Religion can be easily redefined in multiple different ways. In my attempt to redefine the “world religions” paradigm from an outsider’s point of view, I feel it to be necessary to go as broad as possible. I will be classifying my new categorization of religion as “Communal Cultural Activities” or CCA for short (catchy name I know). Through this new perspective of CCA’s I will be essentializing human activity in a new, broader way. We can begin to analyze different cultural groups and how they do activities from an outsider’s perspective and come up with many different groups and subgroups for how these CCA’s manifest in everyday life. This is an action-oriented method of categorization, and thus will ignore most internal spirituality and philosophies; we’re focused on practices here.
For our first group of CCA, we will focus on state based CCA. CCA participated in by a whole nation. In this category, we would include various nationalistic CCA practices as well as communal observances of nationwide traditions. Throughout the world there are many traditions and observances that can be classified this way and they all stem from a certain nationalistic pride that seems to drive people to do activity in honor of said national identity. These activities can range from everyday activities that honor the national identity, such as raising and lowering the national banner or singing the national song, to activities that involve more reverence such as national memorials. Parades and certain nationalistic holidays are also included in this category as they involve a national community of the state. This is a type of CCA in which the object of the communal activity comes from some non-physical external relation to the nationalistic idea of the state.
Moving off from that, the next categorization would be community based CCA. This is CCA participated in by a certain community of individuals not necessarily bound by any identity besides participating in the CCA. This is a broad ranging category consisting of communities of church-going individuals of all kinds, in which people gather together and read books and sing songs. Not only does this include traditional churches but also concerts and book clubs. This category would also include community meeting spaces such as political organizations and also the places where people gather together to watch and observe sports matches. These are all community based CCA, in which the focus of the activity is on some external, physical fetish and not on the individual members of the community nor a non-physical fetish. All traditionally defined “religions” would mostly fit into this category.
The next category would be familial based CCA. These are activities in which the focus of the interaction is on individuals in a smaller community and the CCA is merely a method by which to achieve this. The members of the community in this category take the form of the fetish by which the CCA is focused upon. Examples of this include traditional activities performed within the family unit, such as CCA-ified meals and ritualized activity with the members of the community. This would also include some holidays that are traditionally community oriented such as Thanksgiving meals, and other communal activity.
Having defined these categories, we can see how these very broad categories are prevalent throughout our everyday activities. In my categorization, I focused on the physical activies of individuals and communities and differed them out based on the purpose and the focus of their CCA. Internal philosophy, spirituality, or inner thoughts are not taken into consideration in this framework, because, from an outsiders point of view, we’re entirely focused on actions and the purposes of actions. This, of course, is still classifying things that don’t really exist, yet making allowance for a way more broad category than the ones traditionally held. As Yuval Noah Harari puts it in Sapiens, “None of these things exist outside the stories people tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice, outside the common imagination of human beings”.
Of course, this model has similar problems to the categorization of religions that currently exist, we’re still creating arbitrary categories that hold no real distinction fundamentally. We’re categorizing imagined realities. Once again as Harari puts it “As long as this communal belief exists, the imagined reality exerts force over the world”. In the God is Not One review, it is stated that “Prothero also seems to draw a distinction between way of life and religion, without specifying what it is”. In my framework, I seek to breakdown that category and say that there’s really no difference.
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