African religion extends beyond faith into therapy and social identity.

Evidence

I have argued that Oruka’s use of Wittgenstein is interesting and impressive, but Wittgenstein’s basic fallacy is that he considers religion to be an act of faith, a commitment to a truth claim, in the first place. In the second place, experience with African religion also shows Oruka’s interpretation of Wittgenstein and Quine to be wrong. Religion is not just limited to knowing doctrinal elements. Religion also helps in social identification with co-religionists, implying that it takes social and political dimensions. At the existential level, African religion, for example, is not just limited to faith but extends to therapeutic benefits and sociability in the community which this form of religion generates. I think that it is not totally true that the non-believer cannot understand the believer. As with the case of all transboundary/intercultural understanding, the non-believer may in some ways understand the believer, while in other ways such understanding is impossible for him/her (Mosima, 2016). — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 567

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines religion functionally — social identification, therapeutic benefit — against a narrow truth-claim model.
• XREF: Connects to pragmatic definitions of religion and to the insider/outsider problem in anthropology (emic/etic).