Religion and secular legal systems function as mechanisms to give reality to a culture’s worldview. This allows it to be transmitted among its people. A worldview is an abstract set of assumptions about the conditions that are central to any cultural system. But worldview requires a mechanism to give it reality, to allow it to be transmitted among a people and to future generations, to answer questions about the world, to translate its assumptions into values that regulate human behavior, and to formulate rules of behavior that put those values into action.

Religion is distinguished from secular systems by its focus on the supernatural. Like any facet of culture, religion is highly variable from society to society. As a cultural universal, religion is explained by our need for a way of understanding the complex world around us and a means of coordinating our actions in an acceptable manner. Many features of the natural world can be explained scientifically but for others than cannot be so easily explained, they require something beyond science. Religion also serves to regulate the various levels of human interaction—to tell us how to behave.

As one of several aspects of cultural behavior, religion has variables that correspond to other features of a culture. History also affects worldview, and it is essential to examine the historical dimension of a religious system in order to understand its origins, basic characteristics, and meaning.

In many societies, some of the rules that guide human behavior have evolved from strictly religious to more secular terms. In our own society, the answers to questions about worldview are largely scientific and rational, and the bulk of our basic rules are secular laws. These laws perform the same functions as religious systems, with regard to defining the premises for human action and in outlining the specific actions that correspond to these premises.

Laws also take care of disputes about those regulated actions and provide for punishment of those who transgress them. Even where a society is regulated almost exclusively by a secular legal system, there is often at the basis of that system a religious tradition. The religious rules have been translated into secular ones.