The word works... It's kind of like saying, "I have a car." We all know what a car is, and from there we can ask who the manufacturer is, the model, the year, color, etc. Same with religion...
I don't recall ever having seen it work that way. Years of IIDB and FRDB, with a strong interest in the religion convos, and that's not how they generally proceeded. An OP can even start with the equivalent of a particular model of car, and from there people will generalize upward to "religion" and how stupid all “religion” is rather than down into the details.
My particular interest in eastern religions made this very obvious to me time and again, because seldom could anything be said about ANY religion without christocentric folk disrupting the possibility of an at least semi-learned conversation. So IME “religion” not a starter word but more of a shutdown word. People rarely want more details, they just see the word "religion" and then the cliches and psychological projections start flying.
When the Euro/American ethnocentrism is pointed out, people resort to: “Doesn’t matter, they’re all the same in the middle”. Then the thing about a "supernatural entity" gets beaten to death, thus demonstrating the very problem that they've denied. Nontheistic concepts like The Tao or Karma are given ‘the treatment’, where a comparison to Jehovah is strained until the chance of a charitable and honest comprehension is gone.
There’s nearly nothing we can say about “religion” that applies to all religions. They are not all theistic. They do not all necessarily entail supernaturalism. They do not all worship an anthropomorphic “entity” whether supernaturalistic or naturalistic (to the extent the distinction means anything). They do not all involve blind faith. No one religion is homogeneous as even within a single “religion” there’s a wealth of diversity.
Maybe the only shared characteristic is devout veneration of something seen as greater than one’s individual self (as at least an ideal if the devotion's somewhat lacking in some religious folk). Or a practice to realize identity with that greater something.
