I’m going to call you a Christian.
I don’t care if you don’t believe in God, or read the Bible, or accept that Jesus died for your sins. I’m going to call you a Christian anyway, because you do Christian things. You’re kind to others, you give to charity, you look after your neighbor. You don’t work on the Sabbath, you give gifts at Christmas, and you are awestruck by the sight of a cathedral touching the sunset sky. You’re a Christian.
In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with the popular YouTuber and scholar of religion Andrew Henry. He introduced me to the term “orthopraxy,” which says being religious is not defined by what you believe but by what you do. If you behave according to a certain religion, you are that religion.
To those born into a mostly Protestant culture, that might sound weird. In the West, we tend to treat religion as a matter of belief. But that idea is surprisingly local. The academic study of religion, Henry notes, “was mostly invented by Protestant scholars back in the late 1800s and 1900s,” and they built the category in their own image. Step outside it and you find that for most of history, and for much of the world today, religion was never mainly about what you believed.
The ancient debate still with us
If you think debates about religion are the worst, well, be prepared to be upset, because there’s a debate about even the word religion. The Roman philosopher Cicero argued that the word religion derives from relegere, “to re-read, go over again.” And so, the religiosi were people who carefully attended to every detail of a text, with the diligence of ritual. But around the year 300, the Christian writer Lactantius rejected Cicero’s idea and said religion comes from religare, “to bind,” because we are bound to God. Or, outside of the Christian mindset, we are bound to a creed, a dogma, a belief system.
It’s an ancient debate we’re still having. The orthoprax follow in a line from Cicero — a religion is defined by what we do. The rituals we perform, the words we repeat, the small, everyday superstitions we find ourselves doing all define our religion. The orthodox follow from Lactantius and argue that religion requires assent to a belief. “I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.”
So who is right? Well, in terms of philosophy and theology, it depends on who you listen to or who you read. But in terms of how most of the world actually practices, things lean toward orthopraxy.
In Confucianism and traditional Chinese beliefs, ancestor worship is far more important than any formal creed. In Japan, there is a saying: “born Shinto, marry Christian, die Buddhist.” A lot of Japanese people claim they aren’t religious, and yet pack out shrines at New Year’s, and Christian-style chapel weddings have been hugely popular since the 1990s, often led by a hired “priest” who isn’t ordained and quite possibly has never read the entirety of the Gospels. There’s an old joke within the Jewish community. Two people, Goldberg and Schwartz, are going to the synagogue. Goldberg goes to talk to God, while Schwartz goes to talk with Goldberg. The social, bonding aspect of Judaism is seen as an essential — even defining — part of the religion.
Even within the Christian tradition, things aren’t so obvious. In 2012, the Richard Dawkins Foundation commissioned a poll of people who had ticked “Christian” on the 2011 census and found that only about 30% actually believed in Christianity’s teachings. Three out of four said it was because they had been baptized. Sixty percent hadn’t freely chosen to read any part of the Bible.
If nothing else, it shows that “being religious” is complicated.
The Buddhist who likes a walk
Henry is orthoprax, but it turns out I’m more of an “essentialist,” or orthodox. I never even knew I was. And so I put it to Henry: “If I say I’m going for a walk and therefore I’m meditating, therefore I’m now a Buddhist, that’s not true, is it? By that logic I’m also a Hindu, a mystical Christian and a Sufi, which are incompatible.”
Henry disagrees. In religious studies, he explained, there’s a long-running fight between “essentialists,” who often align with orthodoxy, and “functionalists,” who often align with orthopraxy. Essentialists think a religion has core ingredients, such as belief in the supernatural or membership in the right community, and without them it isn’t the real thing. Functionalists, like Henry, care less about what a practice is and more about what it does.
Take, for example, the Nicene Creed. Every Sunday, millions of Christians recite it together. But millions of people also pack into stadiums and chant “USA! USA!” Both are rituals. Both produce the same feeling: we’re all in this together. So, for Henry, “slapping the label religion on either one of those is kind of artificial.”
As for my incompatible-beliefs objection, Henry’s reply was to say that “people aren’t consistent.” He pointed to surveys suggesting that something like one in ten American evangelicals believe in reincarnation, which is “literal heresy” in a religion built on resurrection. And in the late Roman world, Christians “might go light some incense to Apollo at his temple on Tuesday and then go to the basilica and take the Eucharist on Sunday.”
So if we think that beliefs are incompatible, Henry asks: according to whom? Usually, the answer is a religious authority. Catholics and Protestants disagree about what sits at the heart of Christianity. Sunnis and Shias disagree about Islam. Mormons insist they’re Christians, and a lot of other Christians say they’re not.
There is good and bad news for my opening gambit. The good news is that orthopraxy says I might be right — how you behave is more important than what you believe. But the bad news is that if there’s no core, no central, absolute arbiter of “religious,” then nobody gets to hand out the labels: not the Pope, not the scholar, and certainly not me. You might be a Christian, but it’s not because I said so.
This article You’re a Christian and a Buddhist (whether you like it or not) is featured on Big Think.