Religion

• 1. Introduction

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  Religion is a word that arrives in English from the 1200s CE, borrowed from Old French and Anglo-Norman, carrying the sense of moral obligation, reverence, and sanctity. Yet the concept it names is far younger than the practices it tries to describe. Scholars today count an estimated 10,000 distinct religions worldwide, and four of them alone account for over 77% of the entire human population. How did a medieval Latin term, once used by Pliny the Elder to describe what he took to be an elephant's reverence for the night sky, come to organize our understanding of humanity's deepest questions? And why do so many cultures, ancient and modern, lack any equivalent word at all? The story moves through etymology, philosophy, anthropology, and political power.

• 2. A Word With No Ancient Equivalent

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  Cicero, the Roman philosopher, traced the Latin word religiō to the verb relegere, meaning to go over again or consider carefully. Other scholars, including Joseph Campbell and Tom Harpur in the modern era, have argued instead that the root is religare, to bind or connect, an interpretation promoted by St. Augustine and before him by the theologian Lactantius in his work Divinae institutiones. Neither origin story matches the way ancient Romans actually used the word. Religiō in classical antiquity described a range of general emotions: hesitation, caution, anxiety, fear, the feeling of being restricted. Roman authors related it to scrupulus, meaning very precisely, and sometimes linked it to superstitio, which meant too much fear or shame. Julius Caesar used religiō to mean the obligation of a soldier's oath. The word was not primarily a religious term in our modern sense.

  When religiō arrived in English around the 1200s, it carried the narrower meaning of life bound by monastic vows. The broader, compartmentalized sense of religion as a domain separate from worldly things did not appear before the 1500s. The Peace of Augsburg is one documented instance of religion being deployed to distinguish the domain of the church from the domain of civil authorities, a usage that Christian Reus-Smit has described as the first step toward a European system of sovereign states. In ancient Greece, the term threskeia performed some of the same work, appearing sparsely in classical texts before becoming more frequent in the writings of Josephus in the 1st century CE, where it covered everything from respectful fear to cultic practices.

• 3. Invented, Not Discovered

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  The concept of religion as such was formed in the 16th and 17th centuries, shaped by two forces: the splitting of Christendom during the Protestant Reformation, and the encounter with non-European cultures during the Age of Exploration. Ancient sacred texts including the Bible, the Quran, and others did not contain a word or even a concept of religion in their original languages, and neither did the cultures in which those texts were composed.

  Hebrew has no precise equivalent of the word religion. Judaism's central organizing concept is halakha, meaning the walk or path, sometimes translated as law, which guides practice, belief, and daily life. In the 1st century CE, Josephus used the Greek term ioudaismos as an ethnic descriptor, not a label for a belief system. The concept of Judaism as a religion analogous to Christianity was, according to this view, invented by the Christian Church, and it was only in the 19th century that Jews began to understand their ancestral culture in those terms.

  The Arabic word din, often rendered as religion in modern translations of the Quran, was translated as law up to the mid-1600s. The Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an notes that prior to the 20th century, the English word religion had no direct equivalent in Arabic, and the Arabic word din had no direct equivalent in English. Sanskrit's dharma, also sometimes translated as religion, similarly means law. Japan had no concept of religion and no corresponding word until American warships appeared off the Japanese coast in 1853 and the government was forced to sign treaties demanding freedom of religion, requiring the country to contend with an idea it had no native framework for.

  The philologist Max Muller noted in the 19th century that what we call ancient religion today, the people living it would have simply called law.

• 4. The Problem of Definition

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  Edward Burnett Tylor proposed in 1871 that religion meant the belief in spiritual beings. He cautioned that narrowing the definition further to require a supreme deity, or belief in judgment after death, would exclude many peoples from the category of religious, giving, as he put it, the fault of identifying religion rather with particular developments than with the deeper motive which underlies them.

  Friedrich Schleiermacher in the late 18th century defined religion as das schlechthinnige Abhangigkeitsgefuhl, commonly translated as the feeling of absolute dependence. His contemporary Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel disagreed thoroughly, calling it the Divine Spirit becoming conscious of Himself through the finite spirit. William James, writing in The Varieties of Religious Experience, focused on the individual: 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. By divine, James meant any object that is godlike, whether it be a concrete deity or not, toward which the individual feels compelled to respond with solemnity and gravity.

  Emile Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, shifted the focus from the individual to the community. He defined religion as a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, meaning things set apart and forbidden, which unite all who adhere to them into a single moral community called a Church. Sacred things, for Durkheim, could include a rock, a tree, a spring, a pebble, a piece of wood, or a house. Clifford Geertz defined religion as a system of symbols that acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in people by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. Geertz himself remarked that the mechanics of how this is accomplished are poorly understood: we just know that it is done, annually, weekly, daily, for some people almost hourly.

  The MacMillan Encyclopedia of Religions observes that the very attempt to define religion is itself a particularly Western concern, the product of a theistic inheritance from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that imposes a dichotomy between a transcendent deity and everything else.

• 5. Who Believes and How Many

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  Four religions account for over 77% of the world's population: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Christianity, with about 2.3 billion followers as of 2015, is the largest, having spread across the world through the Byzantine Empire in the first millennium and through colonization in the period that followed. Islam had approximately 1.8 billion followers in 2015, making almost a quarter of earth's population Muslim. Hinduism, which has been called the oldest still-active religious tradition, with origins possibly reaching back to prehistoric times, counted about 1.1 billion. Buddhism, founded by Siddhartha Gautama in the 5th century BCE, had approximately 500 million adherents.

  A global poll conducted across 57 countries in 2012 found that 59% of the world's population identified as religious, 23% as not religious, and 13% as convinced atheists. A follow-up poll in 2015 found those numbers had shifted: 63% identified as religious, 22% as not religious, and 11% as convinced atheists. On average, women are more religious than men. The religiously unaffiliated category includes atheists and agnostics, but also many individuals who retain various religious beliefs while declining to identify with a specific religion.

  Scholars have observed that global religiosity may be increasing, primarily because countries with high religiosity tend to have higher birth rates. The five largest religious groups by world population, estimated to cover 5.8 billion people or about 84% of the total, are Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and traditional folk religions combined.

• 6. Religion, Power, and the State

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  Most Muslim-majority countries adopt various aspects of sharia, the Islamic law, affecting up to 23% of the global population, or approximately 1.57 billion people. Several countries define themselves explicitly in religious terms; Iran is formally the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the United States, a survey found that 51% of voters would be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate who did not believe in God, and only 6% more likely. Christians made up 92% of members of the US Congress in 2014, compared with 71% of the general public. At the same time, only one former member of Congress, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, claimed no religious affiliation, representing just 0.2% of that body, even though 23% of US adults identified as religiously unaffiliated.

  In Western Europe the pattern differs significantly. Same-sex marriage and abortion were illegal in many European countries until recently, following Catholic doctrine, but several European leaders have been open atheists. France's former president Francois Hollande and Greece's former prime minister Alexis Tsipras are among those named in the source. In Asia, the range is wide: India sees religion exert strong force on politics, while China and Japan are largely secular. Hindu nationalists in India have targeted minority communities including Muslims and Christians who historically belonged to lower castes.

  The first major formal interfaith dialogue was the Parliament of the World's Religions, held at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. More recent initiatives include A Common Word, launched in 2007 to bring Muslim and Christian leaders together, and a United Nations sponsored World Interfaith Harmony Week.

• 7. Faith, Science, and Health

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  Albert Einstein wrote in 1940 that science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and that religion deals only with evaluations of human thought and action. He argued that the two domains have strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies even though they are clearly marked off from each other: religion may determine the goals, but it has learned from science what means will contribute to attaining them.

  The terms science and religion themselves are recent inventions that emerged alongside each other in the 19th century, which was also when the terms Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Confucianism first entered English. In the ancient and medieval world, the Latin roots of both science (scientia) and religion (religio) were understood as inner qualities of the individual, never as doctrines or sources of knowledge.

  Mayo Clinic researchers examining the relationship between religious involvement and health found that most studies showed religious involvement and spirituality are associated with better health outcomes, including greater longevity, stronger coping skills, and better health-related quality of life even during terminal illness, along with less anxiety, depression, and suicide. Academic James W. Jones noted that several studies have found positive correlations between religious belief and practice and mental and physical health and longevity. An analysis of data from the 1998 US General Social Survey broadly confirmed the association between religious activity and better health and well-being, while also cautioning against generalizing findings across different forms of spirituality, different denominations, or between men and women.

  According to a study from 2015, Christians hold the largest share of total world wealth at 55%, followed by Muslims at 5.8%, Hindus at 3.3%, and Jews at 1.1%. Adherents classified under irreligion or other religions hold about 34.8% of total global wealth while making up only about 20% of the world population.