Have you ever tried to explain something so familiar that you suddenly realized you don't quite understand it yourself?
Welcome to FreeAstroScience.com, where we break down complex ideas into concepts you can actually use. Today, we're tackling something that might surprise you: the word "religion" has never been properly defined. Scholars, philosophers, and scientists have wrestled with it for centuries. They've proposed dozens of definitions. And every single one has failed.
Yet here's the strange part—we can't stop using this word. It shapes our laws. It defines communities. It sparks wars and inspires peace. It structures the deepest questions we ask about existence.
So grab a cup of coffee, settle in, and join us on this journey through one of humanity's most stubborn puzzles. By the end, you might see this everyday word in a completely new light.
Where Did the Word "Religion" Even Come From?
The Romans Didn't Mean What We Mean
We tend to assume that "religion" is as old as humanity itself. But here's something that might catch you off guard: the concept we use today only emerged around the 17th century .
Yes, ancient civilizations had gods, temples, sacrifices, and rituals. The Romans gave us the word religio. But their version meant something quite different from ours.
For the Romans, religio referred to scrupulous exactness—doing the right thing in the right way. It was about proper observance, not a separate belief system. They had other words too: cultus for customs, ritus for rites, superstitio for excessive devotion. But none of these carved out a special domain apart from everyday civic life .
Here's where it gets interesting. When Romans encountered foreign peoples, they didn't see "different religions." They saw different versions of cultic life—other localities with other divinities. If those foreign gods seemed powerful, Romans might even try to recruit them during wartime through a practice called evocatio .
Christianity Changed the Game—But Not Right Away
Even after the Roman Empire became officially Christian, people still didn't sort the world into bounded systems like "Christianity," "Judaism," or "Islam." When the 4th-century writer Lactantius contrasted vera religio with falsae religiones, he meant true worship versus false worship. He wasn't comparing competing systems on a chart .
The Christians of late antiquity didn't view themselves as having one religion among many. They viewed themselves as possessing the truth.
How Did the Modern Concept of "Religion" Emerge?
You Need a "Secular" to Have a "Religious"
Scholars now believe that to arrive at our modern category of religion, you needed something else first: a complementary secular sphere. A realm that was explicitly not religious .
This development came together in the 17th century. Hugo Grotius's De veritate religionis Christianae (1627) marks one important milestone. European Christendom was splintering from within while simultaneously encountering unfamiliar worlds through exploration and conquest .
Religion could now be conceived as a special domain, potentially separable from law and politics. But when Europeans looked at India, Africa, China, or the ancient Mediterranean, they searched for elements that looked familiar—specifically, elements that resembled Protestant Christianity:
- A sacred text to anchor authority
- A prophetic founder to narrate origins
- A set of theological doctrines
- Duties that offered a path to salvation
If a tradition didn't provide these features, European scholars would often helpfully supply them. Traditions without founders were given founders. Traditions without single scriptures were assigned canonical texts. Diverse local rites were bundled into overarching systems .
And just like that, "world religions" were born.
Why Has Every Definition of Religion Failed?
The Parade of Brilliant Attempts
By the late 19th century, as "world religions" became a subject of academic study, European scholars tried their systematic best to define what exactly made something a religion. Buddhism became a fascinating test case—scholars had to unify practices across South, Central, and East Asia, then decide whether a sometimes godless tradition could even qualify .
Let's look at some of the heavyweight contenders:
| Thinker | Definition of Religion | The Problem |
|---|---|---|
| John Stuart Mill | Must unite creed, sentiment, and moral authority | Many traditions don't package these elements that way |
| Herbert Spencer | A mystery of existence pressing for interpretation | Ancient Judaism had little of this; biblical writers lived within a covenantal drama, not cosmic puzzlement |
| Edward B. Tylor | Belief in spiritual beings | Too Protestant—privileges inner conviction over outward form |
| Max Müller | A mental faculty for apprehending the Infinite | Could apply to a Romantic poet |
| William Robertson Smith | Ritual—the binding force of collective acts | What about communal practices that aren't "sacred"? Or traditions where doctrine matters intensely? |
| Émile Durkheim | A unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, uniting adherents into a moral community | Relies on a sharp sacred/profane division that countless ethnographies would undermine |
| Clifford Geertz | A system of symbols establishing powerful moods and motivations | Opens the door to political ideologies |
The Too-Big-or-Too-Small Problem
Every definition ran into the same wall. As Appiah puts it in his analysis: "These definitions came up short because they excluded too much or included too much. Either they failed to net the fish you were after or they netted too much bycatch" .
Georg Simmel, writing around 1900, had already dismissed the dream that a single word could solve the puzzle. He called it an "Open Sesame" fantasy .
A few years later, William James complained about "verbal" disputation—then fell back on a recognizably Protestant formula himself, defining religion as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine" .
The linguist Jane Ellen Harrison simply refused to define religion at all. A definition, she said, "desiccates its object" .
What About the "Family Resemblance" Approach?
Wittgenstein's Clever Solution
By the late 20th century, hopes for a clean definition had faded. Some theorists turned to philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblance .
The idea is elegant: traditions can belong to the same conceptual family because they overlap in crisscrossing ways—like cousins who share a nose here, a chin there, without any single feature they all have in common. You map the ripple of resemblances and give up on strict boundaries.
But here's the catch. Those resemblances always depend on what you pick as your prototype. If you start with Protestant Christianity, you'll find resemblances that matter to Protestants. Begin instead with Yoruba orisha devotion, and you'll trace a very different set of likenesses .
The starting point shapes everything.
The Aha Moment: Religion Is Like... Acid?
Here's where things get genuinely surprising. Stay with me.
How Scientific Terms Survive Despite Being Wrong
Think about chemistry for a moment. What counts as an acid?
When the term was first used, it simply referred to substances that tasted sour (acidus in Latin). Later, acids were marked by what they did: etching metal, losing their bite when mixed with alkalis. In 1777, the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier became convinced that acidity came from a common ingredient he called oxygen—literally "acid-producer" .
He was wrong.
Yet we'd say that when Lavoisier spoke of acids, he was referring to the same class of things we mean today. A century later, Svante Arrhenius defined acids by their propensity to release hydrogen ions in water. Then in 1923, Brønsted and Lowry reconceived them as proton donors. Gilbert Lewis broadened the definition again to electron-pair acceptors .
Each shift expanded the boundaries. None made the term obsolete. The word survived because the substances doing the dissolving and reacting were real enough to anchor it, even as the theoretical understanding changed .
The Phlogiston Lesson
Not every scientific term was so lucky.
In 1774, Joseph Priestley isolated a gas he called "dephlogisticated air." Phlogiston was supposed to be an invisible substance released during combustion—the essence of burning. What Priestley had actually found was what we now call oxygen .
The difference? Nothing in the world actually behaved as phlogiston was said to behave. Lavoisier's experiments proved that combustion involved gaining a component of air, not losing an invisible essence. The phlogiston concept evaporated because it referred to nothing at all .
Here's the key insight: there's a difference between a bad map of a real country and a map of Atlantis. Only the first can be fixed.
So Is "Religion" More Like Acid or Phlogiston?
This brings us to the heart of the matter.
"Religion" seems to occupy uncertain territory. It might be a flawed map of something real. Or it might be pointing at a chimera we've convinced ourselves exists.
Religion as a "Social Kind"
Philosophers call entities like religion social kinds—things that are doubly human products. They arise first from our collective activity, then from our collective description .
Think about other social kinds: recessions, nations, money, marriage. The philosopher Sally Haslanger calls such entities "socially founded" .
But religion is a special case. It belongs to that subcategory of social kinds that living people apply to themselves. Some social kinds, like "recession," can be defined externally. Economists can declare one happened in the 1870s even if no one at the time felt it by that name. Others, like "wedding," depend on shared recognition—you can't hold one without a community that believes in weddings .
Religion functions both ways. Anthropologists can describe practices that participants would never call religions. Yet once the label circulates, it acquires reflexive power: believers organize their self-understanding around it .
The Feedback Loop
The philosopher Ian Hacking captured this with his idea of dynamic nominalism—the process by which classifications and the people classified reshape one another .
Categories create kinds. The heavy drinker is seen, and sees himself, as an alcoholic. The word doesn't merely label the phenomenon. It helps constitute it.
Hacking later preferred the term "dialectical realism." What emerges from this loop—labels affecting those labeled, which then affects the label—is, by any reasonable measure, real enough .
When you've been told that what you have is a religion, what's affected isn't just how you relate to it. It's what you think you are.
Why We Can't Give Up the Word
The Practical Stakes
Given all these problems, some scholars have proposed abandoning "religion" entirely.
Wilfred Cantwell Smith argued in The Meaning and End of Religion (1962) that talk of "religion" conflated too many things and caused mischief. We should speak instead of "faith" and "cumulative tradition." The anthropologist Daniel Dubuisson suggested replacing "religion" with "cosmographic formation" .
But as the social theorist Martin Riesebrodt drily observed, such neologisms could themselves be shown to have been "constructed through historically specific discourses." And those who would eliminate the term "religion" seldom manage long without it .
The word persists because it still does work, both practical and theoretical:
- Sociologists study its relation to charity or suicide
- Psychologists examine its connection to prejudice or wellbeing
- Legislators and judges must grasp the category to balance constitutional requirements
- Believers use it to name a space where meaning is made, defended, or denied
In the United States alone, countless legal decisions turn on what does and doesn't count as religion for purposes of "accommodation" and "non-establishment" .
Too Many Stakeholders to Fire
As Appiah puts it: "Whatever else it may be, 'religion' remains a category with too many stakeholders to be fired by fiat. When it comes to what the word means, no one gets to say, and everyone gets a say" .
What Should We Actually Do With This Knowledge?
A Practical Approach
If we can't define religion but can't abandon it either, what's left?
We might concede that "religion" resists a unitary meaning and proceed case by case, choosing the angle that best reveals what we need to see .
When speaking of the Abrahamic faiths, a practice-centered approach may capture the lived textures of ritual and observance. After all, the propositions of the Nicene or Athanasian Creed are obscure—arguably incoherent—but the act of avowing them carries enormous significance .
When examining what anthropologists once called "traditional thought" in various African societies, a belief-centered lens may illuminate elements that the modern Christian model hides from view. In the Akan region of Ghana, for instance, people might appease or reproach their ancestors in the same spirit they might deal with someone at a municipal office. There's deep continuity between what we'd distinguish as natural and supernatural realms .
Each emphasis clarifies something the other leaves obscure.
Living With Useful Fictions
The philosopher Hans Vaihinger argued in The Philosophy of 'As If' (1911) that we often reason through fictions we judge "true enough" because making use of them helps us act, anticipate, and understand .
The map may not be the territory. But we'd be lost without it.
The Comfort in Uncertainty
Here's something I want you to take away from all this.
If you've ever felt confused about what religion "really is"—whether you're religious, non-religious, or somewhere in between—you're in excellent company. The greatest minds of multiple centuries have shared your confusion.
That's not a failure. That's intellectual honesty.
And there's something freeing about recognizing that our categories are tools, not truths. We can use them thoughtfully. We can be aware of what they hide from sight and what they let us see. We can begin where we are, with the tools our history leaves us, and make do—even if we suspect our models may someday be replaced .
We don't need a perfect map to navigate. We just need to hold our maps lightly.
Final Thoughts: Keeping Faith With the World
The sleep of reason breeds monsters—a lesson we at FreeAstroScience hold dear. But so does the hubris of thinking our categories perfectly capture reality.
"Religion" endures as what Appiah calls "a shared act of attention: one of those serviceable maps by which we try to find our bearings, and to keep faith with the world" .
Perhaps that's enough.
Whether you identify as religious, spiritual, secular, or something that refuses all labels—you're part of this ongoing human conversation about meaning, belonging, and what lies beyond our everyday experience. You're not alone in finding the territory hard to map.
We're all using imperfect words to point at things that exceed them.
Thank you for spending this time with us at FreeAstroScience.com. We write these pieces because we believe complex ideas deserve clear explanations—and because the world needs more people who keep asking questions, even when the answers resist easy capture.
Come back soon. Keep your mind active. Keep asking the hard questions.
That's how we find our bearings together.
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