For many people religion is about belief. The formalization of religious belief is creed: creeds are those beliefs which are considered most important, and often mandatory in some religious traditions. Since creeds are foundational in some religions, challenging or even questioning these beliefs is considered heresy and/or blasphemy.
Regarding the role of creed in religious traditions, John Renard, in his book The Handy Religion Answer Book, writes:
“As a technical term, creed means a formal statement that sums up the key points in a belief system. Credal statements are typically short enough to memorize, but can be long enough to take two or three minutes to recite.”
While belief is a critical element of many religions, particularly world religions such as Christianity and Islam, for many, and perhaps most, of the estimated 7,000 religions in the world today belief is not particularly important and consequently the participants in these religious traditions do have a creed which is recited to show membership.
Anthropologist Edward Sapir, in The Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality, writes:
“Belief, as a matter of fact, is not a properly religious concept at all, but a scientific one. The sum total of one’s beliefs may be said to constitute one’s science.”
Edward Sapir goes on to say:
“A philosophy of life is not religion if the phrase connotes merely a cluster of rationalized beliefs. Only when one’s philosophy of life is vitalized by emotion does it take on the character of religion.”
In looking at the role of belief in a society, anthropologists John Monaghan and Peter Just, in their book Social and Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction, write:
“It seems apparent that one thing religion or belief helps us do is deal with problems of human life that are significant, persistent, and intolerable.”
They go on to say that beliefs provide:
“a set of ideas about how and why the world is put together that allows people to accommodate anxieties and deal with misfortunes.”
Belief systems are based on assumptions which are ideas or concepts which are considered so fundamental to the believers that they are never questioned or challenged. According to Michael Angrosino, in his book The Culture of the Sacred: Exploring the Anthropology of Religion:
“Beliefs per se are the ideas that flow logically from the foundational assumptions, although unlike the latter they can be challenged, questioned, and even changed over time.”
One example of a assumption in many, but not all, religious traditions is that supernatural beings—gods, deities, and other entities—exist. Based on this assumption, religious traditions have developed many different believes about these supernatural beings which are expressed in mythology, art, creeds, and even laws.
In world religions these basic or foundational assumptions are the basis of creeds, concepts which must be believed and taken on faith. While there is no single religious belief that is universal, people in cultures throughout the world have strongly held religious beliefs which often serve as a form of cultural identity.
For many people, religion is about the supernatural, that is, about beings and events that are not natural. Therefore, religious beliefs often focus on the supernatural with religious mythology and ceremonies reinforcing the idea of unnatural, and often illogical beings and processes. For nonbelievers, religious beliefs appear to be imaginary, fantastical, and even ridiculous, yet to believers these beliefs help them cope with the unseen world of the supernatural.
For people outside of a particular religious tradition the stories about and the belief in certain supernatural events and beings seem unrealistic, unbelievable, and even preposterous. The well-known psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, in an essay reprinted in The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever, writes:
“Some of them are so improbable, so incompatible with everything we have laboriously discovered about the reality of the world, that we may compare them—if we pay proper regard to the psychological differences—to delusions. Of the reality value of most them we cannot judge; just as they cannot be proved, so they cannot be refuted.”
It should be noted that while many religions have a central focus on the supernatural, there are also religions in which the concept of the supernatural plays only a minor role.
Religious beliefs provide a context or framework for interpreting events. Among the Azande in Africa, for example, when several people were killed by a collapsing granary doorway, these deaths were attributed to witchcraft. Similarly, it is not uncommon for religious leaders of the monotheistic universalizing religions to attribute natural disasters—tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes—to violations of certain taboos and as the resulting wrath of the deities. In an article in the British magazine NewScientist, Graham Lawton writes:
“Beliefs define how we see the world and act within it; without them, there would be no plots to behead soldiers, no war, no economic crises and no racism. There would also be no cathedrals, no nature reserves, no science and no art.”
Graham Lawton goes on to report:
“Belief comes easily; doubt takes effort. While this doesn’t seem like a smart strategy for navigating the world, it makes sense in the light of evolution. If the sophisticated cognitive systems that underpin belief evolved from more primitive perceptual ones, they would retain many of the basic features of these simpler systems. One of these is the uncritical acceptance of incoming information.”
From an evolutionary perspective religious beliefs, and the creeds which are based on them, must have some survival value. This survival value may be found in the formation of human groups, that is, in religious beliefs as a kind of social and cultural glue which holds the group together.
Scholars who have studied religions from a comparative perspective—anthropologists, geographers, philosophers, historians, sociologists, to mention just a few—have often grouped religions into several very broad categories. Briefly described below are some of the roles of belief and creed in a few of the different kinds of religions.
Shamanistic Traditions
Shamanistic traditions are religions of experience and, more importantly, personal experience. The underlying belief is that entities from an unseen spiritual world are able to communicate with humans, usually in “dreams.” In many shamanistic traditions, the concept of dream includes both sleeping dreams and visions induced through trance experiences.
It should be noted than shamanism per se is not a religion, but a tradition found in many religions. Often shamanism is the fundamental element of tribal and ethnic religions.
Along with an emphasis on personal experience, shamanism is transmitted orally through storytelling. In his chapter on oral tradition in the Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece, Andrew Dalby writes:
“Oral tradition, since it is by definition, not fixed by writing or recording, is continually in a state of change: rather like language itself, it is transmitted from person to person and created afresh in the course of every such transmission.”
In other words, the storyteller can modify the story, emphasizing certain areas, deemphasizing other areas, and perhaps adding supplemental information determined by the social context in which the story is told. With oral tradition, the shamanistic religious experience is flexible, not fixed.
American Indian religions (note that this is plural not singular) are often used as examples of a shamanistic worldview. In talking about the role of belief in American Indian religions, Sioux writer Vine Deloria, in Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr., Reader, says:
“No Indian tribal religion was dependent on the belief that a certain thing had happened in the past that required uncritical belief in the occurrence of the events.”
This is similar to ethnic religions throughout the world.
The aboriginal religions of the Americas, Australia, and Africa are often cited by scholars as examples of shamanistic traditions. In his book God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World—And Why Their Differences Matter, Stephen Prothero writes:
“Books on the world’s religions often include a chapter on ‘primitive,’ ‘preliterate,’ or ‘primal’ religions, as if they were one and the same. All these religions really share, however, is a stubborn refusal to be crammed into the boxes constructed to fit more ‘advanced’ religions.”
Some scholars classify shamanistic religious traditions as a form of folk religion which are intimately intertwined with a specific cultural or ethnic group. These groups tend to be egalitarian in that they lack social classes and inflexible governmental and economic hierarchies. In his book Breaking the Spell: Religion and Natural Phenomenon, Daniel Dennett describes folk religions as “… the sorts of religion that have no written creeds, no theologians, no hierarchy of officials.”
Doctrinal Religions
Writing is a relatively recent innovation and the impact of writing on religious traditions has been to increase the importance of belief. As stories which had once been transmitted orally were written down, they became relatively unchanging. In oral traditions, the social context, including the season and the time of day, is important in the telling of the stories. In written stories, however, this social context is largely removed, and the emphasis is on the unchanging nature of the words themselves. Doctrinal religions are based on written texts, while shamanistic religions are based on oral traditions.
In his book The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, Nicholas Wade writes:
“With the advent of literacy some 5,000 years ago, the character of religion changed yet again. With the help of written texts, beliefs could be shaped to more specific purposes, like nation building. The sacred texts further increased the distance between believers and the supernatural. Direct experience of the interface with the supernatural world, as experienced by hunter-gatherers in their trance dances, was long gone. The evidence of the supernatural world increasingly came from sacred texts recording revelations held to have occurred in the distant past.”
As religions evolved into doctrinal religions, faith—the belief in the veracity of the texts—became increasingly important and direct personal experience—the foundation of shamanistic religions—became less important.
While today’s doctrinal religions see their sacred texts has having been handed down unchanged since they were dictated by prophets or deities, this has not actually been the case. The early scribes were fairly open about the fact that they were rewriting the ancient stories—stories which had often once been a part of the oral tradition—so that they fit more modern audiences and so that some of the inconsistencies could be removed. With regard to instances in human history where documents of dubious provenance are suddenly found which supports the case of those who made the discovery, Carl Sagan, in his book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, writes:
“A more or less typical example is the book of Deuteronomy—discovered hidden in the Temple of Jerusalem by King Josiah, who, miraculously, in the midst of a major reformation struggle, found in Deuteronomy confirmation of all his views.”
In her book The Great Transformation: The Beginnings of Our Religious Traditions, Karen Armstrong reports it this way:
“This was not a cynical forgery, however. At this time, it was customary for people who wished to impart a new religious teaching to attribute their words to a great figure in the past. The Deuteronomists believed that they were speaking for Moses at a time of grave emotional crises.”
The doctrinal religions also set the stage to become world religions—religions which are not intertwined with a single cultural tradition, but which crosscut cultural boundaries. In his book Religions, Philip Wilkinson writes:
“…once ideas and doctrines could be written down, a religion was no longer reliant on one group for leadership or teaching, but could spread as sacred texts were carried and distributed by travelers.”
World Religions
A few of the world’s 7,000 religions are not closely interwoven with a particular cultural or ethnic group and have members from diverse groups. These religions, often called world religions, have names, recruit members (that is, people can be converted to the religion), have sacred texts, and see themselves as being relevant to all people. World religions crosscut cultural boundaries and in these religions belief and creed are more central concerns than in ethnic or tribal religions. Referring to these religions as “new international religions,” Bruce Trigger, in his book Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study, writes:
“Instead of being identified with a particular state or civilization, these new religions claimed to be relevant for all human beings, and they promised personal salvation to all who believed their teachings and were prepared to live as they prescribed.”
With regard to the function of belief in the world religions, Murray Leaf, in his book The Anthropology of Eastern Religions: Ideas, Organizations, and Constituencies, writes:
“…individual beliefs such as the common run of textbooks claim to describe may or may not be what holds these phenomena together and motivate the people that they are attributed to. My own experience has been that they generally are not.”
In her examination of the Axial Age, the time during which many major religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism—emerged, Karen Armstrong, in her book The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, writes:
“Indeed, it is common to call religious people ‘believers,’ as though assenting to the articles of faith were their chief activity. But most of the Axial philosophers had no interest whatever in doctrine or metaphysics.”
Karen Armstrong also writes:
“As far as the Axial sages were concerned, respect for the sacred rights of all beings—not orthodox belief—was religion.”
While the three Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have a common history, their creeds tend to be different. With regard to Christianity, Stephen Prothero reports:
“Still accepted today by all three major branches of Christianity—Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism—the Nicene Creed is organized around the doctrine of the Trinity, with sections on God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.”
With regard to Islam, Karen Armstrong, in her book Islam: A Short History, writes:
“It must be recalled that beliefs and doctrines are not as important in Islam as they are in Christianity. Like Judaism, Islam is a religion that requires people to live in a certain way, rather than to accept certain creedal propositions. It stresses orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy.”
Judaism is classified by many scholars as an ethnic religion as it is based on inheritance rather than on conversion. Stephen Prothero writes: “In other words, Judaism has no real creed.”
More from Religion 101
Religion 101: Animism
Religion 101: A very brief overview of freethought
Religion 101: Pilgrimage
Religion 101: Religious Prophets
Religion 101: Secularism
Religion 101: Confucianism
Religion 101: Shamanistic Ceremonies
Religion 101: Religion and Ancient Civilizations