an introduction
of religio. It is confirmed by Saint Augustine, a church bishop in North
Africa, in the early fifth century that religio expresses human social
bonds and relationships, and to use the term to refer to worship of God
creates confusion. Subsequent Western scholars have labored to find an
acceptable definition that captures the nature of religion.
There are not only many definitions of religion, but there are also differ-
ent approaches to the subject that reflect occurrences in intellectual history
at the time of particular scholars. These approaches include the following:
theological, anthropological, sociological, historical, phenomenological,
psychological, economical, hermeneutical, feminist, economical, racial,
cognitive science, and postmodern. Each different methodological approach
to the subject of religion or some aspect of it shapes the scholar’s definition
of religion.
the evOlutiOnary apprOach
With the exception of the liberal theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher’s
(1766–1834) emphasis on examining the nature of religion from the per-
spective of an individual’s experience identified with a feeling of abso-
lute dependence in an encounter with something representing a greater
power than oneself, the early nineteenth-century quest to find the nature
of religion was influenced by the Darwinian–Spencerian theory of evolu-
tion, which was connected to a perceived need to be scientific when
examining religion. It is possible to witness the influence of the theory of
evolution in the work of Edward B. Tylor (1832–1917), a pioneer in the
field of anthropology, and in that of James George Frazer (1854–1941),
whose famous multi-volume The Golden Bough, originally published in
1890 in two volumes, grew eventually to twelve volumes. Even though
Tylor’s evidence from missionaries is suspect, he defined religion in a
minimum way as a belief in spiritual beings. Using various dimensions
of religion, Tylor examined the evolution of humans from primitive forms
of society to more advanced modern versions in the West, which he used
as his measuring stick, and theorized the following scheme of evolution-
ary development: hunter-gather or “savage” stage; domestication of ani-
mals and plants in the “barbaric” stage; finally, art and writing ushered
into existence the civilized stage. This evolutionary scheme was reflected
in his ambitious goal of outlining a “science of culture” based on objec-
tive observations and not speculation. Tylor also sought to isolate surviv-
als in modern culture from previous primitive (his prejudicial term for an