ABSTRACT
What is religion? Before we can go beyond a descriptive account of events, it is necessary that we arrive at a definition of the nature of religion. Such a definition has been a subject of debate between theologians, philosophers and social scientists for many years, and numerous definitions have been produced. The social scientists’ contribution ranges on the one hand from the purely individualistic proposed by William James (1936) that religion is ‘the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine’, to the social definition of Emile Durkheim who proclaimed ‘there is no religion without a church’.
