Introduction: Is Yoga a Religion?
All right, I guess we’re doing this.  They’ve been asking for it for years.  
Praying for it even. I’m John Green  and 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 ways many 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.  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 kids’ school district,  
arguing that teaching yoga during PE  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.
[THEME MUSIC]


What Are Religions?
We’ve fought wars over it, built societies  around it, and pretended 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 times and camera  one is for serious religion business.
But what is religion, really? What  unites Hinduism, Christianity,  
and Wicca under the same umbrella? And what sets “religions” apart from other stuff 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 if that's our only definition, then is veganism  
a religion? What about capitalism? What about organizing your entire life around the exploits  
of 11 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. 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, because how we define what counts as religion – and  
what doesn’t – has impacts on all of our lives, whether we’re religious or not.
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 five fundamental truths about religion. 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 credit, it’s true that lots of  religious traditions involve gods and  
goddesses. Except for the ones that don’t, like many forms of Jainism and Buddhism,  
which focus on ethical behavior  and self-transformation.
So OK, 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.
In truth, no single idea unites every  religion. Not “belief in a god,” not  
“prayer,” not “prepping for the afterlife.” The term “religion” is sort of like the word “sports,”
which lumps together soccer, synchronized swimming, 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 Émile 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, 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. I’m not afraid  
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.  
They 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 school 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 “crisscross applesauce.”
And you can tell that’s not a joke  because we’re staying at camera one.  
They literally called it crisscross applesauce.


The History of "Religion"
So how did we get to this point? Was there ever a time when religion was…simple? Mmm…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  
Qur’an, it sometimes gets translated  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. 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 letting people  
off the hook if they donated  to the church building fund.
Martin Luther — the guy who kicked off  the Reformation by purportedly nailing  
ninety-five hot takes to a church door — radically  argued for a separation of church and state.
Basically, he thought 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/big boss/CEO/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.
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. They found that  
many Indigenous peoples’ traditions related to  their ancestors or the land, rather than a deity.
For example, Native Hawaiians honor the  sacredness of the Mauna Kea volcano,  
considered to be the physical  embodiment of the gods,  
as well as ‘aumākua, or ancestral spirits  who provide families with guidance.
This 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.


Impacts of the "Religion" Label
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 protection 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  classification 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 U.K. 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.


Review & Credits
The big takeaway 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 definition we’re using —  and aware of who’s policing its boundaries.
I’ll leave you with one more slightly jazzy  definition, from philosopher and theologian  
Paul Tillich, who called religion “the state of  being grasped by an ultimate concern.” 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 the series,  
we’ll try to make sense 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 at our  
studio in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was made  with the help of all these nice folks. If you  
want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone,  forever, you can join our community on Patreon.
English (United States)