They've been asking for it for years, praying for it even.

I'm John Green.

Welcome to Crash Course Religions.

So let me begin with a confession.

I don't know what religion is.

But I also don't know what art is, or what literature is, or for that matter, what biology is.

Like, is studying viruses biology?

I don't know, because I don't know whether viruses are alive.

To say that religion is a fraught word would be a fairly dramatic understatement.

Like think of the many ways people answer questions about religion.

I'm not religious, but I am spiritual.

I don't go to church, but I do follow my star chart.

I don't practice a religion, but I do practice yoga.

Yoga is a fascinating example, actually.

Like in 2009, the U.S. state of Missouri's government pushed to reclassify yoga classes not as tax-exempt spiritual practices, but as recreational businesses in the same taxable category as gym memberships.

But a few years later, in 2013, some parents in California sued their kid's school district arguing that teaching yoga during P.E. was promoting Hinduism to students.

So which group was right?

Well, that's the thing.

Whether something counts as religious or not often depends on who's asking the question and who benefits from the answer.

INTRO

We've fought wars over it.

We've built societies around it.

We've even pretended that we weren't home when people knocked on our doors about it.

That's right, we have two cameras this time.

Camera two is for silly fun time.

And camera one is for serious religion business.

But what even is religion?

Like, what unites Hinduism, Christianity, and Wicca under the same umbrella?

And what sets religions apart from other stuff that people do, like reciting the Pledge of

Allegiance or wearing the same jersey every time you watch the world's greatest fourth-tier

English soccer team?

Well, we can think of religions as frameworks that help people organize, shape, and make sense of their lives.

But of course, if that's our only definition, then is veganism a religion?

What about capitalism?

What about organizing your entire life around the exploits of eleven 23-year-old men in

South London?

Or over-identifying as a Texan?

Like, yeah, it's a big state.

It's very impressive.

But it's not that big of a state.

I've seen bigger.

So yeah, it's tricky because no single definition contains all the ways people do religion.

And the stakes are high here because how we define what counts as religion and what doesn't has impacts on all our lives, whether we're religious or not.

So when we use the word religion, what we often mean is belief in a higher power, a trait that English philosopher Lord Herbert of Cherbury proposed back in the 17th century as one of the five fundamental truths about religion.

Oh my god, I'm so good at pronouncing the names of Lords of Cherbury.

Like is that a job?

Is mispronouncing British lord names a job?

Because if so, sign me up.

And to give credit to Lord Herbert, it's true that lots of religious traditions involve gods and goddesses, except for the ones that don't, of course, like many forms of Jainism and Buddhism, which focus on ethical behavior and self-transformation.

So okay, what if we defined it more broadly?

Let's say a religion doesn't have to have a higher power, but it needs a shared belief system.

Again, for some traditions, that's fair.

Like for most Christians, it's really important that everybody's on the same page about the whole Jesus is Savior thing.

Religions with shared beliefs are called creedal religions and are often linked to a sacred text.

But even this broader interpretation doesn't cover everything, right?

Like the Soto Zen school of Buddhism emphasizes action over beliefs, building mindful awareness through meditation, cooking, and caring for other people.

We sometimes call these votive religions, traditions that stress what people do rather than what they believe.

And of course, many religions focus on belief and action, like Islam's emphasis on both correct doctrine, or orthodoxy, and correct practice, or orthopraxy.

And within a religion, there can be disagreements, profound ones, ones seen as worth killing and dying for over this stuff.

So in truth, no single idea unites every religion.

Not belief in God, not prayer, not prepping for the afterlife.

The term religion is sort of like the word sports, which lumps together soccer and synchronized swimming and curling and even pickleball, which its adherents genuinely seem to treat like a religion.

The way we define religion is specific to the societies we live in, just like the practices themselves.

Sociologist Emile Durkheim said that religion is a system of beliefs and practices surrounding the sacred—basically anything a community has given special meaning to, like crucifixes or landscapes or altars.

But his definition also leaves a lot of room for other things to be considered sacred, like Taylor Swift or Diet Dr. Pepper.

Because there's no shared feature of these systems we call religions, it's all the more important to be aware of whose interests are served by the definitions we use.

Like a lot of yoga teachers disagreed with Missouri's reclassification of the practice and believed that yoga studios had more in common with churches, which don't have to pay sales tax, arguing that yoga is more than exercise and can't be separated from its spiritual ties.

But in the California case, the judge acknowledged that yoga is religious, yes, but ruled this kind of yoga wasn't religious enough.

Not in the way school kids were learning to do it anyway.

For one thing, the kids called the lotus position criss-cross applesauce.

And you can tell that's not a joke because we're staying at camera one.

They literally called it criss-cross applesauce.

So how did we get to this point?

Was there ever a time when religion was simple or straightforward?

Not really.

In the United States today, we often use the word religion to imply a special sphere of society set apart from the rest of life.

It's sort of separate from politics or culture or the economy, but also overlaps with all of them in many ways, including that I don't want to hear my uncle's opinions about any of them at Thanksgiving dinner.

Which is also not a joke.

But until just a few centuries ago, most languages didn't have a word for the kind of religion we're talking about in this series.

Like the Arabic word din originally meant custom or law, but when it appears in the

Quran it sometimes gets translated into English as religion, which is kind of like interpreting an ancient word for horse to mean car, an invention that didn't exist yet.

Even the Latin word religio originally just meant rules at a time when many Roman emperors were seen as divine.

Like Caesar's law was God's law.

The idea of religion as a private, personal belief system traces back to a very specific time and place, 16th century Western Europe.

During the Protestant Reformation, Christians disagreed over how much authority the church should have and whether it was valid for the church to sell indulgences, which were these like little pieces of paper that let people off the hook if they donated to the church building fund.

Martin Luther, the guy who kicked off the Reformation by purportedly nailing 95 hot takes to a church door, radically argued for a separation of church and state.

Basically, he thought that the government should worry about stuff on earth and let the church handle the afterlife.

This idea served Protestants' interests as it broadened Christianity to allow ideas and practices other than those okayed by the Pope, the shot-caller-slash-big-boss-slash-yes-chef of European religious authority.

The Reformation also redefined the everyday meaning of religion in Western Europe as a personal, private relationship with the divine.

And it wasn't long before Europeans took this model of religion on the road.

During the colonial era between the 15th and 20th centuries, Europeans encountered other ways of doing religion while colonizing cultures in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.

And they found that many indigenous peoples' traditions related to their ancestors, or the land, rather than a deity.

For example, Native Hawaiians honored the sacredness of the Mauna Kea volcano, considered to be the physical embodiment of the gods, as well as Amakua, or ancestral spirits who provide families with guidance.

But that didn't vibe with European thought, which assumed religions to be Christianity-shaped, with a founder, sacred texts, clergy, rituals, and a church.

Now we're going to explore more of what stemmed from that in our next episode, but for now, what's important to know is that this prevailing model of religion hasn't always existed.

It served very particular interests in 16th century Western Europe, as it does now, prioritizing some traditions over others.

And this has tangible impacts outside of the religious sphere.

Like calling something a religion can come with some distinctly earthly perks like tax exemption and legal protection and baptismal hot tubs.

And when this label gets denied to some traditions, that can create real-life consequences.

Many countries today have laws protecting religious freedom, or the right to follow the religion of your choice.

But how those countries define religion determines who is actually afforded that freedom.

For example, the Chinese constitution officially grants legal protections to normal religious activities.

But since 2017, the government has detained over one million Uyghurs and other Turkic

Muslims in re-education camps.

In India, a controversial 2019 law created a fast track to citizenship for refugees from some religious groups, but specifically excluded Muslims.

And governments have sometimes weaponized their classifications of religion as a way to demonize control and exclude certain people.

Often, religious practices that aren't officially recognized are deemed illegitimate or illegal.

Like many Rastafari adherents have been incarcerated for smoking marijuana, a substance they view as a sacrament, but one that's criminalized in many countries, from the UK to Cuba.

In North Korea, where unauthorized religious activity is prohibited, Christians and followers of Korean folk religion have been arrested, tortured, and even executed by the government.

The big takeaway here is that there's no single way of doing religion, no defining quality that unites these practices.

But that's what makes it so important to be conscious of the definitions we're using and aware of who's policing their boundaries.

I'll leave you with one more slightly jazzy definition from the philosopher and theologian

Paul Tillich, who called religion the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern.

And throughout this series, we'll find no single idea about what that ultimate concern is, the shape it takes, or how we're grasped by it.

There are many ways people define and debate religion, contest it and make sense of it, practice it and live it.

Over the course of this series, we're going to try to make sense of some of them together.

But this idea of an ultimate concern, a belief or series of beliefs that structures and animates your life, can be a very valuable thing to have.

And of course, it can be dangerous too.

I wonder if you have an ultimate concern, or I guess more to the point, if you're conscious of what your ultimate concern is, and how beliefs and practices in your life tend to that ultimate concern.

In our next episode, we'll ask, how many religions are there?

And again, find out that the answer is complicated.

I'll see you then.

Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Religions, which was filmed in our studio in Indianapolis, Indiana and made with the help of all of these nice folks.

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