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The article focuses on the theoretical and methodological status of the concept of religion in the essentialist interpretation of ethnic community by analyzing the material of foreign researches. The key effort is to reveal whether the essentialist views on ethnic communities are compatible with the constructivist paradigm of religion. The essentialist approach to the notion of an ethnic community now develops in the frame of primordialism, which can be divided into two main directions: cultural and socio-biological. Proponents of the former concentrate on a detailed description of cultural differences between ethnic communities, with cultural diversity being accepted only to describe the essence of a particular ethnic community. Sociobiological primordialists deny cultural features’ status at the face of biological evolution. The common theoretical assumption of primordialisms turns out to be the essentialist vision: an ethnic community is endowed with the essence defined by a number of attributes, including religion. The constructivist approach, however, suggests that religion has no referent in reality and its notion is defined conventionally and empirically. Accepting this approach would deprive religion of its essence. Rendering the essence of religion relative, therefore, means blurring the boundaries defining the essence of an ethnic community. This consequence clearly contradicts the essentialist approach to an ethnic community. Thus, embracing an essentialist approach to ethnic community leads to the need to adopt the essentialist interpretation of religion.

First of all, this article presents sociological definitions of religion and then it generally evaluates all these attempts which have tried to define religion. Many sociologist of religion have produced various definitions of religion. However, they have failed to reach a standard definition for it. Because all this definitions have been determined by their various methodological approaches. In my opinion, this is a very natural outcome, since the sociology is very dynamic and complex. This complexity and dynamism do not give a chance to a sociologist of religion to make a universal and standard definition for religion