It is this sense of the “really real’ upon which the religious perspective rests and which the symbolic activities of religion as a cultural system are devoted to producing, intensifying, and, so far as possible, rendering inviolable by the discordant revelations of secular experience. It is, again, the imbuing of a certain specific complex of symbols—of the metaphysic they formulate and the style of life they recommend—with a persuasive authority which, from an analytic point of view, is the essence of religious action.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation Of Cultures: Selected Essays (1973) — The Interpretation Of Cultures: Selected Essays