What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Religion?

What gets lost in the debate about whether “religion” is good, neutral, or bad, is what religion, in fact, is. The term is way too broad to unify all who espouse it—or all who denigrate it. What, then, is the best way to categorize different forms of religious life and belief?

“Fundamentalism” is a popular sociological term, but an imprecise label. Most …