Religious experience and beliefs are an important aspect of human life. They help people to understand their place in the world and their relationship to others, as well as provide foundations for ethical, economic, and political reasoning. They are also important for maintaining social and psychological well-being and providing mechanisms for the maintenance of social networks and kin-based communities.
Religion has been defined in many ways over the centuries. The most important definition is based on a belief in a spiritual being that has ultimate meaning, a belief that it is not just a matter of feeling and thought, but is an objective fact. It is the most commonly used and best understood definition, and it is often referred to as a “substance” or “content” definition.
Substantive definitions have been developed by scholars such as Edward Burnett Tylor (1871), who defined religion as the belief in spiritual beings that exist in all known societies. He argued that this approach would exclude certain people from the category of religion, such as the followers of idolatry or superstition.
A similar approach is found in Durkheim’s earlier, formal definition of religion, which he deemed compatible with his later functional theory (Dobbelaere and Lauwers 1973). He considered the term to have two functions, one to promote solidarity among the members of a society and another to facilitate communication across the disciplinary barriers of different cultures.
The functional approach has also been defended by O’Dea (1966), who used a formal definition of religion in his presentation of functionalism. He argued that religion was a side effect of the normal functioning of subconscious intuitive mental faculties. These same faculties enable people to make sense of unexplained events, such as the rustling of tall grass. They can also provide a way to link occurrences that are not explained with causes.
This approach is also advocated by anthropologists and historians of religion, who have been concerned to discover the historical context in which a particular type of behavior originated. For instance, archaeologists have been interested in how the religious practices of the past can be inferred from material artifacts and buildings.
Similarly, philosophers and psychologists have been concerned with how people come to believe in certain supernatural beings or concepts. They have argued that religions are the product of psychological processes and have explored such topics as the Oedipus complex, the Universal archetypes, the desire, the need for a stable frame, the mystical experiences, and the influence on personality development.
These approaches have tended to be more akin to the functional or monothetic theories than to the verstehen approaches, and they tend to be less influential than substantive and formal definitions in the study of religion. This is largely because the social science methods that are used for studying religion and the study of the psychology of religion, as well as the methodological frameworks of participant observation and ethnographic research, are often geared toward searching for understandings within specific social worlds rather than at a theoretical level.