The world’s nearly 6.5 billion people subscribe to at least one religion. This makes religion a central phenomenon in human life, making the study of it an important academic endeavor. Religion is often viewed as a complex force that brings people together or drives them apart, but it can also help explain the wide range of differences among individuals and groups.
Many scholars work to better understand the complexities of religion and have proposed a variety of ways to define it. Some of the most common definitions include a belief in some type of supernatural entity or concept, an organized group of beliefs and practices, a community of believers, and an institutional structure to manage its members.
Anthropologists believe that early religion developed in part out of humans’ attempts to control uncontrollable parts of their environment, such as weather or the success of hunting. Some of these efforts, like magic, tried to manipulate their environments directly; others, like religion, supplicated them by asking for assistance from higher powers such as gods and goddesses.
Some critics of the concept of religion have gone further to argue that it is an invented category and that its modern semantic expansion went hand in hand with European colonialism. These critics would like to see the term “religion” dropped altogether, but they do not deny that it names a real social reality. Rather, they seek to undermine its assumptions so that scholars can more clearly examine and critically evaluate the various forms of life it describes.