Religion is a set of beliefs and values about the nature of the universe and human life that people hold sacred or consider to be spiritually significant. It often involves worship, moral conduct and participation in religious institutions. Religion can also include ideas about the afterlife, a person’s relationship to god or spirits, and a system of faith and practice that people believe is right or wrong.
Many scholars have criticized the use of the word religion as a contested and westernized construct. In particular, some argue that it is inappropriate to define religion as a category whose modern semantic expansion went hand-in-hand with European colonialism. Others have rejected the idea that there is anything to define as a religion at all, suggesting that the concept is a culturally-specific construction with no real or lexical substance.
More recently, however, a number of scholars have adopted an open polythetic approach to the concept of religion, recognizing that there is no single property that defines a prototypical religion. They have also sought to avoid the idea that a social category like religion has an ahistorical essence. This is an important development in our understanding of the concept, though it is worth noting that polythetic approaches can be just as problematic as monothetic definitions. In addition, they do not necessarily avoid the ethnocentrism that can result from monothetic identifications of a prototypical religion. The fact is that the existence of a social kind does not wait on language, and the definitions we employ to describe it are constructed at a given time and place.