Here is one scene, a made-up community festival. Social scientists study something like it through several different lenses. Tap each lens to see how it re-describes the very same event, then see what all of them still leave out.
Once a year the whole community gathers. People wear the same colours, share a long meal, sing the songs their grandparents sang, light the lamps together at dusk, and welcome the year's new members into the fold. By nightfall the square is full and something in the air has shifted.
Pick a lens above to re-read the festival through it.
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Each lens caught something real, and each caught something different: the bonding, the values passed on, the competition for commitment. That is the point. These are complementary ways of seeing the social work a religion does.
But notice what even all three together leave untouched: what the festival actually means to the person lighting the lamp, the felt experience of faith, meaning, and the sacred. Social science describes what religion does in the world; it does not reach the inside of belief, and it says nothing about whether any faith is true. That gap is real, and worth remembering whenever religion gets explained as "nothing but" one thing.