Religion is a term that describes human beings’ relation to something they regard as holy, sacred, absolute, spiritual, divine or worthy of especial reverence. It also refers to the way people deal with ultimate concerns about their lives and their fate after death.
Religion provides people with a sense of purpose and meaning in life, reinforces social unity and stability, serves as an agent of social control, promotes physical and psychological well-being, and may motivate people to work for positive social change. Sociological perspectives on religion focus on the functions that religion serves for society, the inequality and other problems that religion can reinforce or perpetuate, and the role that religion plays in our daily lives (Emerson, Monahan, & Mirola, 2011).
The social constructionist approach to religion emphasises how beliefs and practices are created or changed by individuals. It argues that beliefs and practices are not sacred until people regard them as such.
This perspective emphasizes the importance of social structure, including rituals and ceremonies, in making religious experiences meaningful to individual members. It also points out the influence of culturally and historically specific contexts on how people interpret their religious experiences.
Symbolic interactionist approaches to religion also point to the importance of rituals and ceremonies in making religious experiences meaningful to individual members. These can involve intense emotional and psychological states such as crying, laughing, trancelike conditions, and feelings of oneness with others around them.
In addition to these four sociological perspectives, religion has been studied in the fields of phenomenology and philosophy. Attempts to define and categorize religion have been influenced by the classical view that every instance of a concept has a defining property that distinguishes it from all other instances in its category. However, this theory is being challenged by the growing emergence of “polythetic” approaches to analyzing concepts that adopt a “prototype” structure rather than a logically rigorous classification system.