Importance of Religion to Society
Senior 4 · General and Religious Studies
Importance of Religion to Society
Lesson 1 of 4
40 min
Rwanda's fifth Population and Housing Census, taken in 2022, asked every resident about their religion. Only 3.0% answered "no religion", and 0.1% did not state one. Every other person, about 97 in every 100, named a religious community.
Rwandans today carry smartphones, study science and use mobile money. Yet almost all of them also belong to a church, a mosque or another faith community. Why? What is religion, that it has lasted through every change in human history? This lesson defines religion carefully, shows a tool for describing any religion, and examines the reasons people give, and the reasons scholars give, for being religious.
Definition
Religion: a system of beliefs and practices concerning what people hold sacred, usually God or the divine, which gives meaning to life, guides behaviour and unites believers into a community. The word is often traced to the Latin religare, "to bind": religion binds people to God and to one another.
Belief: holding something to be true. Faith: trust and commitment to God or to what one believes, beyond what can be proved (Unit 12).
Sacred: set apart as holy and treated with special respect (a mosque, the Bible, the Sabbath). Profane: ordinary, everyday things.
Worship: acts of honour and devotion to God, such as prayer, praise and sacrifice. Revelation: God making himself and his will known, for example through prophets and scripture.
Monotheism: belief in one God (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). Polytheism: belief in many gods. Atheism: the view that there is no God. Agnosticism: the view that we cannot know whether God exists.
African traditional religion: the indigenous beliefs and practices of African peoples, passed on by oral tradition; in Rwanda it centred on belief in one creator, Imana.
Scholars define religion in two ways. A substantive definition says what religion is (belief in God or the supernatural). A functional definition says what religion does for people and society. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim combined both in 1912:
"A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them."
Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, translated by J. W. Swain (1915). He used "Church" for any religious community, including a mosque community.
The British scholar Ninian Smart suggested a way to describe any religion without judging it: look at its seven dimensions (Figure 1). A religion is more than its beliefs; it is also what people do, feel, tell, build and how they live together.
The rationale of religion is the set of reasons for it. Believers and scholars give different kinds of reasons.
1. Believers' reasons: God made us for himself. Both Christianity and Islam teach that people seek God because God created them to know him.
| Christian scripture (World English Bible) | Islamic scripture (Pickthall, 1930) |
|---|---|
| "He made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the surface of the earth … that they should seek the Lord, if perhaps they might reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us." (Acts 17:26–27) | "I created the jinn and humankind only that they might worship Me." (Surah 51:56) "So set thy purpose (O Muhammad) for religion as a man by nature upright—the nature (framed) of Allah, in which He hath created man." (Surah 30:30) |
Islam calls this inborn turning towards God fitrah, human nature as God made it.
2. The great questions. Religion offers answers to questions that every human asks and that science alone does not settle.
| Human question | What religion offers |
|---|---|
| Where do we come from? | A creator and a purpose for creation |
| How should we live? | Moral teaching and laws (Lessons 2 and 3) |
| Why do we suffer, and what happens when we die? | Hope, comfort and teaching on life after death |
| Where do I belong? | A community, an identity and rites for birth, marriage and death |
3. Scholars' explanations. Social scientists study what religion does, whether or not God exists.
Believers reply that these theories describe effects of religion but cannot show that its beliefs are false; Marx's critique also ignores the many believers who have fought injustice because of their faith.
Worked example: reading the census
The 2022 census counted 13,246,394 residents, of whom 265,317 were Muslim; 164,304 of these Muslims lived in urban areas. The urban share of Muslims is
For the whole population, the urban share was 27.9%. Muslims in Rwanda are therefore more than twice as urban as the population as a whole. A historian would link this to the way Islam first reached Rwanda, with traders who settled in towns; a planner would note that most mosques are needed in towns.
The share of residents who named a religion: .
Warning
Common mistakes
Important
Discuss. Choose one faith community in your area. Describe it using all seven of Smart's dimensions. Which dimension is most visible to an outsider, and which is most important to its members? Why might those two be different?
The Sociology Professor: "Durkheim's Sociology of Religion: Sacred vs. Profane", about 5 minutes. Note how Durkheim separates sacred from profane, and give one Rwandan example of each.
Practice
Key points
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the opening, Figure 1, the tables, the worked example and the exercises.
This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Quick check
Match each example to Smart's dimension of religion.
Tap one on the left, then its partner on the right.
