Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life.

Paul Tillich (1886–1965), a German Protestant theologian who emigrated to the United States after the Nazi rise to power, developed a “method of correlation” that interprets Christian symbols in relation to the existential questions of modern culture. In this framework he famously defined faith and religion in terms of “ultimate concern,” shifting attention from institutional or doctrinal markers to the depth-dimension of human existence—what ultimately claims a person’s devotion and organizes life’s priorities. The quotation reflects Tillich’s mid‑20th‑century effort to speak to secular audiences by describing religion as an existential orientation that gives meaning, rather than as mere belief in supernatural propositions.

Tillich argues that religion is not primarily a set of rituals or doctrines but an all-encompassing orientation: being “grasped” by what matters unconditionally. An “ultimate concern” is not one concern among others; it reorders every other aim—career, family, nation, pleasure—into something secondary (“preliminary”). Because it is ultimate, it also functions as a meaning-giving center, implicitly answering what life is for. The definition is both descriptive and critical: whatever a person treats as ultimate is, in effect, their religion, and false “ultimates” (idols) can demand total allegiance while failing to provide genuine meaning.