In the West, religion is usually equated with theism (i.e., belief in a personal god).We review the history of the term and describe how this meaning came about.We argue that a broader meaning of the term is more accurate and useful.Religion can be framed as they way people come together and generate a shared map for making meaning.

Few things are more important to human psychology writ large than religion. But what does this concept really mean?The more deeply we investigate it, the odder Religion1, as a category of human behavior, seems. For one thing, while almost all scholars agree that it integrates myth and ritual in worship practices, Religion has accumulated dozens of definitions, none of which are universally accepted. Why is it so difficult to find a generally accepted definition for a concept we witness every day?

Historically, Religion is much more than worship; it also serves a complex set of other personal and social functions. We can see this by considering the history of Religion.

For the vast majority of human history, the combination of myth and ritual that we think of as Religion were so deeply woven into the fabric of cultural life that most cultures did not even have a word for “religion”. The word first appears in the first century BCE in Roman culture, with the Latin word religio. At the time, it meant “scruples,” the concern that some activity is important enough to be performed carefully. For the Roman writer Cicero, religio referred to people’s duties to the gods, such as following their rules, performing rituals, or taking prophecies seriously.

Rome’s “religion” did not demand that people “believe in” their gods. It was primarily a civic religion, a way to acknowledge the Empire.

With Christianity, the meaning of religio continued to shift. For Tertullian in the early third century CE, the key issue was the difference between “the true worship of the true god” and worship of other gods (Nongbri 29)2. By the fourth century, Lactantius would contrast vera religio (true worship of the one true God) and falsa religio (false worship).

By the middle of the seventeenth century, Religion became a complex system of mythic belief, ritual practice, and the institutions that administer it. It was also understood as separate from other social institutions. John Locke would go so far as to insist that religion ought to be separated out from other social tasks. Moreover, during the Enlightenment, many leading thinkers, Voltaire for example, would celebrate Science as the source of true knowledge and dismiss Religion as mere superstition.

The problems this difference has led to are the key point of our blog. For most of human history, Religion was not merely a matter of worshipping supernatural gods. Rather, it provided what historian David Christian calls, in his book Origin Stories, a “shared map,” the myth by which members of a community could navigate our “rich, beautiful and sometimes terrifying universe.”

This map enabled both individuals and societies to take on tasks such as developing a shared interpretation of the world, a common identity, and a set of behavioral standards. In fact, it was so deeply integrated into society that the first pre-modern scientists—the astronomers of Babylon and Egypt—were priests. “Religion” was not separate from the rest of social behavior; it provided the compass for that behavior.

In Western modernity, these tasks were fragmented. Science provided the shared interpretation; Nationality defined shared identity; and Capitalism offered behavioral standards and coordinated the exchange of goods. As a result, we seem to be playing a game of dueling moral imperatives with existential challenges such as climate change. While Science has explained for half a century that our burning of fossil fuels could destroy society, Capitalism has insisted that only profits matter. Both are matters of mythically validated values.

Our reading of Religion suggests that it will be all but impossible to address these issues unless we can re-integrate our shared map of the universe. Exactly what that map will be like, how people will enact that map, and whether the result will be a single “world religion” or a collection of more locally evolved practices—all these are questions that must be debated, distilled, and filtered, as psychologist Merlin Donald (1991) describes the process of mythic evolution.

We offer this analysis of Religion as a preliminary step in this process. We believe that UTOK, the Unified Theory of Knowledge (Henriques, 2022), can help develop a new way to think about what Religion is and why it plays a central role in human culture. With it, we will be able to see that many in the West have confused Religion with theism (i.e., belief in a personal god). These two concepts are not the same, and we believe much clarity can be achieved by separating them.