What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionTruth is discerned together; authority rests with the gathered community.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and The Urantia Movement are both here because each says something this word covers, and what they say may flatly contradict each other. The idea is the place they can be set side by side.
ShelfThe carriers
Travels across32 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderZoroastrianism · c. 1200 BCE
Newest holderAnalog Sabbath · 2026 CE
Turns up as87 communitys · 50 tenets · 45 rites · 35 storys
Where it turns up
every faith that holds it, by founding date — time is half real and half rank order, because a straight axis crushes three millennia against the left wall. Hover a dot for the faith.Across the faiths
one family at a time, and every family speaks before any family speaks twice — 95 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 52 faiths of this family hold it
The church is the body of Christ.
Not a metaphor of membership but of anatomy: many parts, one body, no part able to say to another I have no need of you. The community is the continued incarnation.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Sunday.
The first day of the week, kept because that is the day the tomb was found empty. Everything else in the practice hangs off it — the calendar, the working week of most of the planet, and the one hour a large minority of humanity still gives to something it cannot prove.
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also here 51 more faiths of this family hold it
Eastern OrthodoxyAnglicanismThe Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo ChurchThe Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day SaintsJudaismThe Coptic Orthodox ChurchThe Syro-Malabar ChurchThe Maronite ChurchThe Church of the NazareneThe Malankara Orthodox Syrian ChurchThe MennonitesThe Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo ChurchThe Syriac Orthodox ChurchThe Jacobite Syrian Christian ChurchThe Malankara Mar Thoma Syrian ChurchThe Restoration Movement (Churches of Christ)RastafariUnitarian UniversalismThe Chaldean Catholic ChurchThe Syro-Malankara Catholic ChurchThe Amish (Old Order)The Church of the EastThe Assyrian Church of the EastThe Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)The International Churches of ChristThe Church of the BrethrenThe HutteritesThe Plymouth Brethren Christian Church (the Exclusive Brethren)The BruderhofAnabaptismChristian Science (the Church of Christ, Scientist)CongregationalismJehovah's WitnessesMethodismOrdinary TimePeoples TemplePresbyterianismQuakerism (Religious Society of Friends)Reconstructionist JudaismSecular HumanismThe Ancient Church of the EastThe Armenian Catholic ChurchThe BaptistsThe Brethren in ChristThe Christian Churches and Churches of ChristThe Eastern Catholic ChurchesThe Family InternationalThe Moravian Church (Unitas Fratrum)The Old Catholic ChurchThe Plymouth BrethrenThe Twelve Tribes
Islam
— 6 faiths of this family hold it
The law is for something.
Jurists from al-Ghazali to al-Shatibi held that sharia exists to protect five things — religion, life, intellect, lineage, property — and that a ruling which serves none of them has lost its point. The maqasid argument is the main lever of modern reform, and literalists distrust it for exactly that reason.
held by most
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Jumu'ah — the Friday assembly.
The week's one obligatory congregation: commerce pauses, the khutbah is preached, and shoulder meets shoulder in lines that ignore rank.
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Vedic Religion
— 6 faiths of this family hold it
Satsang — the singing evening.
Bhajans and kirtan with harmonium, dholak and cymbals, a reading, and food afterwards. No priest is required and no caste rule survives an hour of it intact, which is why bhakti movements have always run on it.
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Sikhism
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
Ardas — the standing prayer.
Everyone rises, and the prayer runs through the ten Gurus, the martyrs, the shrines, then finally the specific request — a sick relative, a driving test, a new shop. It ends by asking for the good of all people, not only Sikhs, and any Sikh present may lead it.
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Chamkaur — forty against an army.
Besieged in a mud haveli, Guru Gobind Singh sent his two elder sons out to fight and watched both die. Then the five Sikhs left alive invoked the authority of the Khalsa and ordered him to escape — and he obeyed them, which is the point of the story.
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Aum Shinrikyo
— one faith of this family holds it
Aleph says the crimes were the acts of individuals. The state says the group is the same group.
Aleph's public material treats 1994 and 1995 as the work of members who have since been tried and executed, and points to the compensation it pays. The Public Security Intelligence Agency treats Aleph as the same organisation under a different name, with the same object of devotion. A reader is entitled to both statements and to the fact that they conflict.
⚖ contested within
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The renaming, and the split.
Joyu Fumihiro renamed the group Aleph in February 2000 and tried to build a version of it that did not centre on Asahara. By 2007 the majority had gone back to Asahara-centred practice and Joyu left with a few hundred people to found Hikari no Wa. Aleph is what stayed.
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Church of the Eternal Backup
— one faith of this family holds it
Say the disclaimer out loud.
Before every sync a member states plainly that this will not save them. The practice survives the honesty; the comfort does not.
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The disclaimer.
Spoken before the backup runs: "This will not save me. I am doing it for you." Then the sync.
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Church Universal and Triumphant
— one faith of this family holds it
March 1990, in the shelters.
Members had built and stocked fallout shelters at the Montana ranch on Prophet's reading of a coming nuclear attack. The date passed. The church acknowledged the failure and stopped naming dates.
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Confucianism
— one faith of this family holds it
The Mandate of Heaven can be taken away.
Heaven authorises a dynasty to rule and withdraws the authorisation when it misgoverns — and the evidence of withdrawal is that people rebel and succeed. It is simultaneously a doctrine of legitimacy and a licence for revolution, and every Chinese dynasty has had to live with both halves.
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Charye, and the journey.
A daytime rite at New Year and at the autumn festival for several generations at once, followed by grave-clearing. The rite takes twenty minutes. Getting there produces the largest annual movements of human beings on the planet, and that is the part that costs something.
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Cynicism
— one faith of this family holds it
Stoic Week.
A free seven-day course run each October since 2012 by Modern Stoicism, with a public conference, Stoicon, alongside it — online in recent years, and scheduled for 17 October in 2026.
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Discordianism
— one faith of this family holds it
The Principia Discordia.
Typed, hand-lettered, rubber-stamped and pasted together, then photocopied. It carries no copyright — the notice reads ALL RITES REVERSED, REPRINT WHAT YOU LIKE — which is why it survived without a publisher and why no edition is authoritative.
Open the book — context & 1 source →
Effective Altruism
— one faith of this family holds it
Whether the far future outweighs everything happening now.
The longtermist argument is that the number of people who could exist dwarfs the number who do, so reducing existential risk beats treating malaria. It split the movement and the split has never closed.
⚖ contested within
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November 2022.
FTX collapsed, and with it the largest funder the movement had ever had. What followed inside effective altruism was a year of public self-examination that its own writers described in the language of a crisis of faith.
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Epicureanism
— one faith of this family holds it
E
Epicurus — the man who left money for a dinner.
His will freed slaves, provided for the children of a dead colleague, and paid for the school to keep eating together once a month. It is a strikingly institutional document for a philosophy about withdrawing from institutions.
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Haitian Vodou
— one faith of this family holds it
Vodou is not the word.
In Haiti the word names a particular dance and rhythm; the religion is what you do, and people say they serve the lwa. Voodoo in English is an American invention of the occupation years and means something Haitians do not recognise, which is why the spelling of the word is itself a political position.
⚖ contested within
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The indemnity.
In 1825 France sent warships and demanded 150 million francs in compensation for the loss of its colony and its slaves as the price of recognition. Haiti borrowed from French banks to pay it and finished settling the debt in 1947. Every account of Haitian poverty that omits this is incomplete, and Haitians never omit it.
⚖ contested within
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Heathenry (Ásatrú)
— one faith of this family holds it
Keep your oaths.
Words spoken over the horn are binding; the old ethic is less commandment than reputation — courage, honesty, hospitality, and a word that holds.
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Jediism
— one faith of this family holds it
Whether this is a religion at all is answered differently in two countries.
The Temple of the Jedi Order holds United States tax-exempt status as a church. On 16 December 2016 the Charity Commission for England and Wales refused the same body charitable registration, finding that Jediism lacks the necessary spiritual or non-secular element and could be followed as a secular belief system. Jedi themselves split the same way.
⚖ contested within
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The census of 2001.
A chain email claimed, wrongly, that a religion recorded by enough people would win official recognition. In England and Wales 390,127 wrote Jedi, making it the fourth largest answer to the religion question; New Zealand recorded the highest share anywhere. No agency counted it as a religion. The figure fell to 176,632 in 2011, and for 2021 the Office for National Statistics filed Jedi Knight under No religion.
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Pilgrims of the Last Tuesday
— one faith of this family holds it
You tell one person that you did it.
The parent line practises alone. The Reformed require a single witness, named in advance, told afterwards.
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Pyrrhonism (Scepticism)
— one faith of this family holds it
Ordinary life, held loosely.
Sextus lists four things that guide conduct without requiring any belief: nature, feeling, custom and training. A sceptic goes to the temple, votes, practises medicine, and asserts nothing.
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Shinto
— one faith of this family holds it
Shinto and Buddhism were one system for a thousand years.
Shinbutsu-shūgō: kami were understood as local manifestations of buddhas, temples and shrines shared compounds, and priests served both. The state forcibly separated them in 1868, destroying a great deal in the process. Most Japanese people still use both and see no problem.
⚖ contested within
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Hatsumōde.
The first shrine visit of the year, made by roughly three-quarters of the country in the first three days of January. Meiji Jingū alone handles around three million people. Most of them will tell a survey they have no religion, and they will queue in the cold for an hour anyway.
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Taoism
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Taoism
The Church of the SubGenius
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Church of the SubGenius
The Deep Water People
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Salt Line
The Ethical Culture Movement
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Ethical Culture Movement
The Missionary Church of Kopimism
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Missionary Church of Kopimism
The Rajneesh Movement (Osho)
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Rajneesh Movement (Osho)
The Religion of Humanity
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Religion of Humanity
The Satanic Temple
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Satanic Temple
The Sunday Assembly
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Sunday Assembly
The Urantia Movement
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Urantia Movement
Transhumanism
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Terasem
Wicca
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Wicca
Yoruba Religion
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Yoruba Religion
Zoroastrianism
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Zoroastrianism
Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
The altar call.
Charles Finney formalised it in the 1830s with the anxious bench, and it is now how a large share of the world's Christians date their conversion. Critics inside evangelicalism argue it manufactures decisions; it has survived every one of those critiques for two centuries.
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The midweek study.
Eight people, a front room, one passage, and the assumption that ordinary readers can handle the text. It is the engine of Protestant practice and the reason literacy campaigns and missions travelled together — and the reason lay readings sometimes outrun what the clergy would prefer.
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Who pays.
The plate, mostly. Germany is the exception worth knowing: a church tax of eight to nine percent of income tax, collected by the state and handed over, which gives the German churches enormous budgets and gives Germans a bureaucratic way to leave — a few hundred thousand file the form each year.
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The splits.
451 over how to say Christ is one person; 1054 between Rome and Constantinople; 1517 across the West. The 1054 excommunications were mutually lifted in 1965 and the churches still do not share communion, which shows how little the formal gesture settles.
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