From PhilPapers forum Philosophy of Religion:

2014-10-15
Difference Between Culture and Religion: A Proposal Requesting Response
I understand that there are a varieties of definition. I am thinking in terms of the natural definitions that try to retain culture to more internalized patterns of behavior generalized within a group. When I put Science/Reason among cultural elements, I try to indicate knowledge elements within a culture that are not based on religious authority (or faith/revelation). For instance, the science of cooking (culinary art), diet; even to a greater extent, medicine (though it might appear that traditional forms of medicine may not be very scientific; yet, they are based on some form of observation-hypothesis-testing). Religion on the other hand would prescribe what things may be eaten and what may not (it has a religious rationale to provide). With regard to Entertainment, I guess it was Mark Twain who wrote a famous essay on the difference between British Comedy and American Comedy. What provokes laughter and what does not may vary according to culture. Is entertainment a religious thing? I would not consider so. Is worship an element of culture? I would rather retain it within the religious alone. Entertainment focuses on the earthly and is part of internalized behavior, while worship looks above and is governed by religious beliefs.  But, again I do acknowledge that this is only one way of looking at the issue. There are varieties of definition.
I would like to include a few excerpts related to definitions from Jesse Pink's article on Culture and Cognitive Science in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 

The meaning of the term "culture" has been highly contested, especially within anthropology (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952; Baldwin et al. 2006). The first highly influential definition came from Edward Tylor (1871, 1), who opens his seminal anthropology text with the stipulation that culture is, "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." Subsequent authors have worried that Tylor's definition packs in too much, lumping together psychological items (e.g., belief) with external items (e.g., art). From a philosophical perspective, this would be especially problematic for those who hope that culture could be characterized as a natural kind, and thus as a proper subject for scientific inquiry. Other definitions often try to choose between the external and internal options in Tylor's definition.
On the external side, anthropologists have focused on both artifacts and behaviors. Herskovits (1948, 17) tells us that, "Culture is the man-made part of the environment," and Meade (1953, 22) says culture "is the total shared, learned behavior of a society or a subgroup." These dimensions are combined in Malinowski's (1931, 623) formulation: "Culture is a well organized unity divided into two fundamental aspects--a body of artifacts and a system of customs."
More recently, externally focused definitions of culture have taken a semiotic turn. According to Geertz (1973, 89), culture is "an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols." Culture, on such a view, is like a text--something that needs to be interpreted through the investigation of symbols.....
An even more radical break from psychology can be found in an approach called "cultural materialism" (Harris 2001). Cultural materialists believe that thick description thwarts explanation, because the factors that determine social practices are largely unknown to practitioners. For Harris, these factors principally involve material variables, such as the ecological conditions in which a group lives and the technologies available to it. Cultural variation and change can be best explained by these factors without describing richly elaborated practices, narratives, or psychological states. Harris calls the materialistic approach "etic" and contrasts it with the "emic" approaches, which try to capture a culture from within. This differs from Tylor's external/internal distinction because even external cultural items, such as artworks, may be part of emic analyses on Harris's model, since they belong to the symbolic environment of culture rather than, say, the ecological or technological environments--variables that can be repeated across cultural contexts. 
But psychological approaches to culture are also prevalent, and they have gained popularity as cognitive science has taken a cultural turn. D'Andrade (1995, 143) tells us that, since the 1950s, "Culture is often said to consist in rules… These rules are said to be implicit because ordinary people can't tell you what they are" (D'Andrade himself favors a more encompassing, processual definition, which includes both external items and the cognitive processes that interact with them). Richerson and Boyd (1995, 5) define culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social transmission." Sperber (1996, 33) describes culture in terms of "widely distributed, lasting mental and public representations inhabiting a given social group."
In summary, most definitions characterize culture as something that is widely shared by members of a social group and shared in virtue of belonging to that group. As stated, this formulation is too general to be sufficient (a widespread influenza outbreak would qualify as cultural). Thus, this formulation must be refined by offering a specific account of what kind of shared items qualify as cultural, and what kind of transmission qualifies as social. The definitions reviewed here illustrate that such refinements are matters of controversy.