You’re a Christian and a Buddhist (whether you like it or not) View our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed You’re a Christian and a Buddhist (whether you like it or not) Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato / Artvee / Public Domain History and SocietyPhilosophyMind and BehaviorAnthropologyCultural Practices 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. In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with the popular YouTuber and scholar of religion, Andrew Henry. He introduced me to a theory known as “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.
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.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
