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Here are some well-known representative responses. Do you understand what each is trying to say? Which one do you agree with?
KARL MARX (1818-1883)
WILLIAM JAMES (1842-1910)
EMILE DURKHEIM (1858-1917)
"Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 1844. Click on the image to read complete text.
CLIFFORD GEERTZ (1926-2006)
Religion is "the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow." The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1901-02. Click on the image to read the complete text.
PETER BERGER (B. 1929)
Religion is "sacred canopy...a meaningful order or nomos that is imposed upon the discrete experiences and meanings of individuals...which acts as a shield against terror." The Sacred Canopy: Elements ofa Sociological Theory of Religion,1967.
"A Religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say set apart and forbidden, beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community, called a church, all those who adhere to them." The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912. Click on the image to read excerpts from the text.
JONATHAN ZITTEL SMITH (B. 1938)
Religion is "(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973. Click on the image to read Geertz's article, "Religion as a Cultural System."
ROBERT BELLAH (1927-2013)
"..while there is a staggering amount of data, phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religion — there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no existence apart from the academy."
- Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion
Religion is "a set of symbolic forms and acts that relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence."
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