What is a Religion and is it Intrinsically Important to Human Life?

In the very first episode of the North Star Podcast, the hosts tackle a deceptively simple question: what is a religion, really? They unpack the baggage around the word “religion,” explore how it differs from “spirituality,” and look at what all of this means for modern heathens and anyone trying to live inside a living tradition rather than outside of one.

They draw on thinkers like Mircea Eliade, Kenneth Pargament, Descartes, Hobbes, and others, while grounding the conversation in practical questions: community vs. individuality, belief vs. practice, and why humans seem to keep reinventing religion even when they think they’ve left it behind.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Religion vs. spirituality
  • A working definition of spirituality as “the search for the sacred”
  • A working definition of religion as “the search for significance within institutions that support spirituality” (after Kenneth Pargament)
  • Why “spiritual but not religious” often means “individual but not institutional”
• Are humans inherently religious?
  • Mircea Eliade’s idea of homo religiosus—human beings as religious by nature
  • How explicitly non‑religious ideologies (like Marxism, fascism, communism) can function like religions in practice
• Collective vs. individual: what is religion for?
  • State cults and household cults in Rome and Greece
  • The difference between salvific religions (focused on individual salvation) and state/tribal religions (focused on the well‑being of the group)
  • Why most religions in history were not primarily about having “the right beliefs”
• Modern individualism and why heathenry is so fractious
  • How Western individualism (Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, etc.) rewired how we see the self
  • Why people who have already rejected one tradition are quick to splinter again inside new ones
  • The tension between “do my own thing” spirituality and group‑centered religion
• Takeaways for modern heathens (and other reconstructionists)
  • Why building real collectives (kindreds, theods, groups) is essential
  • Focusing on shared practice instead of policing everyone’s inner beliefs
  • The importance of at least someone in the group striving to deepen and refine practice over time