach comes from Talal Asad, who uses Michel Foucault’s genealogical approach to argue that the development of the concept of religion is a recent Western project.