Is Football a Religion? The Search for a Definition

A Word for Being Careful

Imagine it is 100 BCE in Rome. You have just made a promise to help a friend. If you break it, you feel a heavy knot in your stomach. The Romans had a word for that knot: religio. It meant scrupulousness — a feeling of being bound by an obligation. Religio did not originally have anything to do with gods. You could feel religio about a debt to your neighbour.

Even later, when people used religio to talk about worshipping Jupiter, the word still lacked the sense of a separate “religion” like we have today. The early Christian thinker Augustine (354–430 CE) considered using religio to describe how one worships God, but he rejected it because the word also covered ordinary human duties. For most of history, there was no generic box called “religion” — just different ways people honoured their gods.

So when did religion become a category, a kind of thing you could compare across cultures? That shift is the story of how Europeans, explorers, and scholars tried to pin down what makes something a religion — and why they still cannot agree.

One God, Then Many Spirits

The first big push to define religion as a single category came from Edward Lord Herbert (1583–1648). In the 1600s, Protestants and Catholics were at war, each claiming they worshipped correctly. Herbert, trying to calm things down, listed five “Common Notions” he thought every religion had: belief in a supreme deity, that the deity should be worshipped, that virtue is central, that we should repent, and that we get rewarded or punished now or later. Notice that this list assumes one supreme god. Herbert knew about ancient Egyptians who worshipped many gods, but he argued those gods were really just servants of the one true deity. So his definition squeezed polytheistic practices into a theistic mould. Today we call this a substantive definition — it defines religion by what people believe about reality (specifically, about god‑like beings).

Two centuries later, anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) wanted a definition that did not force non‑European cultures to fit a Christian pattern. He proposed the simplest possible substantive definition: religion is belief in spiritual beings. Spirits could be gods, ghosts, nature spirits, or anything person‑like but invisible. Tylor insisted that people in Africa, the Americas and Asia were just as rational as Europeans; they used logic to figure out where life came from. With this definition, practices like ancestor worship, Hindu devotion to many gods and Navajo ceremonies all counted as religions. This was a big expansion — the circle now included polytheism and animism. But here is the next puzzle: what about traditions that do not involve any spiritual beings at all?

The Universe Itself Becomes Sacred

By the early 1900s, some thinkers argued that religion could be about an unseen order, not just spirits. The American psychologist William James (1842–1910) argued that religion is the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our greatest good lies in adjusting our lives to it. That unseen order could be something like the law of karma, the Dao (the Way), or the Stoic Logos — forces that shape the universe but do not have personalities. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1923–2006) sharpened this idea: religion is a system of symbols that expresses a culture’s conception of “the general order of existence,” the deepest truth about reality.

This cosmic version finally included non‑theistic traditions that had stumped earlier definitions. Theravada Buddhism, for instance, teaches dependent co‑origination — a chain of causes and effects without a creator god. Zen Buddhism holds that Buddha‑nature pervades everything. Daoism emphasises the Dao, an impersonal flow that underlies all things. Because many people today consider these religions, scholars called Buddhism the “litmus test” for any definition of religion. So the circle expands again: from one god, to many spirits, to a cosmic order. Some now distinguish between religions with person‑like beings (animism) and those with impersonal forces (animatism). To avoid implying a separate supernatural realm, which many cultures do not have, scholars use the term superempirical — that is, beyond ordinary sensory experience, but not necessarily in another world.

The Ultimate Concern: When Anything Could Be a Religion

So far, all definitions we have seen are substantive: they say religion requires belief in some special kind of reality. But in the 20th century, a new approach appeared: functional definitions. These ask not “What do religious people believe?” but “What does religion do for people?” French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) argued that religion’s core job is to bind people into a single moral community. It does not matter whether you believe in gods; any system of practices that creates intense group unity counts as religion. A national holiday with flags and anthems, for example, could be just as religious as a mass.

The theologian Paul Tillich (1886–1965) took a different functional route: religion is whatever is your ultimate concern — the thing that gives your life direction and meaning above everything else. For some, that is God. For others, it could be their nation, their family, or even success. Tillich would say that if winning the championship organises your entire life, then football is your religion. Suddenly, capitalism, Marxism and celebrity fandom all become candidates. Critics push back: if a Thai villager wears a protective amulet but does not join a moral community, Durkheim would call it mere magic, not religion. And Tillich would dismiss casual interests as not “ultimate.” These functional definitions can end up excluding some traditional spirit‑based practices while including atheistic ideologies. The boundary between religion and non‑religion becomes a fierce tug‑of‑war, with no single rope holding it all.

Did “Religion” Even Exist Before Modern Times?

There is a deeper twist. Some scholars argue that the whole concept of “religion” is a modern Western invention — and it has been used as a tool of power. Jonathan Z. Smith (1938–2017) showed how Protestant assumptions snuck into supposedly neutral definitions, ranking cultures as more or less civilised. Stronger voices, like Timothy Fitzgerald, say religion is a fiction: there is no such “thing” out there, only a word Europeans slapped onto other societies to control them. Historians Brent Nongbri and others claim that before modern times, people did not separate religion from politics, work, or daily life — so ancient Greece or medieval Europe did not have “religions” the way we think today.

But not everyone accepts this radical view. Other scholars point out that the need to compare different ways of worship arose much earlier. The first‑century Jewish historian Josephus already distinguished the “worship” of various peoples, treating them as alternatives. And ancient Chinese thinkers had words like jiao (teaching) that grouped together Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism long before Europeans arrived. These realists argue that social realities — like marriage or kinship — can exist even if people do not have a word for them. So while the modern concept of religion certainly carries colonial baggage, the urge to categorise different ways of connecting to the sacred may be very old indeed. The debate remains open: is religion something we discovered or something we invented?

Why the Fight Over Definitions Matters

You might think this is just a word game for professors. But it is not. In many countries, if something is officially recognised as a religion, it gets special legal protections — like tax exemptions, the right to build places of worship, or freedom from certain laws. Courts have had to decide whether Scientology, Wicca, or even atheism qualify as religions. The definition also shapes how we respect others. If your friend says “playing guitar is my religion,” you might smile, but the question lingers: what separates a passionate hobby from a faith?

Philosophers today often lean toward a family resemblance view, borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). He argued that concepts like “game” have no single essence; instead, all games share a network of overlapping similarities, like members of a family. Some games have teams, some have balls, some have scoring — no one feature is required. Similarly, religions might share belief in superempirical beings, rituals, community, ethical codes and scripture, but no single feature is necessary. A tradition with three of five features counts, but the boundary is fuzzy. This polythetic approach accepts that religion is a blurred and shifting category. So next time someone says “This is my religion,” you can ask: what exactly makes it one? The ancient Romans did not have our word. Today, we still do not have a single answer. But the search for one — and the arguments it sparks — shows just how much we care about what matters most.

Think about it

1. If a government says that only groups that believe in a god can be called “religions,” should Buddhists be denied the right to build temples? Why or why not?
2. Imagine your favourite hobby — say, playing video games — gives your life meaning and brings you together with a community. Should it count as a religion? What criteria would you use to decide?
3. Some scholars argue that “religion” is a label Europeans forced on other cultures, so we should stop using it. If you were a historian, would you still use the word “religion” to describe ancient societies, knowing they did not have the term? Why?