What does the word religion mean? I often hear that Buddhism is not a religion, but many Buddhists disagree and say it depends on how religion is defined. Many dictionary definitions make religion out to be something connected to the belief in and worship of God or gods, which leaves Buddhism out. How else is religion defined?
I direct you to an essay in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on “The Concept of Religion.” It makes the point that the deeper, and more broadly, one surveys the world’s religions, the harder it is to define the word religion. Even within the academic study of religion there is no consensus of the definition of religion.
The English word religion has a tangled history. There is general agreement it has Latin roots, but exactly which Latin roots is a matter of old, and long, dispute. Further, what the word religion is understood to mean has changed considerably over the years and is still changing. One could argue the word defies being defined.
The Latin Roots of Religion
Let’s start with the Latin roots. One is the Latin word religio, which, broadly, means “conscientiousness” or “obligation.” To citizens of Rome this primarily meant the obligations to gods and the many observances that bound the gods to Rome. But religio also was used to refer to obligations in human relationships that had nothing to do with gods.
Religio has its own roots, and those are disputed. The Roman statesman Cicero (106-43 BCE) said that the word religio was derived from the Latin word relegere, “go through again.” This word connotes faithfulness, sincerity, and conscientiousness. Cicero also emphasized reflecting deeply — and repeatedly — on the meaning and significance of one’s sacred obligations.
Other ancient sources point to the Latn word religare as the forerunner of religio. Ligare means “to bind” — ligament has the same root — and religare suggests binding something that has been severed. It occurs to me that the meaning of religare might be in the same ball park as the Sanskrit yoga, which means “union.” (The English word yoke is a distant relative of the word yoga. They both were derived from the same very ancient Proto-Indo-European root.)
Earlier Meanings of Religion
We now march into the late Roman Empire and the establishment of Christianity in Europe. Latin was is the language of the Church. The word religio spread through Europe with the rest of Latin. What did it mean to early Christians?
Opinions varied. Saint Augustine (354 – 430), for example, wrestled with the meaning of religio and decided it was not the appropriate word for “how we worship God.” The Romans had used the word to refer to secular as well as sacred obligations, after all.
Still, it was a useful word to describe being bound to scrupulous and consistent observance of some sort. In the Medieval period we find the Middle English word religioun, which meant “bound by monastic vows.” It was also used to mean “action or conduct indicating a belief in a divine power.” The emphasis was on conscientious action or conduct, not on what one believed. Note that the adverb religiously even today connotes consistent action or conduct that is not necessarily about religion; e,g., “John attends soccer practice religiously.”
The Changing Meanings of Religion
Let’s check back in with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy essay linked above. It says that in about the 16th century — as the Reformation was gaining steam — there was a significant shift in the use of the word religion. For example, the English poet/philosopher Edward Herbert (1583-1648) used the word religion to refer to a “genus of which Christian and non-Christian groups were species,” the Encyclopedia says.
Herbert tried to convey to the warring Catholic and Protestant camps of Europe that they had a lot in common, and he proposed a definition of “religion” that would include them both. Herbert’s definition began with belief in a supreme deity who should be worshiped. (In this Herbert included the polytheistic traditions he knew about, arguing that they all had a “head” deity to which the lesser gods were subservient.) The religious person is one who cultivates virtue and repents from wrong-doing. And the religious person will be rewarded in this life and the next. “This proposal takes an idealized Protestant monotheism as the model of religion as such,” the Encyclopedia says.
The Age of Exploration was already underway in the 16th century. This was the time Europeans were frantic to find the quickest sea route to India and kept smacking into the inconvenience of the Americas. But Europeans eventually realized that the cultures of Asia and Africa and the Americas had developed a wealth of traditions that seemed more like religion than not but which didn’t fit the model of idealized Protestant monotheism.
Gods and Powers
Western scholars have struggled to redefine religion so that it takes in all the world’s traditions that are presumed to be religion. By the beginning of the 20th century Herbert’s proposal had been expanded to leave out a supreme deity. Instead of belief in a supreme deity, one scholar suggested “belief in spiritual beings,” by which he appeared to mean non-empirical sorts of beings who may or may not be gods, exactly. This seems a tad vague.
The American philosopher William James (1842-1910) had another proposal that to me has some merit —
Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.
There are religions that are all about a relationship between humans and a Supreme Being. There are religions about the relationship of the individual with absolute reality, time and space, in which deities play a supporting role but aren’t the main point. Sometimes where there are gods the gods are archetypes of our own existence, not superbeings to pray to. There are religions about being in harmony with the Dao, the natural order of the universe. There are religions about the ground of being, beyond existence and nonexistence. This is what one prominent Tibetan Buddhist lama called the “the basis of the original unbornness.” The variety of ways religion is practiced and understood is staggering, truly.
Conscientious Action
This touches on Joseph Campbell’s definition of God — God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all categories of human thought. If you look at all the world’s religious traditions throughout history, possibly the only thing they all have in common is that they are all about connecting to something that is unreachable by reason or ordinary sensory experience. I call this the Great Ineffable Whatever. Even in those traditions that propose God, God has been described by theologians as being beyond being and nonbeing, beyond existence or nonexistence.
Getting back to the analogy of genus and species — if you aren’t familiar with biological taxonomy, a genus is a category of closely related species. Canis is a genus, for example, and wolves, foxes, coyotes, and dogs are some of the species belonging to that genus. As a writer, I often find I need that genus word. But if religion is a genus, the dictionary definition only describes terriers. It’s very frustrating.
On top of that, much of our understanding of religion has entirely lost the original meaning of conscientious action. Much of religion in the modern West has been reduced to mere belief. This is especially true of Christianity. Belief without conscientious action, without consistent ritual observance and reflection, wouldn’t have qualified as religion in earlier times.
Unspiritual Religion
In much of popular culture these days “religion” is an oppressive thing. It’s nothing but old dogmas promoted and enforced by authoritarian organizations. If one signs on to the religion one must accept all the dogma without question. And I know there are religious organizations that operate that way, but to define the genus religion that way is to reduce the definition to not just terriers but to white and tan wire fox terriers named Buddy.
And this has led us to the endless memes about “religion” versus “spirituality,” in which “spirituality” is liberating and rewarding while “religion” is mind controlling. And soon enough I’m going to write another post about why the religion/spirituality dichotomy is absolute nonsense. It’s based on a very limited and warped understanding of religion. But I’ll save that for another day.
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