page_title: Religious studies
section_title: Defining "religion"
hierarchical_section_title: Religious studies / Defining "religion"
caption_attribution_description: Totem Poles at Stanley Park, Vancouver
context_page_description: Religious studies, also known as the study of religion, is an academic field devoted to research into religious beliefs, behaviors, and institutions. It describes, compares, interprets, and explains religion, emphasizing systematic, historically based, and cross-cultural perspectives.
  While theology attempts to understand the nature of transcendent or supernatural forces, religious studies tries to study religious behavior and belief from outside any particular religious viewpoint. Religious studies draws upon multiple disciplines and their methodologies including anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and history of religion.
  Religious studies originated in the 19th century, when scholarly and historical analysis of the Bible had flourished, and Hindu and Buddhist texts were first being translated into European languages. Early influential scholars included Friedrich Max Müller in England and Cornelius P. Tiele in the Netherlands. Today religious studies is practiced by scholars worldwide. In its early years, it was known as "comparative religion" or the science of religion and, in the US, there are those who today also know the field as the History of religion.
context_section_description: Throughout the history of religious studies, there have been many attempts to define the term "religion". Many of these have been monothetic, seeking to determine a key, essential element which all religions share, which can be used to define "religion" as a category, and which must be necessary in order for something to be classified as a "religion". There are two forms of monothetic definition; the first are substantive, seeking to identify a specific core as being at the heart of religion, such as a belief in a God or gods, or an emphasis on power. The second are functional, seeking to define "religion" in terms of what it does for humans, for instance defining it by the argument that it exists to assuage fear of death, unite a community, or reinforce the control of one group over another. Other forms of definition are polythetic, producing a list of characteristics that are common to religion. In this definition there is no one characteristic that need to be common in every form of religion.
  Causing further complications is the fact that there are various secular world views, such as nationalism and Marxism, which bear many of the same characteristics that are commonly associated with religion, but which rarely consider themselves to be religious.
  Conversely, other scholars of religious studies have argued that the discipline should reject the term "religion" altogether and cease trying to define it. In this perspective, "religion" is argued to be a Western concept that has been forced upon other cultures in an act of intellectual imperialism. According to scholar of religion Russell T. McCutcheon, "many of the peoples that we study by means of this category have no equivalent term or concept at all". There is, for instance, no word for "religion" in languages like Sanskrit.
caption: Totem poles reflect the beliefs of the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast; some religious studies scholars argue that the term "religion" is too Western-centric to encompass the beliefs and practices of communities such as these
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