John Green: Hi, I'm John Green. Welcome to Crash Course Religions.

So before I was a YouTuber and before I was a novelist, I was a student chaplain at a children's hospital. And once a week or so, I would spend 24 hours as the hospital's on-call chaplain, sleeping - in between deaths, traumas, and other chaplain calls - in a small windowless room in the hospital's pastoral care office.

I'd sleep in my clothes on top of the covers so that I could move quickly when calls came in the middle of the night, but I would take off my shoes and my chaplain jacket before lying down and I would arrange them just so by my bed, as a ritual.

There is a fine and complex line between superstition and ritual. I hoped that if I placed the shoes and jacket just so, the night might pass quietly. But I also carefully arranged the shoes and jacket because the act of doing so brought me comfort, and gave some structure to an otherwise chaotic life experience.

So is that the point of ritual? To console and consolidate the self? Or might there be more to it?

Now ritual, like religion, is hard to define. On the simplest level, ritual is something...we do - an extraordinary action. But it could be basically anything.

Singing. Cleaning. Repeating a mantra. Reciting a pledge of allegiance. Or, it could be the absence of action like not eating certain foods or sitting quietly during meditation, or pausing for a moment of silence before a baseball game.

But just because any action could be a ritual doesn't mean it is one. Scholars like Catherine Bell have suggested there's a process by which actions become rituals. And this ritualization is what takes an ordinary action and makes it extraordinary. 

Like, let's take handwashing as an example. You probably - at least hopefully - wash your hands fairly often. But you might not pay a lot of attention to how or where you wash them.

It's not, like, a significant event in your day, it's something you do without really thinking. 

But even practitioners of Shint?, a religious tradition indigenous to Japan, hamdwashing is a ritualised process meant to purify an individual before they enter a shrine. 

Now there are a lot of ways actions become ritualised, but let's look at a couple with Shint? in mind. 

First, this sort of handwashing requires repetition. Practitioners wash their hands and mouths every time they enter a Shint? shrine. And not just at any available sink. They do it at a temizuya.

There's also a formalised sequence. At the temizuya, Shint? practitioners pick up a ladle with their right hand, scoop up some water, and then rinse their left hand. Then, they switch and rinse their right. Then, the ladle goes back to the right hand again to rinse the mouth. Finally, the left hand gets one last rinse, before cleaning out the ladle and replacing it. 

The process is way more specific and intentional than, for example, singing the first verse of "All Star" every time you wash your hands to make sure that you're scrubbing for the prescribed 20 seconds. 

Which yes, I do do. 

There are tons of other ways people ritualise actions. Sometimes rituals have to be conducted by a religious figure. 

Like in Catholicism, for example, a priest must be the one to perform the Eucharist, a ritual during which bread and wine are believed to transform into the literal body and blood of Jesus. 

Or, sometimes rituals require particular clothing. Like, in order to be free from distractions of wealth or privilege, Muslims wear simple, white robes during their pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. 

And rituals can have social, political, and even psychological impacts. They can calm us in times of uncertainty, unite or initiate us into communities, or simply create a boundary between what we consider sacred and the rest of our lives. 

Consider the adhan, or Muslim call to prayer. Five times a day, Muslims perform a ritual prayer or Salat. 

Before each prayer, a dedicated prayer-caller will sing out the adhan from a mosque. This ritualised process creates a special time and space for Muslims to pray.

And this happens all over the world. From the streets of Baghdad to the cornfields of central Indiana. 

Or consider how, in the US, the National Anthem is played before sporting events. Everyone stands and places their hands over their heart as a way of saying, "I am an American." 

It's a unifying ritual that, much like the Muslim call to prayer, is meant to convey to others that you're part of a community. 

And so it's no surprise that not participating can often cause controversy  .. but more on that in a bit. 

Here's the thing about rituals, though: it's not like every Muslim doing Salat, or every American saluting the flag, is actively pondering the mysteries of the universe, or what it means to have national pride.

Like who hasn't been caught at church sleep-crossing ourselves, where we're just like  .. oh yeah, going through the motions. It's 5am, okay, this is an unreasonable time to have church. Nothing should happen at 5am—is this just a me problem?

Which reminds me that sometimes the distinction between habits and rituals can be fuzzy. Like, many of us perform rituals out of habit, but! Performing the ritual still serves a function regardless of the participant's level of engagement with the symbolic meaning. 

Because participation in a ritual reinforces a shared community and identity, and it lets other people know you belong. 

For example, people who wish to join the Khalsa, a special order of Sikhs who follow specific codes of conduct, must undergo a ritual known as "Taking Amrit." 

Joining the Khalsa is a big step for a Sikh and represents complete devotion to the faith.

It requires that five existing members of the Khalsa stir an iron bowl of sugar water with a double-edged sword. And each member recites a special prayer, while stirring, that transforms the sugar water into the Amrit, or immortal nectar, a process that can take hours. 

Once the Amrit is prepared, initiate are called forward one at a time to kneel and drink the Amrit.

Then the nectar is sprinkled on their hair and eyes as they affirm their commitment to God. They arise as members of the Khalsa and are then then given new names — men become Singh, or lion, and women become Kaur, or princess. 

The new names mark the initiates as the sons and daughters of Guru Gobind Singh, who created the Khalsa in 1699, and his wife Sahib Kaur.

And the process of taking Amrit shows us another common way that we ritualise actions: by linking them to a significant figure, god, or sacred narrative. 

It's similar to graduation, which is itself a kind of ritual, right? Like, you go through a set of steps led by people with authority — in this case, your principals and teachers— who are wearing ceremonial clothes. And at the end — usually several hours later — you cross a threshold, moving from students to alumni. 

That's the thing about rituals: they aren't religious by nature. Rituals can also grant a person authority within a community. 

Like the elaborate process through which we choose an American Idol, which is surprisingly different from the elaborate process through which we choose a new Pope, the head of the Catholic Church. 

Stan says that when referring to that process I can't say "we choose" a new Pope because I am not myself a cardinal of the Catholic Church under the age of 80.

But to that I say, I'm not yet, Stan! I'm only 46, I've got every opportunity to become a cardinal. 

The series of steps begins with of white smoke coming from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel, indicating that the cardinals have agreed upon a new Pope, and it ends with an announcement, in Latin, from the balcony of St Peter's Basilica confirming the new Pope. 

The process even involves the newly promoted pope choosing a papal name. Something like Benedict or Francis.

The names are usually pulled from history and carry great significance. And that ritual, too, is designed to convey the Pope's authority over the Church. 

In the event that I do become a cardinal and my fellow cardinals agree to make me the Pope, I would be Pope John XXVI. I would stick with my name. 

It's the same in the secular world, and not only with American Idols. 

Presidential inaugurations often involve a set of highly visible ritual practices meant to convey power and bestow authority. That's why we call election winners "president-elect" until they go through the inaugural swearing-in ceremony. 

The inauguration marks the transition of power and the "making" of a president. 

Now, in the same way that rituals can grant power and authority through their functions, they can also be used to speak out against that same power and authority. 

Which is what happened in 2016, when the San Francisco 49ers were about to play a pre-season game against the Green Bay Packers. 

The opening lines of the National Anthem began to play, and everyone stood to face the flag. 

Well, almost everyone. 

49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick wasn't standing. Instead, he sat quietly on the bench. The song ended, people returned to their seats, and the 49ers went on to lose to lose to the Packers. 

Kaepernick told a reporter afterward that he wouldn't "stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of colour." 

Pretty soon, Kaepernick and his teammate Eric Reid were kneeling while the national anthem played. And by the beginning of the regular season, more players were kneeling and more people were paying attention. 

Even President Obama weighed in to support Kaepernick. 

But the backlash became deafening. Kaepernick and other kneeling players were accused of "disrespect." Some people called him "ignorant," "ungrateful," and a bunch of other awful things I'm not allowed to say on YouTube. 

And at the end of the season, Kaepernick became a free agent and no team signed him; he never played in the NFL again. 

The anger that followed these protests shows how impactful rituals can be. For many, the National Anthem is a unifying ritual; it inspires positive feelings of connection and national pride. And when Kaepernick intentionally violated the social norm, he invoked a sort of counter ritual. 

As Joseph Winters wrote, "These bodily refusals invoke dissonant memories of incessant Black suffering and death, memories that cannot be converted into a moment of celebration and collective self-worship. 

In other words, he challenged the idealised image of the United States represented by the National Anthem, pointing instead to disunity and oppression. 

And in some ways, his critics experienced this as a threat both to their personal and to their identities. 

How could they both have national pride and face the reality of racial injustice? It's easier to choose one idea or the other than to sit with that complexity. 

So, clearly, rituals are powerful. They can mark time and space, create new identities, and even launch political movements. 

And they're everywhere, not just within the strict traditional boundaries of religions, but also in our daily lives. 

Even if you aren't a religious person, the chances are you still participate in a ritual or two, whether that's making your coffee a certain way each morning, crafting a carefully curated playlist for your workout, or just taking a moment for silent reflection before you go to bed. 

We ritualise the actions that are important to us. They might also work some deep, supernatural magic — but even if they aren't, they can still bring us comfort and peace.

And they matter, because at their best, rituals bring us to a new kind of attention and connection. 

I'm reminded of Annie Dillard writing, "We live half our waking lives and all our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall."

Ritual can be one strategy for jolting us out of those insensate waters, bringing us, albeit momentarily, to awareness. 

In our next episode, we're going to think about who gets to speak for a religion. 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 people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever, you can join our community on Patreon.