Fortunately, as contemporary society became more global and the variety of religious expression in the West blossomed, scholars and others began to discover that the doctrinal approach could not be applied easily to religions not grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition—a discovery that eventually brought about an enlightened change in view. The inherent bias of the traditional approach to defining religion was particularly obvious when indigenous or Eastern religions were at issue, since many of them either have no God or Supreme Being, let alone a personal creator God, or tend to view religion as an integral part of everyday life.

Indeed, in many indigenous religions there is little belief structure, and some Eastern religions such as Zen Buddhism and Hindu Bhakti view doctrine as ancillary and even a hindrance to spiritual advancement. Moreover, how could anyone deny the religiosity of Theravada Buddhism and Jainism, which have no Supreme Being, when both predate Christianity by five centuries? What of the many Hindu sects which, while recognizing numerous gods, clearly subordinate them to the ultimate goal—union of the “Self” with the “Absolute”? And what of Taoism, which cannot be defined but only “discerned,” or Confucianism, where character is the goal and wisdom the path to attaining it?

Modern religious scholars now agree that the test for religion must be objective and cannot be based on concepts drawn from any one particular tradition. Use of a definition that is biased toward a particular religious tradition is certain to discriminate among religions, and has indeed resulted in varying levels of religious persecution. Rather, experts have broadened their view to achieve what Professor Bryan Wilson, Reader Emeritus in Sociology, Oxford University, calls “ethically neutral definitions” consisting of “elements [which] came to be recognized as constituting religion, regardless of the substance of the beliefs, the nature of the actual practices, or the formal status of the functionaries in their service.” In this way a religion’s beliefs and practices can be interpreted fairly and without bias.

There still are many different ways of defining religion. In more recent years the trend has been toward analysis through “comparative religion,” which approaches the understanding of a religion through cross-cultural comparisons of its component parts. This approach and the context from which it developed are discussed below.