Religion is a complex social phenomenon that encompasses a variety of beliefs, values, and behaviors. It includes a person’s relation to that which is sacred, holy, absolute, spiritual, divine or worthy of especial reverence. It also includes the way a person deals with ultimate concerns about life and death, and how they make sense of their place in the universe. Religion may also include rituals, symbols and ceremonies, and ideas or teachings about the nature of God or of a deity or about a supreme being.

Traditionally, academics have offered various definitions of religion. One common approach is to define religion as a set of beliefs and practices that people associate with the pursuit of what they consider to be true, beautiful, or good. This view is often influenced by Clifford Geertz’s emphasis on the hermeneutic approach to culture, which tends to focus on symbolic expressions of this valuation.

Another approach is to drop the substantive element and to focus instead on the function a religious belief or practice can play in society. This is the functionalist approach exemplified by Emile Durkheim’s claim that any system of beliefs and practices that unites a group into a single moral community can be considered a religion (whether or not it involves belief in unique realities).

These two approaches differ from each other in important ways. But both face the same philosophical issue: how does a scholar distinguish between the many different phenomena that are currently lumped under the category “religion”? The increasing awareness of this problem has led to the development of a movement, inspired by continental philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, that rejects the notion that there is such a thing as a coherent, unchanging essence that can serve as a basis for sorting cultural types into discrete categories.