Hi!

I'm John Green.

Welcome to  Crash Course Religions.

Does this   look familiar?

You probably know it as the “Coexist” design— a smattering of symbols   that come together to spell the word.

This is just one of thousands of car bumpers that uses   its design to proclaim a desire for peace and religious tolerance to… other drivers I guess?

Now, viewers might see the “Coexist” symbol as a representation of the world’s religions,   right?

You’ve got a crescent moon  for Islam, the Jewish Star of David,   a cross symbolizing Christianity, even a  little Wiccan pentagram to dot the “i.” But the thing is, it doesn’t cover all the  religions practiced in the world—not even close.

And what it leaves out tells you a lot more about the history of religion than you might think.

[THEME MUSIC] So if you’re going by what’s typically covered in the news, which holidays are listed on calendars,   or how bright your neighbor’s seasonal  lights are, you’d think only a handful   of religions are practiced in the world.

Scholars of religion have used the framework of the “big   five” major world religions for decades: Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism.

But those aren’t even the most  widely practiced religions.

Like,   there are more followers of Sikhism worldwide than there are followers of Judaism.

And Shintō   is practiced by millions of people and yet… zero representation on the COEXIST bumper sticker.

So what’s the point of having a category like the “big five”?

And why do we hear about only a few   religions, while ignoring tons of others?

Let’s go back in time to figure this out.

As we saw in episode one, what counts as a “religion” is actually pretty complicated.

The idea of “religion” as this special category, set apart from other stuff people think, believe,   and do…well, that’s only a few hundred  years old.

It came about in 16th-century   Western Europe, during the Protestant Reformation.

Christians used the “religion” label for  traditions that had a founder, sacred texts,   clergy, and particular times and places for doing religious stuff.

In short, to be a religion,   it had to look kinda like Christianity–which Islam and Judaism kinda do, and Buddhism slightly does, and worshiping at the altar of a  particular economic system doesn’t,   even if the invisible hand of the  market works in mysterious ways.

During the colonial era, as Europeans  encountered cultures in Asia, Africa,   and the Americas, they looked for signs of “religion” with their own Christianity-shaped   mold in mind.

But it turns out, people have a lot of ways of making sense of their lives,   of organizing community, and relating  to otherworldly forces.

And many of   them didn’t look like what European  colonizers understood as religion.

Like, in 1553, Richard Eden wrote that Indigenous people on what’s now the Canary Islands “went   naked, without shame, religion, or knowledge of God.” Paintings of Christopher Columbus’s   arrival in the Americas kept this narrative going, showing colonizers looming large,   with a priest along for the ride, heroically bringing religion to people assumed to have none.

At the time, many Europeans assumed “religion” was a natural category that could be recognized   on-sight.

People either had religion or  they didn’t, and if they didn’t, y’know,   they needed it.

Specifically, to borrow a  line from my grandmother, they needed Jesus.

According to this logic, a lack of religion  implied a lack of civilization.

So, like,   Muslims might have the wrong religion, thereby necessitating Crusades and whatnot, but at least   they had a religion, and were therefore civilized.

People in the Americas and much of sub-Saharan   Africa were seen as without religion, which meant without civilization, which was used to   justify colonialism as necessary or even noble.

Of course, Muslim and Buddhist and Jewish communities   were also colonized, because the logic of colonialism was never particularly logical.

By the 19th century, Christianity was everywhere on Earth, but it’s not as simple as saying that Christianity came to the colonized world–the colonized world   also came to Christianity, with indigenous beliefs and practices helping to shape the religion.

Think of dia de los muertos, which was  integrated into Christanity during colonization.

Or to take it further back, what’s up with  Christmas trees?

Jesus never mentioned them.

By the 20th century, scholars  started recognizing other traditions   as “religions,” too.

They lumped  them into opposing categories like   Western versus Eastern, “great” versus  “little,” and “major” versus “minor.” I’ll let you take a guess for which  religions got the “good” labels.

Texts from Buddhism, Hinduism, and other Asian traditions were translated into English,   which helped cement the idea that sacred written   texts were a universal feature  of a, quote, “world religion.” Meanwhile, those with oral traditions  were seen as “primitive,” or “minor.”   Although for the record, this crash course video   is happening in the oral tradition, and  I don’t think that lessens the learning.

By the mid-20th century, a vibes-based approach had emerged that really crystallized how   Europeans defined religion.

Scholars started thinking in terms of family resemblance.

Like,   okay, maybe world religions don’t  share a single common feature,   but they do have overlapping similarities.

Based on those similarities, you can  tell what’s a religion and what’s not,   sort of like how you know Pokémon and  Call of Duty are both video games,   even though they don’t have a  ton in common at first glance.

Anyway, that family resemblance method is still directly informed by that Christianity-shaped mold   of what a “religion” should look like.

It tends to leave out groups that don’t match the vibe,   like those that don’t focus on sacred  texts, such as the Yezidis of Iraq.

So, the idea of what counts as  a “major religion” was decided   mostly by people who thought  Christianity was the ultimate   model of religion.

But these arbitrary  choices about which religions “matter”   have had significant consequences—ones that are way worse than being left off a bumper sticker.

For example, Sikhism is one of the most practiced religions in the world, but one that often gets   left out of conversations about major religions.

It originated in 16th-century India, from the   teachings of Guru Nanak, who preached about the oneness of God and the equality of all people.

But Sikhs are in the minority in  India, where they’ve faced harassment,   persecution, and violence.

And in the United States, misunderstandings and prejudice have   also led to attacks on members of  the Sikh community.

For example,   just days after the September 11th attacks, a Sikh man named Balbir Singh Sodhi was   murdered in an anti-Muslim hate crime.

He was mistakenly targeted for his beard and turban,   which Sikh men customarily wear  as an expression of their faith.

Being known and understood by the public is a matter of life and death for people of any   religion.

And the less you’re understood, the more that’s a risk.

In response to discrimination,   harassment, and violence in the U.S., Sikhs have advocated for basic knowledge of their   religion to be taught in schools —  just like the so-called “Big Five.” Religions have often been misunderstood as, fixed ideas that get passed down,   perfectly preserved from generation to generation.

But that’s absurd.

The idea that religions are stable, unchanging systems can foster   essentialism, or thinking that groups of  people share a core quality.

And that can   lead to false stereotypes like, “All Buddhists are peaceful” or “All Muslims are terrorists.” Or “All Episcopalians marry  an abundance of Catherines   and execute two of their wives.”  That’s only true of our founder.

Cultures are internally diverse and always changing, so we can’t generalize about what   all members of a religion think  and do.

And in most traditions,   we can’t draw a straight line from how early members did stuff to how people do it now.

My way of being Christian isn’t like how the Romans did it – which is good news for me,   as I lack the moral courage to face off  against a lion in a coliseum.

But my way   of being Christian is also different from the Southern Baptist or Ukrainian Orthodox way of   being Christian.

There’s vast diversity  within traditions as well as across them.

Beyond stereotypes, this focus on continuity also allows certain groups within religions   to claim authority by asserting their  belief system is the true one, or even,   the only true one, because it’s the closest to the original.

It’s like only being a fan of Taylor Swift’s  country music, because that’s the original and   true Taylor Swift, the Southern one who grew up in – let me just check my notes here – Pennsylvania.

Linking a religion’s current interpretation to the far-off past becomes a way of excluding and   controlling other people’s interpretations, which, in my opinion, just isn’t cool.

Taylor Swift is both country and  pop, and also everything else,   the one true guiding light of our time…wait, am I turning Taylorism into a religion?

Actually, we’re gonna get into that in a later episode.

Okay.

So we often see this with religious nationalism — where   governments or politicians claim their  interpretation of a tradition is correct,   and use it to organize and control certain groups of people.

In Saudi Arabia and Iran,   conservative interpretations of Sunni  Islam and Shi’a Islam, respectively,   have been encoded as national laws,  restricting what women can wear and do.

In Myanmar, Buddhist nationalism has been invoked to persecute religious minorities,   especially Muslims.

And in the United States, some Christian groups have organized politically to   restrict access to abortion and the rights of LGBTQ people for religious reasons.

And it’s not just that religions are always changing, but there are   also no firm boundaries walling them off from each other.

In the United States,   many people of Jewish background embrace Buddhist practices.

At the Odero Lal temple in Pakistan,   both Hindus and Muslims have long worshiped in the same space.

And in Brazil, adherents   of Candomblé have been blending African and Catholic traditions for centuries,   but doing so in secret to protect  themselves from persecution.

Another thing to consider is the way the “major religion” label presents some traditions with more   nuance than others.

Like, even though Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share many of the same   stories and central figures, they’re treated with more complexity and viewed as distinct,   separate traditions.

Meanwhile, diverse  communities get uniformly labeled as   Buddhist, even though groups vary in their interpretations, texts, and central figures.

So, where do we go from here?

I mean, humans make up categories to understand the world:   that’s what we do.

But, part of  being human is also interrogating   those categories — questioning how they can serve us better, and more equitably.

To really understand all  the ways people do religion,   we have to unpack the boxes we’ve created – where they came from, what they do in society,   and whose interests they’re serving.

And that unpacking shows us that a list of   “major religions” isn’t a map of a pre-existing system.

It’s an idea that creates a system,   one that reflects and reinforces power,  while obscuring the criteria for what counts.

But the cool thing is, the more we  expand our understanding of religion,   the more we begin to recognize these systems and their flaws as they operate in the world all   around us.

And if we’re lucky, we’ll also catch a glimpse of commonalities across these divisive   constructed categories, and find shared values that can serve to bind us together more closely.

We’ll keep exploring that theme in our  next episode, as we ask not just “What