For Whitehead the core of religion was individual. While he acknowledged that individuals cannot ever be fully separated from their society, he argued that life is an internal fact for its own sake before it is an external fact relating to others. His most famous remark on religion is that "religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness ... and if you are never solitary, you are never religious." Whitehead saw religion as a system of general truths that transformed a person's character. He took special care to note that while religion is often a good influence, it is not necessarily good – an idea which he called a "dangerous delusion" (e.g., a religion might encourage the violent extermination of a rival religion's adherents).

What did Whitehead believe was the basis of religion?