International Review of Sociology
Revue Internationale de Sociologie

Vol. 21, No. 1, March 2011, 107
120

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Defining religion: a practical response
Steve Bruce*

University of Aberdeen
(Received October 2009; final version received September 2010)

After addressing the post-modern argument that defining religion is impossible,

bad or both, the case is made that functional definitions of religion are generally
not definitions but assertions about the consequences of religion substantively
defined. A substantive definition of religion is proposed. The relationship between
ordinary and sociological language is discussed. A review of recent debates in the
sociology of religion makes the point that our arguments rarely concern the
definition of religion; they are much more often about the practical identification
and measurement of the features of the social phenomenon which we want to
study and those problems are not peculiar to the sociology of religion.
Keywords: functional and substantive definitions; lay and professional language

Introduction
In current British English the word academic is often used to mean useless,
pointless, or irrelevant. Members of the academy naturally find this usage rather
irritating. However, if we are looking for an academic pursuit that merits the insult,
then the obsession of some students of religion with the definition of their subject
matter would be a strong candidate (for extensive examples, see De Vries 2007).
Doubtless cement engineers argue about exactly what sort of cement is best suited to
lining the holes drilled into a sub-sea oil well but one cannot imagine that they argue
about the meaning of cement or that any of them will deny that cement exists.
Yet even a casual trawl of web or published sources will reveal that serious
students of religion devote considerable time and effort to arguing about the
definition of their chosen object of interest. I am not thinking here of Edward Tylors
considerations of alternative ways of defining religion in Primitive Culture (1871). He
at least concludes his review of alternatives with a preferred definition. What I have
in mind are the various post-modern approaches which argue that there is actually no
such thing as religion because religion is a modern social construct (usually
constructed for bad purposes). Tim Fitzgerald (2000), for example, argues that
religion as an idea is the creation of the modern separation of church and state (with
some influence of the earlier separation of science and religion). Talal Asad finds an
older and wider set of ancestors for his Genealogies of Religion (1993) but also
concludes that religion is a construction of European modernity: there can be no
universal definition of religion, not only because its constitutional elements and
relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the

*Email: s.bruce@abdn.ac.uk
ISSN 0390-6701 print/ISSN 1469-9273 online
# 2011 University of Rome La Sapienza
DOI: 10.1080/03906701.2011.544190
http://www.informaworld.com
108 S. Bruce

historical product of discursive processes (1993, p. 9). Worse yet, the definition
authorizes . . . particular forms of history-making (1993, back cover) that are
morally bad.
The errors in this approach to definition and conceptualization are many but we
can confine ourselves to a brief consideration of three. First, the origins and
development of a concept have no necessary bearing on the reality it purports to
comprehend because discovery is not the same as invention. Newtons discovery of
gravity was a historical product of discursive processes but prior to its discovery
people did not have trouble adhering to the earths surface. Second, the uses to which
some idea is put does not exhaust the idea and even demonstrating that an idea has
been used for bad ends does not of itself demonstrate that the idea is badly conceived
and should be discarded. Third, the post-modern critique of the idea of religion
applies equally well to every other concept and definition we ever use, including those
used in the construction of genealogies and in discussing alternatives. In a fine
demonstration of a failure to understand the nature of language, the first page of a
British government study of religious beliefs starkly announces The actual term
religion is an invented or constructed category as if this was unusual and as if
there was some contrasting category of abstract nouns that was naturally occurring
(Home Office 2004, p. 1). Fitzgerald wants to abandon the study of religion in
favour of the study of the supposedly material political and social relationships that
are putatively disguised by the idea of religion. But to say anything useful about what
supposedly lies behind religion requires other definitions and concepts that will be
equally susceptible to the same dismissal by family tree and discourse.1 As it offers
no rational scientific grounds for arbitrating between competing discourses or voices,
if applied rigorously the post-modern critique (like all others forms of relativism)
authorizes only cacophony or silence.
The post-modern relativist will, of course, reject the realism which underpins
those three criticisms but this is one of those incommensurable divides about which
one can do nothing but takes sides. Until I find an academic colleague who is as
relativistic about his salary or workload as he is about his disciplinary interests, I see
no reason to abandon the assumptions of conventional social science.
There is a very different approach to defining religion which the social scientist
should also reject: separating true from false religion. It is common for religious
people to make a partisan distinction and they can do it in opposing directions: the
term religion may be an honorific or an insult. Some believers insist that what they
believe about the supernatural is religion because it is true and that all competing
faiths are pseudo-religions or magic or superstition. Some neatly reverse that
approach: what they believe is just the truth and what everyone else has is mere
religion. Emile Durkheim committed himself to a version of this when he wrote: If
then we wish to discover the true nature of religion, we must observe it at the zenith
of its evolution; it is in the most refined forms of Christianity and not in the puerile
magic of the Australian aborigine or the Iroquois that we must expect to find the
elements of the definition we are seeking (Pickering 1975, pp. 75
76). I see no
sociological value in such partisanship because, while objective reality may be
relevant for understanding why some plan of action fails to achieve it goals, what
usually matters in explaining human action is what actors believe to be the case: the
point made by W.I. Thomas in his discussion of the definition of the situation
(Thomas 1923). The explanation of my fleeing the house is that I believe it to be on
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Revue Internationale de Sociologie 109

fire, whether or not that really is the case. For the last century, most sociologists of
religion have attempted to avoid assessing the truth claims of competing religions by
adopting a posture of methodological agnosticism. What matters for understanding
Mormons is not whether I believe that the Angel Moroni delivered the Book of
Mormon to Joseph Smith but whether Joseph Smith and his followers believe this to
be the case.
In his determination to be unimpressed by protestations of religious neutrality,
Fitzgerald has argued that by adopting methodological agnosticism the academic
study of religion has embraced a particular theological position: a sort of wet
liberal ecumenism in which all religions are vaguely true. Fitzgerald may be right
that the unitarian-universalist brand of Christianity has an attitude to other
religions that is close to the sociological principle of methodological agnosticism
but that is not the fault of sociology. He may also be right that the scholars
of religious studies he directly criticises (such as Ninian Smart) were both metho-
dological agnosticists and unitarian-universalists but again that is not the fault of
sociology. The Religious Studies version of methodological agnosticism may, as
Fitzgerald argues, suppose that all proper religions are in some sense true but what
sociologists such as Peter Berger mean by the practice is importantly different:
signalled in Bergers case by calling it methodological atheism (1967, pp. 180
181).
It does not implicitly or otherwise support any particular theology because it treats
all beliefs as human projections. Some may also, of course, be true but claims
about the divine are beyond empirical testing by the disciplines methods and hence
beyond our remit. For example, it is always possible (as a devout Catholic might
argue) that the fissiparousness of Protestantism is Gods punishment for heresy but
as sociologists have no way of testing that assertion, we will continue to explore the
contrasting organizational consequences of, on the one hand, positing a single final
point of access to Gods will and, on the other, permitting that all right-minded
believers can comprehend the will of God. Our raw material consists of the beliefs
and actions of identifiable people. Which (if any) of them has an accurate grasp of
what (if anything) may lie beyond the material world is none of our business.
It is worth stressing that methodological agnosticism is not a sociological
response to religion in particular but is applied to beliefs in general. One good reason
for it has already been mentioned: if we wish to explain why people act as they do,
the explanation will take the form of identifying which of their beliefs (not ours) were
brought into play in interpreting their perceptions (not ours) of the circumstances in
which they acted or reacted. The other good reason is that our appreciation of the
role of social constructions has taken us beyond the initial problematic of the
sociology of knowledge. Karl Mannheims famous Ideology and Utopia (1936) and
his preceding work divided knowledge into truth and ideology and offered
sociological explanations of only the latter. As in the early sociology of science, it
was assumed that correct beliefs required no explanation: only error needed to be
explained. Since the 1960s, sociologists have generally treated all knowledge as
sociologically explicable. Of course, that a particular set of ideas seem to be effective
is one good reason why people may be persuaded to accept them but in many fields
efficacy is itself a matter of socially constructed shared perceptions. That this may
seem to lock us into a circle is sometimes a problem but it is sufficient for my
purposes here to establish that most modern sociologists (and not just sociologists of
110 S. Bruce

religion) routinely bracket the truth value of the claims made by people whose
behaviour they are trying to understand.
Much of the difficulty in defining religion comes from arguments about which of
a largely agreed set of characteristics should be constitutive. The particular version of
this that we know as functionalism will be discussed shortly but I will first identify a
variety of other examples. Because it is widely assumed that people (severally or
jointly) have certain enduring needs that are met by religion, it is common in
descriptions of largely secular societies for a wide variety of beliefs and activities to
be defined as religions. For example, football may be described as a religion because
fans may be extremely committed, may find that attending matches gives them an
effervescent or liminal experience similar in some respects to the collective ecstasy
found in shared religious activities, and may treat football grounds as sites of
pilgrimage; for a discussion of the similarities and differences of football and
religion, see Hervieu-Leger (2000, pp. 104
107). Various forms of music and dance
culture have similarly been treated as religious on the grounds that they share some
features with religion more conventionally defined (Sylvan 2002, Lynch and Badger
2004).
My difficulty with such an approach is that it obscures more than it illuminates.
Defining football as a religion discourages a detailed consideration of the differ-
ences between sport and religion and achieves by fiat what should be established
by empirical demonstration. Broadening the notion of religion to include anything
that shares any of its features runs counter to the one of the key purposes of
definition, which is to isolate the distinctive features of phenomena. We can see
the problem in a November 2009 British court judgement. Tim Nicholson was
sacked by Grainger PLC after refusing to obey a legitimate instruction. His
employer, who had travelled from London to Dublin without his Blackberry mobile
phone, instructed the employee to fly to Dublin to deliver the phone. The employee
refused on the grounds that the gain to his boss of being rapidly reunited with
his means of communication was patently less than the damage to the environment
of undertaking a plane journey. The employee wished to use the legal protections
given to religious beliefs as grounds for seeking compensation for having been
sacked. He argued that his environmentalist principles were sufficiently important
and sufficiently strongly held to be the equivalent of a faith. Mr Justice Burton
accepted his argument and allowed him to bring the case. In effect, the judge
defined as religious all strongly held principles of some generality. The obvious
difficulty with that judgement (if it is not reversed) is that rather than clarifying
what distinguishes religious beliefs from any other ideas or sources of inspiration
that a plaintiff may claim are precious, anything taken very seriously is now a
religion (Adams and Gray 2009).
The above identifies one of the key problems in defining social phenomena.
Phenomena are often complex. We have to select which of a range of character-
istics we shall regard as definitive. And we may disagree about this. There is a
second related but analytically separable problem which I will now address. In
addition to a range of potentially definitive characteristics (viewed in a static
sense) phenomena are often attended by a range of typical causes and con-
sequences and we may wish to incorporate some of these in the definition of the
thing itself.
 International Review of Sociology
Revue Internationale de Sociologie 111

Functional definitions
As is well known, two of the founders of sociology are conventionally described as
having defined religion in terms of its supposed consequences. In his Critique of
Hegels Philosophy of Right Karl Marx said: religion is the sigh of the oppressed
creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation.
It is the opium of the people (1970, p. 17). The upper classes use religion to oppress
the lower orders and the lower orders use it to console themselves. Emile Durkheims
functional definition of religion makes its capacity to unite all people in a common
consciousness the definitive feature. Some confusion arises because it is not at clear
that the supposed consequence or function is uniquely associated with religion or
religion with it. That is, they may not be identical.
The Marxist view of religion is co-terminous with its function read in one
direction. Once the real source of oppression has been removed under socialism,
there will be no pain which requires the opiate of religion and religion will end. But
the same does not work in the other direction. Presumably Marxists allow that there
are forms of ideological obfuscation other than religion (bourgeois nationalism, for
example) and other forms of opiate (for example, literal opium). Thus while we can
say that Marxists think religion is a thing that has the consequence of quietening the
masses, it is not strictly the case that such a consequence defines religion (or at least it
does not do so uniquely).
This is even more so the case for Durkheims definition of religion because it is
not a necessary part of the definition that religion will disappear if social cohesion
vanishes. Nor is it necessary that only religion can serve the purpose of providing
social cohesion. That is, there are functional equivalents of religion.
We do not need to go too far down this path to appreciate that what are
commonly described as definitions of religion are more accurately described as
assertions about the origins or common consequences of religion. It is of course
possible to be entirely rigorous about functional definition and assert that by
religion we will mean whatever provides either ideological obfuscation or social
cohesion. But if followed strictly then that practice would add nothing at all to our
understanding of either obfuscation or cohesion. It would simply be a renaming.
Wherever we saw social cohesion we would assert that the thing which produced it
was religion (even if, for example, it was the threat of violence). That there would be
little of explanatory value in just renaming is generally recognized by those who
purport to use a functional definition of religion in that they do not present purely
tautological statements. Instead they identify function separately from religion as
such. Robert Bellah, in Tokugawa Religion, says: It is one of the social functions of
religion to provide a meaningful set of ultimate values on which the morality of a
society can be based (1957, p. 6). If religion is not just the functions it serves then it
must be identifiable separately from those functions. As has often been noticed,
functionalists often fall back on conventional substantive definitions. Jack Goody
says of Talcott Parsons and Bellah: it is perhaps significant that in their pragmatic
treatment of religious phenomena the above authors adhere much more closely to the
traditional sphere of discourse (1961, p. 154).
If functional definitions are better understood as assertions about consequences
that are generally predicated upon more conventional substantive identifications of
religion, we have a good case for arguing that the substantive approach is of more
112 S. Bruce

value, even in the matter of identifying the uses and consequences of religion. The
clear distinction between the identification of the phenomenon and claims about its
consequences offers protection against tautology. Because we are no longer asserting
them by definitional fiat, we appreciate that we need to examine the effects of
religion. We also bring back into focus important issues that are disguised by a
functional definition such as whether and why religions differ in their capacity to
serve the function in question. Most importantly, we permit the possibility that a
society can have more or less religion and thus allow the possibility of secularization.

Substantive definitions
For reasons I will explain shortly, a definition that fits with broad contemporary
common-sense reflection on the matter is usually not a very bad place to start.
Moreover, the utility of a definition must in the end depend upon the success of the
explanations in which it is employed. That is, the purpose of a definition is to bring
together analytically similar phenomena, aspects of which we believe we can explain
in the same terms. I define religion substantively because this allows me to formulate
a number of theories which I believe have considerable explanatory scope. Religion,
then, consists of beliefs, actions and institutions which assume the existence of
supernatural entities with powers of action, or impersonal powers or processes possessed
of moral purpose. Gods are an example of the former; the Hindu principle of karma is
an example of the latter. Such a formulation seems to encompass what most people
mean when they talk of religion.
There are, of course, objections to such a definition. As a pre-emptive rebuttal of
those such as Richard King who reject such a definition on grounds derived from
Edward Saids critique of orientalism (Said 1995, King 1999), I see nothing in this
definition that confines it to the West or to theistic salvation religions. Leaving aside
for a moment the fact that most Hindus and Buddhists do actually worship deities,
this definition seems to fit perfectly well even the most philosophical brands of
Hinduism and Buddhism.
Some critics of substantive definitions regard the fact that people argue about
definitions (and, in particular, contest their placement in any classificatory system) as
invalidating any particular definition. This does not seem a pressing problem. Below
I will say more about when analysts should argue with their subjects but that
particular groups and individuals both contest and manipulate definitions does not
of itself vitiate attempts at classification. For example, leaders of authoritarian
regimes and their dissident critics argue over whether a country deserves to be
described as a democracy but that does not prevent political scientists defining
democracy (and its alternatives) or using the notion in social scientific description
and explanation, and nor should it.
In an interesting reversal of Fitzgeralds claim that popular definitions of religion
inadvertently endorse a particular kind of religion, Andre Droogers (2009) argues
that substantive definitions of religion are problematic for the opposite reason:
because they assume that religion is false. His logic is that religion (or other crucial
elements of a substantive definition such as the sacred) is always one half of a
contrast pair: in this case religion-and-science. And as social scientists work within
the paradigm of science, those who study religion effectively brand their subject
matter as false. One can see the problem but not accept the conclusion. Although it
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will not satisfy the adherent of any particular religion (who will insist that his faith be
exempted from phenomenological bracketing), the attitude of methodological
agnosticism seems to resolve this problem. I do not see how social scientific analysis
is hampered by treating all beliefs as being susceptible to social scientific explanation.
There is nothing in the disciplinary armoury of the sociologist that allows me to
know whether televangelist Pat Robertson is right to regard the Haitian earthquake
of 2009 as divine punishment for voodoo but for my purposes it is enough that
Robertson believes this to be the case.
The most common criticism of substantive definitions of religion is a watered-
down version of Asads assertion about the historical specificity of such definitions:
there is just too much variety. It is certainly true that a universally applicable
ahistorical definition of religion (and of anything else in the non-material world) is
impossible. However, for those who are not complete relativists, there are three
sensible responses.
The first is empirical. Just how much common ground is there in the way that
peoples in different times and place view the religious? Provided one is content with a
minimalist definition of religion, there seems a great deal of it. The ancient Greek
warrior making offerings to his Gods before battle, the medieval knight promising to
build a monastery if God gives him victory in his crusade, and the modern Protestant
businessman praying for God to bless his new factory are engaged in recognizably
similar activities and, if time-travel ever allowed them to meet, we would expect them
to be mutually intelligible. Similarly, we can imagine superstitious nineteenth-century
Durham coal miners having little difficulty explaining their rituals of reassurance to
Bronislaw Malinowskis Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922).
The second response is to appreciate that there is nothing particularly wrong with
a very broad conceptualization of religion provided it is accompanied by a well-
informed sense of the variety of forms it can take. That is, we do not need to do all
our conceptual work in our master definition. On the basis of detailed ethnographic
studies of a number of contemporary Christian congregations, Martin Stringer
(2008) argues that ordinary believers may have superstitious, disordered, pragmatic
and immanent beliefs that accord little with the coherent, transcendent and
transformative view of Christianity found in official teachings and creedal state-
ments. He takes this to mean we should change our definition of religion. I take it
to mean that we should appreciate (a) that not all religions are the same and (b)
members of religious organizations can differ in their appreciation, acceptance and
conformity to the teachings of those organizations.
The third response is pragmatic. A detailed universally applicable definition of
religion is clearly necessary if one aims to produce a universally applicable theory of
the origins or purposes of religion. But most sociologists have the humbler ambition
of producing lower-level generalizations about this or that sort of religion in this or
that time and place, and for such purposes a definition that covers a decent part of
the human record
for example, Europe in the last 20 centuries
may be perfectly
workable.

Should sociology have its own language?

We can now turn from common issues in the definition of religion to the specific
question of a sociological definition of religion. Chemists do not need to consider the
114 S. Bruce

relationship between their concepts and the concepts used by their subject matter.
The elements have no consciousness of the characteristics that are used to construct
the Periodic Table and cannot argue about their relative placing: the transition
metals do not insist that they are every bit as good as the noble gases. The subject
matter of the social sciences has consciousness and uses the same language as the
analysts. Our work depends upon understanding our subjects, which requires that we
understand their language. Hence actors and analysts terms are inevitably tangled
together.
It is hard to think of any concept used in mainstream sociology that is not in
common usage. A sociologist who studies the family may also invite the family to
dinner. As analysts we sometimes use concepts (social network, for example or social
capital) that are rare in the bus queue or the barroom but even then we suppose that
we could, if required, translate these into terms which ordinary people would
recognize. We all understand deprivation. The notion of relative deprivation may
take the lay man or woman a moments thought but it is perfectly intelligible. On the
further fringes of the discipline there are technical terms which would be alien to
most people: adjacency pairs, pre-sequencing, and repair sequences are examples
from conversation analysis. But even these terms are translatable into lay language.
Indeed, the ultimate check that one had, for example, correctly identified Do you
want to go see a film? as an invitation requiring acceptance or decline rather than
as a question requiring a yes or no answer would be to explore directly with the
speaker his or her intentions.
There is no mystery about how sociological concepts develop. We shift
between collecting lay usages of some term that refers to what interests us,
refining varied use into a simplified and systematic formulation, and applying this
again to lay usage. And we work backwards and forwards between observation
and explanation.
There are three key differences between sociological and lay concept formation.
First, the professional formulation is generally abstracted from more widespread
usage than the lay counterparts. Because of our interest in generalization and
comparison, the sociological definition of the family, for example, is likely to be
informed by a much wider range of instances than that used by lay people when they
consider their own, and other known, families.
Second, sociological concepts are generally broader than lay concepts because
they are designed for purposes more abstract and enduring than those which
motivate the lay person and they are refined in arguments between large numbers of
scholars from diverse backgrounds. An ethnomethodologist colleague of mine found
a fine example of this distinction while working in a mental institution in the 1970s.
The psychiatrists classified the patients according to elaborate diagnostic categories.
The nursing orderlies classified their charges as either wetters or wanderers based
on whether incontinence or disorientation caused most work with any particular
patient.
Third, sociological concepts will generally have a degree of consistency and
cohesion, an orderliness not required in everyday life. For example, whatever one
thinks of the utility of the classic church/sect/denomination/cult typology of religious
organizations, because it was developed by a large number of scholars trying to
identify the causal relations between features of the religious life with the greatest
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Revue Internationale de Sociologie 115

explanatory power it has far greater internal consistency than my mothers

bifurcation of proper churches and dangerous cults, which was based on always
obscure distinctions that appeared to shift randomly.
It is important to note that sociologys reliance on lay language use does not
commit us to accepting actors accounts in any or every particular instance. Having
refined our usage, we stick to it, even if it means arguing with our respondents.
Consider the notion of social class. This is now conventionally described in a limited
number of ways, based largely on the extent of power, authority, freedom, res-
ponsibility, training and expertise involved in occupations. When we ask Scots and
English people to say what class they are, we find a systematic variation in the
difference between how respondents describe themselves and how analysts classify
them. Scots who are, in the observers sense, middle-class are more likely than their
like-situated English counterparts to describe themselves as working class. When
they do so, we do not accept that valuation and report that the Scots are more likely
than the English to be working class. Instead we argue with our subjects. Not only do
we disagree with them but we try to explain why some Scots get it wrong and we
think we have an explanation: identifying strongly with the working class creates a
distinctive political culture which both is objectively well suited to Scottish
conditions and allows Scots to think of themselves as different from, and superior
to, the English.
What is often not appreciated by the theorists who dismiss empirical social
research on the grounds that it operates with flawed definitions is that we possess
a range of tools for assessing the relative validity of different conceptualizations
of our subject matter. For example, it is common for the response sessions that
follow any lecture I give on secularization to contain the objection that, because
one can be religious without going to church, church attendance is a poor
measure of religiosity and hence there is no secularization. Let us leave aside for a
moment the obvious riposte that every strand of the Christian tradition strongly
recommends collective worship (and many make it obligatory). We can also leave
aside the equally obvious riposte that those of us who describe secularization in
the West use a wide variety of indices in addition to church attendance. The trade
secret is factor analysis. There are a variety of statistical techniques that allow us
to examine to what extent various measures of interest in religion cohere. That is,
we can search for consistency of usage in the statements and actions of those
whom we are trying to understand. We can see how well (or badly) church
attendance, regular prayer, church membership, financial support of religious
activities, self-identification as religious, assertions of the relative importance of
religion, importance of religious endogamy, and the like cohere. And we can do
so in ways that involve both actors and analysts definitions. That is, we can leave
it to respondents to decide what terms such as religious mean or we can ask
questions based on our definitions of such terms. And we can compare the results
for consistency and cohesion.
In brief, conceptualization does not have to be a matter of abstract philosophiz-
ing punctuated by unrepresentative anecdotage. Provided we accept that it is possible
to operationalize our concepts, to construct valid and reliable measures, and to
analyse the relationships between those measures, we can improve the usefulness of
concepts by empirical research.
116 S. Bruce

A pragmatic justification for relaxed usage

This brings me to my final theme: a practical defence of our current practice. The
Chicago University founder of symbolic interactionism, Herbert Blumer, was a
brutal critic of the scientific pretensions of social scientists (psychologists in
particular) of the 1940s and 1950s. Against those who believed that the social
sciences could develop variables comparable to those of the natural sciences, Blumer
argued that the best we could do was create sensitizing concepts which give the user
a general sense of reference and guidance in approaching empirical instances (1969,
p. 148). Blumer sees this as a weakness. I do not.
If one takes the view that what matters about definitions is their usefulness, a
good defence of my relaxed attitude to defining religion is that it does not prevent us
doing good social science. To illustrate the point, I will briefly mention some recent
debates in the sociology of religion with which I am familiar.
Since the publication of Dean Kelleys Why the Conservative Church are Growing
(1986) there has been a great deal of research and argument around the issue of
whether certain characteristics of liberal and conservative varieties of Christianity (or
weak and strong religion) explain their relative fates. The resolution of the debate
was something of an anti-climax. Demographers demonstrated that much of the
difference in the growth or decline of US denominations was the result, not of
differentials in attracting or even retaining members, but of differences in typical
family size. Conservative Christians tended to have larger families. Hence even if they
were no more successful than liberals in socializing their children into their beliefs
they would have grown faster. That a lot of us wasted much energy trying to explain a
chimera suggests that a useful starting point for any explanation of apparent
difference is a check on the underlying demography. But what is interesting about the
strong-weak religion debate is that nothing hinged on the definition of religion.
The same could be said of the new paradigm (aka the supply-side or rational
choice theory of religion) that has polarized much of the discipline for the last two
decades (Bruce 1999). Arguments over the claim, popularized by Rodney Stark, that
various features of the religious market explain levels of religiosity have often
involved disagreements about how one should measure religiosity and how one
should classify and scale such market features as religious establishment, religious
hegemony, and religious pluralism. Those disagreements have often been highly
technical. For example, the most commonly used measure of religious diversity, the
Herfindahl index, takes the form of [1 1(a/z)2(b/z)2(c/z)2(d/z)2 . . .] where z is
the total number of churchgoers and a, b, c, etc. are the numbers attending any
particular church. The closer to 1, the greater is the degree of diversity. The
important point about this measure is that it gives greater weight to popular choices
than to unpopular ones. For example, if a town has five equally popular churches, it
will score 0.8. But if it has one large church with 50% of churchgoers, three each with
10% and four others each with 5%, it will score only 0.61. The first town with only
five options will appear to have greater diversity than the second, which, having eight
options, actually offers greater choice. If one supposes that what explains high levels
of church attendance is the range of choices satisfying diverse desires, then a plain
count of options would be a better measure than the Herfindahl index. However, if
one supposes that people are less likely to choose an unpopular church, then the
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Herfindahl index, because it compromises range of options by giving greater weight

to evenness of spread of choices, might be the better measure.
There are equally difficult choices to be made in turning a complex characteristic
such as the extent of state support for a particular religion into a variable. Some
states give a particular church an honorific constitutional position but no financial
support. Others offer legitimacy by collecting membership dues on behalf of a
particular church. Some have extended that practical help (but reduced its value as a
source of legitimation) by collecting dues on behalf of a number of religions. How
does one arrange such varieties of establishment into a single scale?
However, the important point for the topic of this essay is that none of these
technical arguments depends on, or is changed by, any particular definition of
religion. If we wish to understand why Rodney Stark prefers the supply-side model of
religious change to any secularization account, we would note that he has a
particular theory of religion which makes secularization impossible but even that
rests on assertions about characteristics of religious and secular belief systems that in
turn rest on a conventional and largely unobjectionable definition of religion (Bruce
1999).
An extremely fertile field of research in recent decades has been the study of
religious change in Africa and Latin America. The growth of Pentecostalism has
intrigued very many scholars and a clear divide can be discerned between those who
explain its popularity in terms of its usefulness for those attracted to it and those who
stress the political agenda of those who promote it. That story can be told in
functional terms (where the choice is functional for Pentecostalists versus functional
for American capitalist interests) or in terms of plausibility (where the argument is
the extent to which US support for Pentecostalism increases its appeal). But those
arguments do not depend on us arguing about whether Pentecostalism is really a
religion.
One might imagine that the great secularization debate would depend on
definitions of religion. It does at the fringes: some thoroughly functionalist
definitions of religion obviously render secularization impossible. But most of the
arguments over secularization have not hinged on the definition of religion but on
two pragmatic considerations: the interpretation of motives and the measurement of
extent. For example, some critics of the secularization paradigm attempt to offset the
implication of the agreed decline in interest and involvement in mainstream
organized religion by pointing to other less obvious marks of enduring religious
interest: vicarious religion (Davie 2007) and popular religion (Williams 1999) are
examples. Davie believes that many Europeans who are not active participants in
organized religion are nonetheless vicariously religious, by which she means that with
varying degrees of consciousness, they appreciate other people doing religion on
their behalf. My response is not that the term religion is being misused in the idea of
vicarious religion (Bruce and Voas 2010). I have no difficulty at all in appreciating
the meaning of vicarious religion when it is applied to the common medieval
Christian practice of paying others to say masses for ones soul or to the Buddhist
division of labour that sees the laity financially supporting monks to win religious
merit on their behalf. What is at issue for the secularization paradigm is whether,
for example, we should regard avowedly non-religious Britons who watched the
cathedral funeral service for Princess Diana as being religious vicariously. And
where we can identify modern examples of vicarious religion, just how many
118 S. Bruce

people are involved? It is not the definition of vicarious religion (and hence of
religion per se) that is at issue: it is the identification and enumeration of putative
examples.
There is always a danger in justifying some course of action by its apparent
results: readers may not be as impressed as I am by the value of the above debates.
Like the Marxists of the 1960s who derided the arguments between Parsonian
structural-functionalists and symbolic interactionists as trivial because both groups
of scholars were suffering from false consciousness, scholars who fret about the
definition of religion may regard the illustrations I have offered as proof that a
relaxed attitude to identifying our subject matter produces pointless work. Again I
can only offer a pragmatic rebuttal. Do we learn more about religion in the modern
world from Fitzgeralds arguments about definitions or from empirical responses to
Starks analysis of religious markets? Or to separate the two parts of Stringers
Contemporary Western Ethnography and the Definition of Religion, is the value of his
detailed descriptions of what his respondents believe enhanced at all by his attempts
to change how we define religion?

Conclusion
This essay has been brief, not because the topic is unimportant but because it has
been so well worked over. The options are limited and the grounds for choosing
between them are well known. Both Samuel Johnson and Sydney Smith have been
credited with one of the earliest philosophy jokes. On seeing two housewives shouting
at each across a street from their respective upstairs windows, Johnson (or Smith) is
supposed to have said: You know, those women can never agree because they are
arguing from different premises. When I originally wrote that sentence I imagined
the quarrelling housewives to stand for those who favour substantive and those who
favour functional definitions of religion. I now realize that the greater gulf is between
those scholars who think that arguments about definitions are very important and
those of us who believe that some loose largely commonsensical conceptualization of
religion is sufficient to allow us to get on with our primary purpose of exploring its
sociologically interesting features.
In this brief review of the common difficulties of defining religion, I have made
the following simple points. While a functionalist concern with the consequences of
religion is quite proper, the difficulty of consistently adhering to a functionalist
definition of religion is demonstrated by the fact that leading functionalists actually
define religion substantively. As there is little hope of (or need to) develop
sociological concepts that do not rest on common usage, a substantive definition
of religion that fits pretty well with lay usage seems entirely adequate for social
scientists who do not aspire to grand theories of religion. Finally, I have justified that
pragmatism by noting that the definition of religion has not been a major
consideration in a varied list of recent and major debates in the sociology of
religion. What that very brief review of interesting arguments shows is that our
problem is not the definition of religion: it is the operationalizing, identification and
measurement of features of religion and of all the other social phenomena which we
wish to deploy in our explanations. That last phrase is important. Measuring and
scaling personal religiosity, for example, is sometimes tricky but it is no more difficult
than measuring levels of education or social class or levels of health and well-being.
 International Review of Sociology
Revue Internationale de Sociologie 119

Provided we hold consistently to the principle of methodological agnosticism and are

not drawn into debates about the truth or falsity of religion, defining religion is no
more or less difficult than defining any other social phenomenon.

Acknowledgements
This paper was written while I was a Leverhulme Senior Research Fellow and I would like to
thank the Leverhulme Trust for its generous support of my research. I would also like to thank
Robert Segal of the University of Aberdeen for his helpful thoughts on the subject. I would
also like to express my enduring gratitude to the late Roy Wallis who, as teacher and then
colleague, profoundly shaped my understanding of sociology.

Note
1. The same criticism can be made of one of the oddest interventions in the definition
argument: the idea that the putatively deleterious consequences of certain ways of defining
religion can be avoided by replacing nouns (such as religion) by verbs (such as
religioning). The case is made by Malory Nye (2000). That such a switch changes
nothing except ease of comprehension is obvious if one tries replacing theft by thieving and
robbery by robbing.

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