What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionA binding agreement between the divine and a people, with obligations flowing both ways.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and The Unification Church (Family Federation) 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 across10 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderZoroastrianism · c. 1200 BCE
Newest holderEffective Altruism · 2011 CE
Turns up as16 rites · 16 storys · 13 tenets · 11 codes
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 — 30 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 20 faiths of this family hold it
The wedding.
In the Byzantine rite there are no vows at all — the crowning does the work, and the priest leads the couple three times around the table in the dance of Isaiah. The Western churches built the whole rite on spoken consent, which is why coercion voids a marriage in canon law.
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The Exodus.
Christianity did not write this story and could not do without it. Passover became Easter, the sea became the font, and slaves in the American South sang it back at their owners while the owners were preaching obedience out of the same book.
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The Ark of the Covenant is in Aksum.
The church holds that the original Ark, taken from Jerusalem by Menelik, son of Solomon and the queen of Sheba, rests in the chapel beside the church of Our Lady Mary of Zion. One monk guards it and never leaves the enclosure; no one else, including the patriarch, may see it. Every church in Ethiopia keeps a tabot, a consecrated replica of its tablets, and it is the tabot rather than the building that makes a church a church.
held by most
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Makeda, Solomon, and the son who took the Ark.
In the Kebra Nagast the queen of Sheba visits Solomon, bears him a son, and that son Menelik returns to Jerusalem as a young man and leaves with the Ark — with the connivance, the text says, of the firstborn sons of Israel's priests. The story made Ethiopia the second Zion and its kings the house of David; the 1955 constitution still traced Haile Selassie's line to Menelik I. The dynasty ended in 1974 and the story did not.
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A covenant binds a people to God across generations.
At Sinai the bond became mutual and collective — inherited, argued with, never dissolved.
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The Land is part of the covenant.
The liturgy has faced Jerusalem for two thousand years and asks daily for the ingathering of exiles. What follows politically is the most divisive question in Jewish life, and the tradition contains every answer at once.
⚖ contested within
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A martyr is not a defeat.
The Coptic calendar counts its years Anno Martyrum, from the accession of Diocletian in 284, so every date a Copt writes is a reference to persecution. The ethic that follows is not a search for death but a refusal to trade the confession for safety — and a refusal to leave.
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A nation was baptised, not a congregation.
Armenia declared itself Christian around 301 under King Trdat III, before any other state did. The church that resulted has never been one institution among others in Armenian life; when there was no Armenian state, and for most of the last sixteen centuries there was not, the catholicosate was the thing that held the nation's legal and educational life together.
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The dead stay in the parish ground.
Kerala Christian families are attached to a parish by burial as much as by baptism, and the family grave is the tie that makes leaving a parish nearly unthinkable. It is also the reason the church property litigation has been so bitter: when a court transfers a church, it transfers a cemetery, and funerals have been held up for days while the two sides argued about who could open the ground.
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Baptism is a vow, so it cannot be given to an infant.
The Anabaptist objection was never mainly about water. It was that a church of everyone born in the parish is not a church, and that a promise made on your behalf before you can speak is not a promise. Baptising adults was a capital crime in the Holy Roman Empire from 1529.
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Continuity is the argument.
Three thousand years of unbroken practice is itself the case for the practice.
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also here 12 more faiths of this family hold it
The Syro-Malankara Catholic ChurchThe International Churches of ChristThe Church of the BrethrenThe HutteritesThe ChristadelphiansCongregationalismThe Armenian Catholic ChurchThe Brethren in ChristThe Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day SaintsThe Moravian Church (Unitas Fratrum)The Salvation ArmyThe Unification Church (Family Federation)
Islam
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
The People of the Book are not idolaters.
Jews and Christians get a category of their own — their food lawful, their women marriageable, their scripture partly acknowledged, their churches protected. Historically that came bundled with dhimmi status: protection, a poll tax, and legal subordination. What replaces the category inside a modern state is being argued out right now.
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The nikah — a contract with terms.
An offer, an acceptance, two witnesses, and the mahr, a payment named in the document that belongs to the wife and to nobody else. Conditions can be written into it — the right to divorce, to work, to study — and in several schools they bind.
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Every living parent must consent.
The vows are one sentence, said by both parties in identical words before two witnesses. But the marriage cannot proceed without the consent of all four living parents, whatever their religion and whatever their reasons, with no appeal to any institution. It is the most-discussed rule in the faith and the institutions do not waive it.
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The Covenant-breakers.
People who accepted Bahá'u'lláh and then contested the succession he had appointed in writing — his half-brother Mírzá Yahyá, and later his son Mírzá Muhammad 'Alí. Bahá'ís must shun them completely, including relatives. It is the faith's only expulsion, it is decided by the head of the faith alone, and it has been applied to a few dozen people in a hundred and eighty years.
⚖ contested within
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Effective Altruism
— one faith of this family holds it
The Pledge.
You commit publicly to giving away at least ten per cent of your income for the rest of your working life, and your name goes on a list. 11,153 people from 118 countries have done it.
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Haitian Vodou
— one faith of this family holds it
You serve; you do not worship.
The verb is servi. Vodouwizan say they serve the lwa, and the relationship is described in the language of obligation, contract and family duty rather than adoration. A lwa that is served properly delivers; one that is neglected causes trouble, in the way a slighted relative does.
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Feeding the lwa.
Each lwa eats specific things: Danbala a raw egg on flour, Ezili Freda cake and champagne, Ogou rum and grilled meat, Zaka cornmeal in a straw sack, the Gede rum with peppers. The items are exact and substitutions are noticed. An unfed lwa becomes insistent, and Haitians describe a run of bad luck as a bill arriving.
held by most
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Russian Cosmism
— one faith of this family holds it
You owe your parents their lives back.
Pride in ancestors is egotism, on Fyodorov's account. Love of them, taken seriously, obliges the literal raising of the dead — which is why he treats the preference for producing new children over restoring old parents as a moral failure.
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Shinto
— one faith of this family holds it
The shrine wedding.
Three sips from each of three stacked cups — san-san-kudo — a pledge read aloud, a branch offered, and about twenty people watching. The form feels ancient and dates from the 1900 wedding of the Taisho emperor; before that most Japanese weddings happened in the house.
held by most
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Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
Anand Karaj — the four rounds.
The couple circle the Guru Granth Sahib four times while Guru Ram Das's four Lavan are read and then sung, and that is the whole marriage. No fire, no priest, no astrologer, no dowry — and no bride given away, since the rite has no giver.
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The Panj Piare — five heads, five castes.
At Vaisakhi 1699 five men from five corners of India walked into the tent when the Guru asked for a head: a shopkeeper, a farmer, a water-carrier, a calico-printer and a barber. Then Guru Gobind Singh knelt in front of the men he had just made and asked them to initiate him in turn.
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Taoism
— one faith of this family holds it
The covenant at Heming Mountain.
In 142 Lord Lao descended and appointed Zhang Daoling to govern the spirits under a written covenant, and his first act was to abolish the blood sacrifices the old local cults had been extracting from villages. Institutional Taoism dates from that year — five centuries after Laozi, and about a covenant rather than a book.
held by most
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Z
Zhang Daoling, the first Celestial Master.
In 142 he received a covenant from Lord Lao appointing him to administer the spirits, and organised his followers into twenty-four parishes with registers, confession and a levy of five pecks of rice. His descendants have held the office for sixty-four claimed generations and the line moved to Taiwan in 1949.
held by most
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Yoruba Religion
— one faith of this family holds it
Moremi and her son.
Ife was being raided by figures in raffia that the town believed were spirits. Moremi promised the river Esimirin whatever it asked if she could save the town, let herself be captured, discovered the raiders were men in costume, escaped and told her people how to burn them. The river then asked for her only son, and she paid.
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Swearing on iron.
Ogun is iron, and to swear you touch or lick a piece of it. Nigerian courts and police have used it because people who will perjure themselves on a Bible or a Quran will not risk it on Ogun — which practitioners point out is a comment on which religion the swearer actually believes.
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Zoroastrianism
— one faith of this family holds it
The wedding.
The couple sit facing each other with a cloth held between them while rice is thrown and the priests recite; when the cloth drops, whoever throws first is teasingly said to have the upper hand. The admonitions are addressed to both parties in the same terms, and marriage is framed as a religious obligation rather than a permitted concession.
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Yima's enclosure.
Warned of a killing winter, Yima builds an underground vara and stocks it with the seed of every animal, plant and person. The specification is uncomfortable and the text does not soften it: bring the best of each kind, and none who are hunchbacked, or leprous, or impotent, or mad. It is a flood story with an admissions policy.
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Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
The Land is part of the covenant.
The liturgy has faced Jerusalem for two thousand years and asks daily for the ingathering of exiles. What follows politically is the most divisive question in Jewish life, and the tradition contains every answer at once.
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The Shoah broke something, and no answer has held.
Richard Rubenstein concluded that the God of history could not be maintained. Eliezer Berkovits answered with hester panim, the hiding of the face. Emil Fackenheim proposed a 614th commandment — not to hand Hitler a posthumous victory — and the Satmar Rebbe blamed Zionism in print while survivors were still counting their dead.
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T
The Covenant-breakers.
People who accepted Bahá'u'lláh and then contested the succession he had appointed in writing — his half-brother Mírzá Yahyá, and later his son Mírzá Muhammad 'Alí. Bahá'ís must shun them completely, including relatives. It is the faith's only expulsion, it is decided by the head of the faith alone, and it has been applied to a few dozen people in a hundred and eighty years.
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The Covenant.
Bahá'u'lláh named his successor in writing; that successor named his; and when Shoghi Effendi died in 1957 with no heir, the Universal House of Justice was elected in 1963 as the writings provided. Each transition produced a rival claimant, each was declared a Covenant-breaker and shunned, and none acquired a following. A religion of eight million people has essentially no denominations, which is close to unique.
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