Religion

There is no consensus on the definition of religion (Clarke & Beyer, The World's Religions, Routledge, 2009, page 136). Traditional definitions have tended to try to formulate the "western folk conception" of religion, i.e. the rather vague ideas ordinary westerners have of what religion is, based on their experience of religion in the west. As long ago as 1912, Leuba (Psychology of Religion) listed 50 different definitions, and many more have been suggested since. Most observers classify academic definitions into two types:

1. substantive definitions, which try to define what religion "is"; most of these define it in terms of relation to the supernatural
2. functional definitions, which try to define religion by the role it plays in the lives of individuals and/or societies

The former have been criticized as being too narrow: for example, some of them would exclude Buddhism, which most people regard as a religion. The latter, on the other hand, have been criticized as too broad, allowing all sorts of things to be regarded as some people's "religion": sport, art, politics, drugs etc.

More recently, some scholars have argued that, rather than a single characteristic or group of characteristics, Wittgenstein's family resemblance approach should be adopted to the definition of religion. As members of a family resemble each other in various ways, though there is no one characteristic or group of them that defines membership in the family, so a religion should be defined as something that has most, but not necessarily all, of a list of characteristics. A variety of such lists have been proposed by scholars.