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Scientific method must eliminate bias and view facts objectively. In the scientific study of religion we must avoid the bias due to apologetic or philosophical interests, to a primary concern with schematic interpretation, and to cultural prejudice. A second task is a correct definition of religion in order to know how best it can be studied. A third task is the proper correlation of the social and psychological sciences in the interpretation of the milieu out of which a given religion grows.

Les auteurs indiquent, pour commencer, sur base d'une comparaison entre les travaux de Berger et Yinger, que le choix entre une définition substantielle et une définition fonc tionnelle de la religion n'est pas une simple question de goût : ce choix exerce une influence décisive sur le résultat de l'ana lyse. Ils enquêtent ensuite sur la praticabilité des définitions fonc tionelles et substantielles. Il en ressort que la " religion " n'est pas une entité, mais une qualité qui est attribuée à certaines choses et à certaines fonctions par des catégories sociales ou catégories de positions. Une variation est évidente dans ce que certains appellent " religion " et d'autres pas. Il en découle que le sociologue doit porter son attention sur le contexte structurel et situationnel du processus de définition de la religion. Sans cela, il court le risque de reprendre à son compte la définition d'une catégorie de positions dans la société. Cela apparaît avec force en ce qui concerne l'emploi des définitions substantielles ou fonctionnelles dans les théo ries qui prennent parti implicitement ou explicitement au sujet de la sécularisation. Si le sociologue veut prendre distance de tout point de vue idéologisant dans sa définition de la religion, il ne lui reste qu'une seule alternative : il ne doit pas définir lui-méme la religion, mais la laisser définir par les différentes positions sociales présentes dans la société. La définition de la religion n'est pas un point d'aboutissement pour la recherche sociolo gique, mais elle appartient à l'objet à étudier. Elle est un élément de la réalité sociale changeante que le sociologue veut considérer.

Studying a religion imposes two sorts of definitions. First, what religious phenomena does one consider worth studying? Second, what does one find sufficiently important for study in a limited framework? Judaic religious and historical phenomena, like those of other religions, may seem to defy adequate description at the outset. The varieties of historical setting, intellectual and religious expressions, literary and theological literature-these can scarcely be satisfactorily apprehended in the modest framework of a lifetime of study. In working toward a definition of religion, one has to confront the same formidable complexities. The problem is cultural and philosophical. The operative criteria of selection ought to be: What phenomena are universal, everywhere present, and meaningful? What, further, is important as a representation of the reality both viewed and shaped by "Judaism"? The answers surely cannot be found in literature produced by, and for, a religious elite, for the sophisticated conceptions of extraordinary men cannot be supposed to have been grasped by common folk. Theological writings, while important, testify to the conception of reality held by a tiny minority. In the case of Judaism, legal ideals and values were shaped by a class of religious virtuosi to begin with, then imposed upon the life of ordinary people. Excluding these two classes of data, we may imagine that the religious materials that best conform to our criteria are liturgical. The myths conveyed by prayer and associated rituals were universal, everywhere present, and meaningful in the history of Judaism from A.D. 70 onward. Of greatest importance, they provide the clearest picture of how Jews in archaic times envisioned the meaning of life and of themselves. If a myth is present, it must be everywhere present, hidden in every ceremony and rite, every liturgy, every sacred gesture and taboo. We must be able to locate it in commonplace, not merely extraordinary, events of piety. In my view, Jewish liturgy provides the clearest, and at the same time

I do not propose to attempt in this article to make any exact or exhaustive definition of religion, but rather to call attention to one of its outstanding psychological characteristics. At the outset, then, I take it for granted that religion is primarily a feeling experience. We make use of the term ‘religion,’ it is true, for many things in addition to immediate feeling experiences, and it is inevitable that we should do so. But it will be well to bear in mind that when we describe Buddhism or Christianity (as a system of beliefs and practices) as ‘a religion’ we are using the term in a secondary fashion. A man may accept the tenets, and to some extent practise the commandments, of a religion in this sense without being religious.

INTERPRET my invitation to address the American Academy of Religion on the definition of its key concept, religion, as an opportunity to exercise several of what I believe to be my philosophical responsibilities. In this paper I reject, therefore, the currently popular view of the philosopher as technician, restricted in his proper function to the clarification of linguistic meanings. This technical role is indeed one of my important responsibilities, but the "love of wisdom" involves far more than technique. In what follows three sections correspond to my three primary aims for this occasion. First, I have an apologetic aim: to defend the very enterprise of definition-making, particularly the enterprise of defining religion, against several significant criticisms. Second, I have a constructive and critical aim: to sketch out a definition of religion, briefly explain it, test it, and show some of its uses. And third, I have a frankly hortatory aim: I want what I say to make a fruitful difference, both among inquirers in the fields concerned with religion and outside them. I intend, therefore, to close with an appeal to this body to take a vitally required initiative in ending the present state of conceptual chaos engulfing studies about religion.

Progress in religious education depends upon knowing what religious experience is. On this subject there is much confusion and uncertainty. After estimating the value and the defects of philosophical deduction, purely descriptive definition, and the attempt to establish fundamental postulates, the article undertakes to formulate certain principles which may serve as starting-points for the more exact definition of religion. The implications of this view for religious education are then discussed.

dreams in their blind outreach for help. The challenge to intelligent educated religious men and women who assume the role of religious leadership is humbling. In one generation we have seen two world wars, and some think another greater world conflict is yet beyond the horizon. Many careful thinkers fear more the coming problems of peace, or an armistice, than the difficulties of a global war. What are we as religious leaders, in our varied undertakings, doing to change world conditions, so that men and women, boys and girls, may have reasons for hope? The seminary is just one school among many on a modern university campus, ignored for the most part by those who are busy in the other schools and departments. The church is one type of organization among many in our modern society, and has few inter-relationships with the others. People deal with religious ideas and practices as if they were inconsequental addenda to the rest of life or unimportant relics of an outgrown age. Leadership is measured by one's following and the accomplishments of one's undertakings. Many religious leaders are discouraged and depressed. What is wrong? What can be done to change the situation? First of all we should be glad if Biblical scholars would help us as religious educators to identify religion, and to find examples of religion in action. There are many illustrations in the records of ancient days of religion becoming decadent and corrupt in the temples and in the established practices. Yet the vital leavening power of religion has never died. It was frequently found where least expected, and a better form of religion arose out of the ashes of the old. Will the Biblical scholars tell us what they think of a functional definition of religion? Do we have good precedent and justification for trying to shift the focus of attention from doctrines and ceremonial

Q F ALL the vain but persistent quests of man-quests for the philosopher's stone, for the fountain of youth, for the elixir of immortality-none has been more fondly or more stubbornly pursued than the quest for a definition of religion. Year after year, and generation after generation, new definitions continue to be offered, but none of them finds general acceptance. Why has this quest so signally failed? Because religion is not any one thing. A well-known work on the history of religion is entitled Orpheus. A complete account of all the varying forms of religion, if such an account were possible, might very well be called Proteus. Homer tells us that Menelaus, returning from the Trojan war, was detained by the gods on an island, until the daughter of Proteus took pity on him and helped him to trap her father. To escape the firm clutch of Menelaus, "the ancient one of the sea" changed rapidly from one shape to another: "at first he turned into a bearded lion, and thereafter into a snake, and a pard, and a huge boar; then he took the shape of running water, and of a tall and flowering tree." Menelaus, however, refused to let go until Proteus submitted and told him how to find his way home. Now religion in the course of its history has assumed a multitude and a variety of forms which would have sorely taxed even the metamorphic powers of the old Hellenic deity. Menelaus did succeed in holding Proteus fast, but strive as we may to hold religion and discover its essential nature, it eludes our grasp. Of course, from a practical standpoint, we may seize and hold the thing itself, and learn from it the way home, without being able to define it or to describe it ade

No scientific disclipine can be credited with much accuracy until it has succeeded in defining its principal terms. While recent contributions to the still youthful field of the psychology of religion have made the problems clearer, and at least partially solved some of them, no definition that has yet been proffered has met with wide acceptance. It is the purpose of this paper to suggest a working definition which, it is hoped, will prove to be reasonably satisfactory. It will be claimed that the definition adequately covers the established facts in regard to religion, that it furnishes a clear line of demarkation between religion and related fields, and that it is serviceable as a preliminary step toward the solution of the more difficult questions of the social significance and metaphysical validity of religion.2 An adequate definition of religion must satisfy two prerequisites. The first of these is that, to meet the requirements of logic, it must be exactly coextensive with the term defined.3 It must include all varieties of all religions in the past as well as the present, and all of the logically possible forms that religions may conceivably assume in the future, no matter whether we believe these forms to be desirable or undesirable, uplifting or degrading, true or false. It must be thoroughly impersonal and descriptive, not normative.

Theravāda Buddhism has during the past century been an annoyance to scholars who tried to find a general and crossculturally valid definition of religion. Durkheim refuted Frazer's minimal definition of religion being “the belief in Spiritual Beings” solely on the grounds of the notable exception of Theravāda Buddhism. He based his argument that “the idea of gods is absent, or at least, … plays only a secondary and minor role” mainly on the now classic work of Oldenberg, “Buddha, his Life, his Doctrine, his Community,” published originally in 1881. The same book was also used extensively by Max Weber who asked himself whether a system of “ethics without God” and “with absolute indifference towards the question whether gods do exist or not and how they exist” could be called a “religion.”

For the science of religion, it is indispensable to have a definition of religion as the starting point of its study. The term science of religion may still be somewhat unfamiliar and sound strange. It only means an approach to the study of religion, using the empirical and scientific method. Basically, the science of religion is not different from any of the disciplines in the fields of natural science and behavioral science. It fulfils the basic requirements of scientific investigation. The basic requirements for science are two, the method of study, and the object of study. As to the former, the science of religion follows the general nature of scientific method, which is to be objective, value neutral and positivistic-positivistic in the sense that all the inquiries must be based upon observable phenomena. The object of study must be open and available for observation by anybody who wants to study it. Now, to turn to the problem of the object of study, religious phenomena, which are the object of study of the science of religion, involve man's value elements. On this point, it is different from natural phenomena. This makes the point of departure for behavioral science from natural science.

covered a group of people devoid of religion. But always on closer investigation it has been ascertained that there are some cult ceremonies or practices, some meager beginnings of a religion with which the observer had neglected to reckon. Nor does human history record a time, be it never so remote, when men lived their lives without experiencing the need and achieving some forms answering to their felt need of a religion. The oldest available documents, inscriptions, and other monuments go to show that religion was often a much more inclusive and absorbing subject among the ancients than it is for many modern people. It is true that the lines of demarcation between religious phenomena and other social facts are much more vague among less cultured peoples. Yet for that very reason it is possible to appreciate all the more the fact that, among all people and in all the stages of human history religion is a fact with which we must take account. It is not difficult to account for the fact that some peoples have been accounted to be destitute of religion. The explanation is to be found in the presuppositions of those who have pronounced judgment. The inclusiveness or exclusiveness with which the phenomena are treated is determined by the scope of one's definition of religion. It is possible to have a definition so broad that it will include all the social facts of experience, morality, politics, recreation, and in short everything in which the group is trying to achieve or conserve something that it regards as worthful. For such a definition the political mass meeting, harangued to excitement by an agitator, and the football match, with its surging

Definitions of religion cover a distressingly wide range in consequence of the essentially non-convergent outcome of a struggle to reach agreement about this word. At one extreme, Communism, the very antithesis to religion in most people's minds, has been termed a religion on account of its appearance as a system of intense emotional dedication to doctrinal principles by those within its fold. Recently I heard Felix Greene, the cousin of Christopher Isherwood and of Graham Greene, describe this dedication within Communism; Greene had just returned from five full months in Red China where he even was granted a personal interview with Chou en Lai. The near half a billion Chinese people live in a political and economic system which is controlled by a hard core of just several million Communist Party Members. He continually ran into Chinese youth who described to him their real despair over being refused membership in the Party because of failure to measure up to the fantastically high standards of conduct and commitment required of a Party member.. He likened the Party to a reigious order in every sense of the word in which some of the choice youth of China have evidently "found themselves" through utter and absolute commitment to the Party. They exhibit a selflessness that is frightening in its future implications and renders a stark warning to the apathy and easy-going faiths of so many of us in America in general and in Christianity in particular. Without doubt, the definition of religion is not violated when it is stretched to include Communism, at any rate, when it is stretched to include that element of Communism related to commitment.

What distinguishes the religious movement or dimension from other movements? If we attempt a rigorous definition of religion we risk losing ourselves in the quicksands of philosophical debate. In its most general sense ‘religion’ embraces all prevalent systems of faith and worship past and present, an almost infinite variation. Not all movements or ideologies have achieved the status of a religious system of faith and worship. Is there any common denominator shared by those that have?

Far be it from me to disappoint those readers who are eagerly awaiting my reaction to the hatchet job on my life and work by the four men of the symposium of the last issue of The Journalfor the Scientific Study of Religion. I will confess to being somewhat surprised by the animus of the four writers. Each in his own way and with his own style was bent on tearing apart, debunking, cutting down to size, hurting, and destroying-perhaps without even knowing it. It is not merely that the elementary canons of scholarly discourse were discarded (and I'm not sure such canons are worth very much given the incurable nastiness of most scholars). The writers were so intent on punishing me for the quantity of my output that they engaged in distortion, omission, quoting out of context, and just plain foolishness of the sort that exceeds the limits of common honesty. I must indeed be a fierce and terrible inkblot to stir up such a reaction. Let us begin with Professor Hadden. One would think from the tone of his introduction-only moderately patronizing-that he would like to be a good friend. (After all, only a good friend would bother to mention my mother's first name-even if it might not be so friendly to suggest that she influenced me into the priesthood, which, incidentally, she did not.) Yet perceive two of the tricks of my would-be "good friend." Professor Hadden quotes a reviewer in the Washington Post (inaccurately described as a "Vatican" priest) as saying, "Either he did not know what he was talking about, and being celibate shouldn't, or he did and should shut up." What Professor Hadden does not tell the reader is that in the following sentences the author of the review rejects that position and goes on to write an extremely favorable review of the book. Professor Hadden's quoting reviewers is like the Devil's quoting Scripture. And he also quotes the Hyde Park Kenwood Voices on my battle with the nativists in the University of Chicago's sociology department; but he has not bothered to tell the reader that authors Siegel and Rose concluded by making it quite clear that the main reason why I am not a professor at Chicago is that I am a Catholic priest. With that kind of selective quotation out of context from a "friend," one scarcely needs enemies. My fellow Aquarian Dean Martin Marty, who is surely a friend and the most benign of the symposiasts, engages in an ever so small omission which makes me look like a naive and innocent clerical Pollyanna with a "reassuring" view of religiondespite the long passages in Unsecular Man which are anything but reassuring to the traditional churches. He repeats the hoary cliche of many reviewers that my definition of religion is too broad, and, like the reviewers, he does not note the fact that it is not my definition but Clifford Geertz's. Also, like the reviewers, he does

To determine the relation of religious behavior to certain areas of personality, such as neuroticism, spontaneity, and worldmindedness, dimensions of personal and religious behavior were isolated by factor analysis and interrelated by canonical analysis. Characteristics of religious behavior and personalityreligion interaction differ among Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Baha'is, and non-affiliates. The Baha'i interaction redefines religion. The findings are discussed in terms of the definition of religion, psychosocial variables to which religion is related, differences among religious groups, and unity through religion. Studies of religion must distinguish between independent dimensions of religious behavior and their differential correlation with personality in different religious groups.

THE role of religion ih society seems to have been rather cohasistently over or underestimated. The social science tradition in the early twentieth century was often influenced by Marxism ahd other alati-religious doctrines, which were interpreted as regarding religion as but a superficial expression of deeper-lying economic and social forces, an epiphenomenon to be dealt with rather lightly. Others within social science-most notably perhaps Max Weber-reacted against this estimate and were interpreted by later writers with the result that most people in our disciplines now regard religion as a very fundamental and universal phetiomenohl in human society. Proceeding on the latter assumption, it is most disconcerting to meet people from the East who dispute this point of view. Some years ago, when I had just taken as a revealing new insight the doctrine that religion is a most poteht tool for the understanding of any society, I queried a Chinese colleague on the religion of China. She insisted that the Chinese have no religion except for the few Christian converts. I put this conversation out of my mind as soon as possible, lingering only over a melancholy reflection that the Chinese, even when presumably scholarly and engaged in college teaching, have a difficult time ih understanding the English language. Several years later I had the occasion to teach a course in the sociology of religion. When I began with the usual formula concernihg the universality of religiohi, one of the students of Eastern origin again insisted that his country has no religion. It was at this stage that the importance of a definition of religion dawned upon me, a pursuit which has now convinced me that the conventional claim for a universality of religion is based on an ethnocentric misundersta

THIS paper was motivated by the desire of many members of this society at last year's meeting to define religion. Some of us, whose primary interest is philosophy, tried to suggest that it is impossible to come up with a satisfactory definition of religion which is not too narrow or too broad. Contemporary linguistic philosophers, especially those in England, have abandoned the craving for definition of such terms as "religion," for what appears to be a more promising task, namely, an attempt to characterize the nature of religious language, how it is used, how it functions, and what kind of meaning it may be said to have. My suggestion in this paper is that by examining religious language we may gain some insight into the manifold complex of human experiences which we call "religion." This very concern by philosophers with the nature of religious language represents a change in philosophical orientation, for until quite recently logical positivism seemed to dominate the philosophical scene. You may recall that according to logical positivism all statements which may be said to have cognitive meaning are either analytic or are reducible to empirical facts. Religious utterances were said to possess only emotive meaning-that is, they were not really held to be statements, but rather were considered to be expressing the emotions of the speaker, and to be attempting to arouse similar emotional responses in the hearers of the utterances. Ludwig Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations did much to awaken philosophers to the nature of this claim of the logical positivists. Wittgenstein suggested that the logical positivists had constructed an artificial criterion of meaning; they had drawn a boundary line clearly marking off cognitive from emotive meaning when, in fact, such a boundary line was not found in the ordinary use of language. To put this same point more simply, the logical positivists began with a theory of meaning which excluded ethical, metaphysical, and religious statements by definitional requirements from those statements which could be said to have cognitive meaning. Then to explain why it seemed to many that statements of ethics, metaphysics, and religion did have a meaning, they devised a category of emotive meaning into which these sentences could be neatly placed. Hence, religious utterances were cognitively meaningless and nonsensical, according to this criterion of the logical positivists. However, following Wittgenstein's suggestions, I shall try to indicate that this system of classification is too simple, too neat, and too artificial to help us in our attempts to understand the nature of religious language. Let us follow the practice of contemporary linguistic philosophers and look at the use of words, sentences, and paragraphs in the contexts in which they occur as a better procedure for discovering their meaning. When one uses this approach to religious language it does not seem surprising to discover that religious language is not meaningful in a straight-forwardly scientific or logical sense, for I doubt if religious people ever claim that it is meaningful in these senses.

If one adopts a definition of religion that emphasizes its function, as in coping with chaos or in expressing ultimate concern (rather than the forms which serve such functions in one system or another), the more crucial measurement question becomes "How is a person religious ?" rather than "How religious is he? " Following the analogy of structural linguistics or of natural history, an exploratory effort was made, with open-ended, non-doctrinal questions to tap the natural expression of ultimate concern among a college sample. Students did indicate overwhelmingly their inclinations to pursue basic, permanent questions. Those most expressing such concerns were most likely to belong to groups formed to address such concerns. (Editor's abstract.)