Many religious ideas claim to have special truths. They may say that only their religion has the complete and correct knowledge of God or that only they can be saved from hell. They often make claims about the ‘rightness’ of certain behaviours, such as not killing, and they offer rewards and punishments for these. Moreover, they may claim to have special knowledge of history, the future and other aspects of the world that they cannot explain in other ways.

There are, however, those who would deny that any of these things is true and even go so far as to assert that the word’religion’ does not correspond to anything that exists beyond the realm of modern European thought. The ‘no such thing as religion’ slogan is an attempt to reject the substantive definition of religion that requires belief in a distinctive kind of reality, but it can also be read as a rejection of the notion that there are any real or lexical definitions of religion that have any validity at all (see Possamai 2018: ch. 5).

One approach to the problem is to drop the ‘belief in unusual realities’ requirement and define religion functionally, such as by its capacity to create solidarity or to organize people’s values. In this way it is possible to treat religion as a genus that appears in more than one culture, though not necessarily in every culture, and to define its characteristics in ways that are not so controversial as those that rely on beliefs about disembodied spirits and cosmological orders.