In attempting to parse the myriad of connections between society and religion, which is to say, how the two relate, inform, shape, and influence one another, the most basic and obvious bridge between the two must be their shared functional unit: the human person. By nearly every definition of religion, academic or otherwise, there could not be a society without a grouping of people (at least a human one) and what most commonly is referred to as religion would make little sense or even come close to resembling our most basic intuitions about it without some form of a community surrounding it. In looking back to Ninian Smart’s triune understanding of religion (Experience, Ideas, and Activities), to varying degrees, all three seem to contain a communal component (i.e. the social) regardless of time, place, or historical legacy.

While it is difficult to perfectly chart the innervations of any category into the multiplicity of the world’s religions and the religiosity of their adherents, the social does just as well if not better than any other. Religious communities provide the contexts, conditions, and metrics by which religious experiences are interpreted and gain their meaning. Similarly, religious concepts are irretrievably connected to the community insofar as that they provide the religious fodder for meaning and the eventual conceptualization of said religious experiences of the individual within the community. The framing of religious activity as religious except in the most extreme cases of prophets and founders is necessarily a communal endeavor. The division of the world into the realms of Emile Durkheim’s sacred and profane elucidates the reality that what in a far majority of cases makes experiences, ideas, and activities religious originates in a religious community. Without such a community, religious action, thinking, or living becomes indistinguishable from any other form of action, thinking or living.

These connections, however, only begin to speak to the nature of the relations between society and religion, as the members of any particular religious community are also members of ever-increasingly complex, concentric communities. Or put another way, said members exist within ever-expanding social groups that encompass more and more of society. As Naveeda Khan shows, the connections between religion and society, what she calls sites of striving, exist at all levels of human inter-relatedness; whether it be friendship, the familial unit, the neighborhood, one’s local mosque, church or synagogue, the region, the state, and an all-encompassing identity of what it means to be a religious adherent within a larger society and what it means to be religious among other religious individuals. At each level, there exists the individual’s religious identity alongside his or her social identity, and at each successive level of social complexity, these identities are shaped and influenced by others’ identities. Thus, the connections between religion and society are not limited to one’s particular religious community, but also include the connections at each level of membership within the distinct societies which constitute the larger one. Religion is undeniably shaped at each level of social organization and yet at the same time informs and shapes these very same levels of human socialization.

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