Religion is a concept that is often used to label a wide range of social formations, most prominently the so-called world religions such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. One way of defining religion is to use a monothetic approach, which determines membership in the category according to a single property. Emile Durkheim, for example, defined religion in terms of the beliefs and practices that unite people into a moral community. Others define it functionally, determining whether or not a form of life has a particular role that it plays in the lives of its members. This approach is more common today, and is exemplified by the work of Clifford Geertz.
Some scholars use a cross-sectional approach, which divides a religious tradition into seven different dimensions. These are practical and ritual; experiential and emotional; narrative or mythical; doctrinal and philosophical; ethical and legal; and material (art, architecture, and sacred places). A balanced view of a religion should also recognize its historical dimension, and therefore include the contributions of disciplines such as sociology and social anthropology, which study the institutions of a religious tradition, as well as that of history, which studies the ways in which a religion’s traditions develop over time.
The British folklorist James Frazer, for example, developed a comprehensive theory of religion, arguing that human beings begin with magic and then progress to belief in supernatural beings that need to be propitiated. This is the origin of what has been called the sacramental view of religion, which includes a number of sacred activities such as marriage and burial that are believed to sanctify the union between humans and spirits.