Religious behavior includes beliefs and worship, as well as devotional or contemplative practices. It can also include a sense of community, and a code of moral conduct or beliefs that provide guidelines for one’s actions. These are all components of a religion, which can influence people’s decisions and attitudes toward life, the universe, and themselves.
Sociologists have debated how to define religion. Should definitions have sharp lines, ascertaining certainly whether a phenomenon is religious, or should they have fuzzy edges to allow for the unexpected and the unfamiliar? Should a definition be broad, including many different phenomena, or narrow, including only the most traditional forms of belief?
Substantive definitions have been challenged by the rise of a functional approach. For example, Durkheim argued that religion is whatever system of practices unite people in moral communities (whether or not those beliefs involve unusual realities). A functional definition resists a particular ideological image of humans as passive recipients of social order.
Social constructionists have critiqued both substantive and functional definitions of religion, arguing that they all lack a grasp on how the concept of religion was created in our world and that the resulting shifts from one type of category to another reflect an arbitrariness of the terms with which it is defined. Such scholars, such as Clifford Geertz and Victor Asad, stress that human subjectivity is shaped by social structures, and they argue that we need to examine the nature of those structures to understand what constitutes religion.