Many people involved with the study of religion try to define it based upon its conceptual content. According to substantive and essentialist definitions, religion is characterized by some basic essence which is common to all religious systems, but not to any non-religious systems.
Below are various short quotes from philosophers and scholars of religion which attempt to capture the nature of religion from a substantive or essentialist perspective:
To be religious is to effect in some way and in some measure a vital adjustment (however tentative and incomplete) to whatever is reacted to or regarded implicitly or explicitly as worthy of serious and ulterior concern.
- Vergilius Ferm.
By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of Nature and of human life.
- J.G. Frazer.
[Religion is] the knowledge possessed by the finite mind of its nature as absolute mind.
- G.W.F. Hegel
Religion is the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.
- William James
I want to make clear that by the term ‘religion’ I do not mean a creed. It is, however, true that on the one hand every confession is originally based upon the experience of the numinous and on the other hand upon the loyalty, trust, and confidence toward a definitely experienced numinous effect and the subsequent alteration of consciousness: the conversion of Paul is a striking example of this. ‘Religion,’ it might be said, is the term that designates the attitude peculiar to a consciousness which has been altered by the experience of the numinous.
- C.G. Jung
Religion (subjectively regarded) is the recognition of all duties as divine commands.
- Immanuel Kant
Religion is that system of activities and beliefs directed toward that which is perceived to be of sacred value and transforming power.
- James C. Livingston
Religion is a system of language and practice that organizes the world in terms of what is deemed sacred.
- William Paden
To take everything individual as a part of the whole, everything limited as a representation of the infinite, that is religion.... The essence of religion consists in the feeling of an absolute dependence.
- Friedrich Schleiermacher
Religion is the recognition that all things are manifestations of a Power which transcends our knowledge.
- Herbert Spencer
The religious is any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of its general and enduring value.
- John Dewey
Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of the meaning of our life.
- Paul Tillich
Religion is the varied, symbolic expression of, and appropriate response to that which people deliberately affirm as being of unrestricted value for them.
- T. William Hall
I understand by religion any system of thought and action shared by a group which gives the individual a frame of orientation and an object of devotion.
- Erich Fromm
It seems best to fall back at once on this essential source, and simply to claim, as a minimum definition of Religion, the belief in Spiritual Beings. ...[S]o far as I can judge from the immense mass of accessible evidence, we have to admit that the belief in spiritual beings appears among all low races with whom we have attained to thoroughly intimate acquaintance.
- E.B. Tylor
Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal and the hopeless quest.
- A.N. Whitehead
Religion may best be understood as systematic anthropomorphism: the attribution of human characteristics to non human things or events.
- Stewart Guthrie
