Definitions of Religion

Emile Durkheim: A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred
things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them….So, at the bottom, it is the unity and diversity of social life which makes the simultaneous unity and diversity of sacred beings and things. Side note: Durkheim coined the term, “Collective Effervescence” which is essentially, “a community or society may at times comes together and simultaneously communicate the same thought and participate in the same action.” The Elementary Form of the Religious Life (1912)

Mircea Eliade: “Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane. To designate the act of manifestation of the sacred, we have proposed the term hierophany. It is a fitting term, because it does not imply anything further; it expresses no more than is implicit in its etymological content, i.e., that something scared shows itself to us. It could be said that the history of religions— from the most primitive to the most highly developed— is constituted by a great number of hierophanies, by manifestations of sacred realities. From the most elementary hierophany—e.g., manifestation of the sacred in some ordinary object, a stone or a tree—to the supreme hierophany (which, for a
Christian, is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ) there is no solution of continuity. In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act—the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to out world, in objects that are an integral part of out natural “profane” world. —The Sacred and The Profane, (1957)

Clifford Geertz: A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful,
pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. — Religion as a Cultural System (1965)

J.Z. Smith: If we have understood the archeological and textual record correctly, man has had his entire history in which to imagine deities and modes of interaction with them. But man, more precisely western man, has had only the last few centuries in which to imagine religion. It is this act of second order, reflective imagination which must be the central preoccupation of any student of religion. That is to say, while there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religious— there is no data from 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 independent existence apart of the academy. For this reason, the student of religion, and most particularly the historian of religion, must be relentlessly self-conscious. Indeed, this self-consciousness constitutes his primary expertise, his foremost object of study. — Imagining Religion: From Babylon to
Jamestown (1982)

Charles Long: Religion is a practical social concern, and the reality of its objective pole must in some sense be validated by communal consensus. But, at the same time, it is a mode of release from the entanglements of the social, and it is the awareness of an objectivity that lies beyond the social and the existential. Again, these positions presuppose each other, for both must be accounted for as intentional forms of the human consciousness. The Indian mystic must experience the vicissitudes of existential existence before realizing a state beyond it, and  the word of the Bambara must articulate the forms of the cosmos before returning to silence. The ontology of the sacred is manifested on all levels of the human consciousness and colors all experience and expression with its peculiar qualities. — Significations: Signs, Symbols, and
Images in the Interpretation of Religion (1986)

Finally, I want to look at two different interpretations about how to go about the study of
religion. Russell McCutcheon and Robert Orsi have a long time fund within the discipline
and have “called each other out” on several occasions in different journals and
pamphlets. Orsi refers to McCutcheon’s style of analysis as “chilling,” whereas,
McCutcheon refers to Orsi as a “caretaker” of religion, someone who is more or less an
apologist for any particular religion.

Russell McCutcheon: First in our new survey must come the category Theories, since
theories of human minds, individuals, social formations, texts and institutions are what
drives our research…Second in this alternate survey would comes the category Methods,
for, depending on the theory that shapes one’s problematic, one will use different
tools…Which brings us to our last category- and the order of these three categories is
crucial- Data; I specifically place this last because an aspect of the ambiguous world is
of interest to us only because we already have this or that set of questions about how
human minds or societies work. — Discipline of Religion: Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric.
(2003)—Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing The Public Study of Religion. (2001)

Robert Orsi: Religion is not solely the creation of the scholar’s study. Religion is what scholars of religion engage when they leave their studies….
1. Religion is not a special or separable aspect of human affairs
2. Its study does not require or generate unique conceptualizations
3. Religious studies is about the human side of religion, not about the non-human, the gods or supernatural
4. To study religion requires that we identify the authorizing discourses of social power that make religious beliefs and experiences believable
5. It is irrelevant to speak to religious persons, because what any one person says or experiences is always already determined.
—Roundtable on Ethnography and religion: Doing Religious Studies with your Whole Body.” Practical Matters 2 2013 —Between Heaven and Earth: the Religious Worlds People Make and The | Scholars Who Study Them. (2005)