Religion has long been a powerful force in human society. It has helped to preserve moral beliefs and behaviors, encourage healthy lifestyles, provide a sense of community and connection to tradition, and even affect people’s health. In fact, it’s not uncommon for researchers to find that religious people are healthier than their nonreligious counterparts.

However, what counts as religion has shifted over time. In the past, scholars have defined the concept based on the presence of certain types of beliefs, such as belief in a God or in afterlife, or based on practices like prayer and participation in a particular ritual. These are known as “substantive” definitions because they define religion in terms of the presence of a distinctive kind of reality.

A more recent approach drops the substantive element and defines religion in terms of a specific role that it plays in society. One can see this in Emile Durkheim’s notion of religion as whatever system of practices unites a group into a moral community (whether or not those practices involve belief in unusual realities). It is also seen in Paul Tillich’s idea that religion is whatever dominant concern organizes a person’s values.

Recently, some critics have gone even farther and argued that the term “religion” is an artificial creation that went hand in hand with European colonialism. They have used this argument to reject substantial definitions of religion. But they have also argued against the claim that there is no such thing as religion.