Is there a case in history where society was heavily influenced by what was later considered a religion, but wasn’t at the time and didn’t claim to be?
You could maybe make an argument that the way religious people differentiate themselves from pagan tribal beliefs or cults fit this categorization. The way Catholics and Orthodox Christians treat their saints while calling pagan beliefs barbaric is quite humorous.
So Christian Science is obviously a weird cultish religion that lets kids die but growing up as one it ruined multiple things about both Catholicism and Protestantism for me because the core theology actually sort of makes sense in a way that those kinda do not, and one of those ways was finding the fact that Catholics claim to be monotheistic but pray to saints extremely fucking odd. I remember when my friend became a hardcore Catholic convert we argued about it a few times lol.
Would religious cultures even consider themselves “religious” since it was the de facto ideology of their society?
You’d have heretics from other cultures, but I don’t know if religion would even be a definable thing unless separated from the structure of your society.
I am speculating here and thinking about the concept, I do not know either.
Technically, it’s one specific part of ideology… it has many departments and niches to subconsciously brainworm itself into…
Not all religion is ideology and not all ideology is religion, as far as I’m concerned… religion is ideology adapted to the slave-owning and medieval ages, through a theological lens… for feudalism and slavery…
Would religious cultures even consider themselves “religious” since it was the de facto ideology of their society?
Going by the catholic church example they seemed to, like most religions, arrive at a point of “We say this is how it is because you gotta have faith” or similar which to me would be the distinguishing feature to this, where it’s “actually it’s all scientific” (ceterus paribus, i.e. we making shit up
Well considering the concept of “religion” is a thoroughly Western idea and has no equivalent in most other ancient cultures (see “The Heathen in his Blindness…”: Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion by S. N. Balagangadhara) I would say almost all of them. “Hinduism,” to just cite one example, is a constructed “religion” that did not understand itself as thus and arguably didn’t even exist until Westerners constructed it.
yeah no I’m out of my depth here intellectually, but it sounds interesting, mind elaborating?
Balagangadhara argues that as a conceptual category “religion” as understood by the West does not and cannot apply to traditions outside of the West. Even for the pagan Romans and Greeks “religion” just meant “performing the rites of my ancestors.” There were atheists that professed “religion,” because “religion” was not belief or doctrine or whatever, it was practice and tradition. Christians in the Roman Empire were critiqued as “having no religion” because they weren’t practicing the rites of their ancestors, they had nothing connecting them to their past. So Christians kind of turned the turn around, and instead redefined “religion” to mean faith and belief in a coherent set of ideology and doctrine, often submitting to a central authority that determines this doctrine, and from a holy book. This idea of “religion” maps very well onto Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. But other cultures it is nonsensical. Asking somebody from ancient India “do you believe in Krishna” makes no sense. The terms of the question are irrelevant. There’s no “belief system,” there’s no “holy book” or “faith” or “doctrine” or whatever. It’s not a question of faith or belief at all. Hinduism as a term didn’t even exist until the 19th century, and it was invented by Western scholars attempting to make sense of Indian thought. Similarly, Chinese thought also has no sense of “religion” in any sense that Westerners can make sense of, and to apply the term to existing social and cultural practices elsewhere attempts to pigeonhole entirely different systems of thought into a colonial framework.
