Religion shapes the worldviews of individuals and nations from isolated tribes to sprawling empires. Its influence is multifaceted: it gives believers a moral code, provides a framework for resolving conflict, softens the punishments of barbarian law, and helps people to organize societies and maintain social stability.
Most people define what they consider religious as beliefs, values, and practices related to what they believe to be spiritually significant or sacred. This definition has served as the basis for most academic studies of religion.
Scholars have viewed religion as both universal and a specific phenomenon that can be studied across cultures and over time. This view led to the rise of a number of disciplines that deal with the study of religion, including ethnology, sociology, history, and anthropology.
Some scholars use a functional approach, treating religion as the beliefs and practices that generate and reinforce social cohesion and provide orientation in life. Others use a symbolic interactionist approach, focusing on the emotional and psychological impact of religious rituals and ceremonies. These can involve crying, laughing, screaming, trancelike conditions, and feelings of oneness with the group.
Scholars have also debated whether or not to use a monothetic or polythetic definition of religion, in which a particular property or set of properties fastens a term to its meaning. This controversy reveals a deeper argument about the nature of the study of religion and how its results may be interpreted. Monothetic definitions are criticized for being too narrow, and polythetic definitions for assuming an essentialistic claim about the existence of a prototypical religion.