1. Meredith B. McGuire, Religion: The Social Context, 4th ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1997), chap. 5.
2. No attempt is going to be made here to explore all the problems to which attempts to define religion have given rise. I have, however, discussed the general dilemma in Eileen Barker, “But Is It a Genuine Religion?” in Between Sacred and Secular: Research and Theory on Quasi Religion, ed. Arthur Greil and Thomas Robbins (Greenwich, Conn.: J AI Press, 1994).
3. For the distinction between characterizing and appraising value judgements, see Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation (London: Routiedge, 1961); and for a discussion on the use of definitions in social science, see Eileen Barker, “The Scientific Study of Religion? You Must Be Joking!” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 34, no. 3 (1995): 287–310.
4. A university chaplain once told me that he could not call the International Society of Krishna Consciousness a religion because (despite the fact that it would fit all the criteria he would normally use in defining “religion”) there were “not enough rooms”—and the university had a rule that each religion should have a room. When I asked whether it might not be more honest to change the rule, he replied in a shocked voice that to do that could be seen as religious discrimination.
5. Meredith B. McGuire, Religion: The Social Context, 4th ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1997), chap. 5.