What Is Religion?

The section of my comparative constitutional law textbook I'm reading right now is about freedom of religion, and in particular what constitutes religion. The Canadian Supreme Court declares that:

"Defined broadly, religion typically involves a particular and comprehensive system of faith and worship. Religion also tends to involve the belief in a divine, superhuman, or controlling power. In essence, religion is about freely and deeply held personal convictions or beliefs connected to an individual's spiritual faith and integrally linked to one's self-definition and spiritual fulfillment, the practices of which allow individuals to foster a connection with the divine or with the subject or object of that spiritual faith."

(As a side note, it should say that it allows individuals to think they've fostered a connection with the divine etc., since one can't foster an actual connection with something that doesn't exist, and someone's got to be wrong.) But my main point is somewhat different. This definition is missing something. Suppose that I say, tomorrow, that I have hit upon some New World Religion, which I am thusfar the only adherent of. I am not worshiping the Christian, Jewish, or Muslim God, nor any of the various gods or divinities of Hinduism, Buddhism, the ancient Greek mythology, or any other religion known to man. I created this new religion for myself, just now. Perhaps I'd call it revelation, who knows. And I say that my religion requires me to do various things which I could not do in a given society unless I were doing them for my religion, and let's be honest, there are lots of such things. Would the government allow me to do those things?

Of course not.

The missing component in the above definition is that religions are defined primarily by religious communities, and by and large religious communities are defined by some sort of authority figure. Religions are more or less highly centralized, but basically if you say "I am a believer in religion X," you also mean "I am a member of religious group X and follow religious authority figures A, B, and C." We can quibble about how integral the authority part is (Buddhism might be a counterexample, but then again, that feels like one of those things that make Buddhism less religion-like and more philosophy-like). Most religions that I know of have some sort of sacred texts, which are considered Authoritative, and some sort of clergy that wields the Authority of those texts. And all religions are defined by large groups of people, in absolute if not percentage terms, who claim to follow the same Authoritative Texts and obey the same Authoritative Clergy. So as my dad sometimes says, the biggest difference between a religious belief system and a secular belief system is that the religious belief system involves Authority, and the more people that Authority wields its authority over and the more authoritative that authority is, the more we can say for certain that a given belief system is, in fact, a religion. So, to get kind of cynical and/or radical about it, the business of protecting religious belief systems over and above secular belief systems is very largely the business of giving state sanction to beliefs held only under the auspices of some authority figure. Fun, huh?