Abstract

This essay argues that religion is a distinctive form of human activity, and offers a philosophical account of what religion fundamentally is (and what it is not), within the context of the Free Exercise Clause. §I promotes religion as an action-theoretic concept. §II presents the claim that atheism can be regarded as a religion: this claim is rejected on the basis that religion cannot be defined as a set of propositional beliefs concerning metaphysics and morality. §III defends a paradigmatic account of religion as a kind of activity ordered to a concept of transcendence or superior nature, and argues that morally excellent human actions can be identified as religious, but only in a secondary or derivative way. §IV contends with the problem of including act-omissions as instantiations of religious exercise, and proposes a solution with reference to recent arguments implicating two-way powers.