Religious beliefs deal with a variety of ultimate concerns including life and death, morality, the nature of reality, and social order. Religion is also often seen as involving a relationship with something or someone sacred, divine, or supernatural, and a code of conduct.
Historically, scholars have defined religion in various ways. Some definitions are broad (e.g., those that define religion as anything dealing with ultimate concerns) and some are narrow (e.g., those that define it as a belief in God or a spirit). In the last several decades, there has been a growing awareness among scholars influenced by Continental philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault that these “substantive” definitions of religion are problematic because they are inherently ethnocentric. They reinforce a Western dichotomy between the natural and the supernatural, ignore other faith traditions, and exclude some non-theistic religions such as Buddhism, Jainism, or Daoism (see social construction of religion).
A number of recent studies have attempted to address these problems by using techniques from a variety of fields in the social sciences. These have included examining the effects of religion on morality, self-control, anxiety about dying, and health and well-being. Other researchers have focused on the role of religion in promoting social inequality, conflict, and hostility, and on the extent to which these are motivated by religious differences.
Finally, some sociologists and other social scientists have abandoned substantive definitions of religion altogether and have used functional approaches instead. These drop the assumption that religion has a specific essence and use definitions such as Emile Durkheim’s, which defines religion as whatever system of practices unites people into a moral community (whether or not those practices involve belief in unusual realities).