I finished the series of articles I wrote on Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution with a definition – a religion is a philosophy that makes you dance. It pleased me because the book itself can be read as a history of how philosophy grew from dance. But is it any use?
The great difficulty of definitions like mine is that they leave the content of religions entirely to one side. We are still enough of the heirs of Christendom to feel that religions must involve doctrines, heresies, and a commitment to supernatural realism. The trouble is that a definition with doctrines, heresies, and supernaturalism fits many varieties of atheism just as well. You will object that atheism bans, by definition, any belief in the supernatural. Yet almost all sophisticated religions ban at an intellectual level all kinds of belief which sustain them in practice. Buddhists worship; Muslims have idols. "Theological incorrectness" is found wherever you look for it.
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