Religion is an organized system of beliefs and practices revolving around, or leading to, a transcendent spiritual experience. It exists in every culture on earth and is usually practiced publicly by a recognizable group of people. It is a major source of morality and values, a framework for understanding the universe, and an organizing structure in many societies.
Historically, scholars have attempted to understand religion by looking at its beliefs and practices. These efforts have been categorized as either monothetic or polythetic. Monothetic approaches hold that a religious concept must have some defining properties in order to accurately describe a particular religion.
Polythetic approaches, which have gained popularity in recent decades, abandon the belief that a specific religious concept must have a certain number of defining properties. Instead, these approaches look at the functions a given religion performs in a particular society and how it is used to unite people in a moral community.
For example, the polythetic approach developed by Emile Durkheim takes religion as whatever binds members of a society together into a moral community and provides them with a sense of meaning and purpose. Another important function of religion is the ability to motivate people to take actions that are morally virtuous.
Some scholars of religion have gone even further, arguing that to understand a religion in terms of beliefs or any mental states is to misunderstand it. These critics believe that the modern semantic expansion of the term “religion” goes hand in hand with European colonialism, and that one must stop treating it as if it refers to an independent phenomenon.