It is paramount to note that our world contains a striking diversity of religious traditions. Given that most of us probably have no trouble recognizing such traditions as religious, it is perhaps surprising that there is little agreement about what religion is or, indeed, if "it" is anything distinctive at all. Scholars have sought to define religion so as to identify both what makes something a religion and what, if anything, distinguishes religions from secular social organizations like clubs. Although the task is basic in its approach, most scholars suggest that it has proven difficult to formulate a definition of religion that can command wide assent. Furthermore, academic literature is filled with attempts to describe what religion is and many of those attempts are very unhelpful. Definitions of religion tend to suffer from one of two problems: they are either too narrow and exclude many of the belief systems which most people will agree are religious, or they are too vague and ambiguous, leading one to conclude that just about any and everything is actually a religion. .
Smith Z. Jonathan as quoted by Cline puts it that ".while there is a staggering amount of data, phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religion, there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar's study. It is created for the scholar's analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no existence apart from the academy." To this effect, numerous conflicting definitions have been proposed, most of which can be classified as examples of one of three elementary types: intellectual definitions, affective definitions, and functional definitions. I will endeavor to exhaust explanations on the three classes, however, we need to recognize that many societies do not draw a clear line between their culture and what scholars would call "religion.
