Value functions in religion in at least three ways: as the ground of obligation, as the framing values orienting culture and thinking, and as specific moral traditions.

Value as the ground of obligation

One of the chief functions of religion is to explain why people should be moral or spiritual at all, and to cultivate a fundamental human constitution of living under obligation. Religions define people as responsible. Even in vaguely antireligious secular societies such as those of the North Atlantic nations at the beginning of the twenty-first century, this obligation-making function is recognized as "civil religion." When religions fail to function even as civil religions, serious relativism gains currency, as has been analyzed by Robert Bellah (b. 1927) and his collaborators.

Religions represent fundamental human obligatoriness to rest on what...