Religion is an important part of the life of most people. It helps to keep people connected with other members of their community and is a source of strength in the family unit. It is also linked to good mental health and well-being, with research showing that people who attend church regularly are more likely to be married, live longer and have higher levels of happiness and satisfaction in their lives.
Traditionally, most attempts to analyze the concept of religion have been “monothetic” in that they operate with the classical view that every instance that is accurately described by a concept will share a defining property that puts them in that category. The last several decades have seen the emergence of “polythetic” approaches that abandon this classical approach and treat religion as having a prototype structure.
The concept of religion has an important place in human history, a role that is reflected in culture, literature, music, dress codes and other ways of organising life together. These features have often been embedded in the environment where a particular religion was practised, and they are also found within other cultures that do not practice that specific religion.
Moreover, the scholarly study of religion can have its own distinctive character in different disciplines. For example, anthropologists legitimately study the diversity and unruliness of religious experience; theologians adopt a content-based approach to studying the texts and dogma that capture our fundamental dependence on a greater order of things; intellectual historians and students of political thought use the concept of religion to understand historical and scholarly traditions.