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What Even IS a Religion?: Crash Course Religions #1
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When is yoga religious, and when is it… not religious enough? In this episode of Crash Course Religions, we’ll find out why these frameworks we call “religions” are so hard to define, and why our definitions have real-life consequences.
Introduction: Is Yoga a Religion? 00:00
What Are Religions? 01:32
The History of "Religion" 05:48
Impacts of the "Religion" Label 08:46
Review & Credits 10:11
***
Support us for $5/month on Patreon to keep Crash Course free for everyone forever! https://www.patreon.com/crashcourse">https://www.patreon.com/crashcourse
Or support us directly: https://complexly.com/support">https://complexly.com/support
Join our Crash Course email list to get the latest news and highlights: https://mailchi.mp/crashcourse/email">https://mailchi.mp/crashcourse/email
Get our special Crash Course Educators newsletter: http://eepurl.com/iBgMhY">http://eepurl.com/iBgMhY
Thanks to the following patrons for their generous monthly contributions that help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever:
Emily Beazley, Brandon Thomas, Forrest Langseth, oranjeez, Rie Ohta, Jack Hart, UwU, Leah H., David Fanska, Andrew Woods, Ken Davidian, Stephen Akuffo, Toni Miles, Steve Segreto, Kyle & Katherine Callahan, Laurel Stevens, Krystle Young, Burt Humburg, Scott Harrison, Mark & Susan Billian, Alan BridgemEmily Beazley, Brandon Thomas, Forrest Langseth, oranjeez, Rie Ohta, Jack Hart, UwU, Leah H., David Fanska, Andrew Woods, Stephen Akuffo, Toni Miles, Steve Segreto, Ken Davidian, Kyle & Katherine Callahan, Laurel Stevens, Krystle Young, Burt Humburg, Scott Harrison, Mark & Susan Billian, Alan Bridgeman, Breanna Bosso, Jennifer Killen, Sarah & Nathan Catchings, Jon Allen, Bernardo Garza, team dorsey, Trevin Beattie, Eric Koslow, Indija-ka Siriwardena, Jason Rostoker, Ken Penttinen, Siobhán, Les Aker, Barrett Nuzum, William McGraw, Vaso , Nathan Taylor, ClareG, Constance Urist, Rizwan Kassim, Alex Hackman, kelsey warren, Katie Dean, Stephen McCandless, Wai Jack Sin, Ian Dundore, Caleb Weeks
__
Want to find Crash Course elsewhere on the internet?
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Introduction: Is Yoga a Religion? 00:00
What Are Religions? 01:32
The History of "Religion" 05:48
Impacts of the "Religion" Label 08:46
Review & Credits 10:11
***
Support us for $5/month on Patreon to keep Crash Course free for everyone forever! https://www.patreon.com/crashcourse">https://www.patreon.com/crashcourse
Or support us directly: https://complexly.com/support">https://complexly.com/support
Join our Crash Course email list to get the latest news and highlights: https://mailchi.mp/crashcourse/email">https://mailchi.mp/crashcourse/email
Get our special Crash Course Educators newsletter: http://eepurl.com/iBgMhY">http://eepurl.com/iBgMhY
Thanks to the following patrons for their generous monthly contributions that help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever:
Emily Beazley, Brandon Thomas, Forrest Langseth, oranjeez, Rie Ohta, Jack Hart, UwU, Leah H., David Fanska, Andrew Woods, Ken Davidian, Stephen Akuffo, Toni Miles, Steve Segreto, Kyle & Katherine Callahan, Laurel Stevens, Krystle Young, Burt Humburg, Scott Harrison, Mark & Susan Billian, Alan BridgemEmily Beazley, Brandon Thomas, Forrest Langseth, oranjeez, Rie Ohta, Jack Hart, UwU, Leah H., David Fanska, Andrew Woods, Stephen Akuffo, Toni Miles, Steve Segreto, Ken Davidian, Kyle & Katherine Callahan, Laurel Stevens, Krystle Young, Burt Humburg, Scott Harrison, Mark & Susan Billian, Alan Bridgeman, Breanna Bosso, Jennifer Killen, Sarah & Nathan Catchings, Jon Allen, Bernardo Garza, team dorsey, Trevin Beattie, Eric Koslow, Indija-ka Siriwardena, Jason Rostoker, Ken Penttinen, Siobhán, Les Aker, Barrett Nuzum, William McGraw, Vaso , Nathan Taylor, ClareG, Constance Urist, Rizwan Kassim, Alex Hackman, kelsey warren, Katie Dean, Stephen McCandless, Wai Jack Sin, Ian Dundore, Caleb Weeks
__
Want to find Crash Course elsewhere on the internet?
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thecrashcourse/">https://www.instagram.com/thecrashcourse/
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/YouTubeCrashCourse">http://www.facebook.com/YouTubeCrashCourse
Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/TheCrashCourse">http://www.twitter.com/TheCrashCourse
CC Kids: http://www.youtube.com/crashcoursekids">http://www.youtube.com/crashcoursekids
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)
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)