The impossible task of defining religion

Yahoo

08-04-2025

This article was first published in the State of Faith newsletter. Sign up to receive the newsletter in your inbox each Monday night.
Earlier this year, I spoke with a college class about the relationship between religion and entertainment.
I talked about my coverage of the movie 'Conclave,' the member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who was then competing on 'The Bachelor' and religion's role in the Olympics.
But when it came time for the Q&A portion of my presentation, there weren't any questions about faith-related movies and shows. Instead, one of the students challenged me to talk more broadly about religion in American life. 'Who counts as religious?' he said.
Based on my conversations with religion researchers over the years, I knew that was a doozy of a question. And so, I didn't really try to answer it. I just talked about how it works in surveys, which typically rely on people's self-identification. (In other words, researchers sort people into the 'religious' group if they describe themselves as 'religious.' It's a simple as that.)
The student didn't challenge my response, but that didn't stop me from feeling a bit lame. The question of 'Who should count as religious?' has popped into my head several times since that presentation, and I've struggled to come up with a more definitive answer.
I returned to that query again last week as the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case about faith-based tax breaks. As part of their effort to define the limits of religious exemptions, several justices reflected on how to define religion under the law.
The justices, as well as the attorneys involved in the case, wrestled with whether the legal definition of religion should focus on sincerity of beliefs or a sense of duty to a higher power — or some combination of both.
I got a kick out of a moment that Justice Amy Coney Barrett shared with attorney Eric Rassbach, who was arguing on behalf of the Catholic groups that brought the case.
After asking Rassbach to articulate a line between religiosity and non-religiosity, Barrett said, 'It's kind of a big question, right?'
As I took notes on the conversation, I nearly shouted, 'You can say that again!'
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What it's like to attend church in space
Wrestling Church is a unique event in the United Kingdom that's bringing people to religion — and to wrestling.
Held in traditional religious spaces, the event enables regular churchgoers to learn more about the wrestling community and wrestlers to learn more about organized religion. It mixes prayer and faith-filled reflections with sweaty, loud wrestling matches.
Gareth Thompson, founder of Kingdom Wrestling, the charity that leads the program, recently told The Associated Press that Wrestling Church grows out of his belief that both wrestling and a relationship with God can change your life.
'People say, 'Oh, wrestling and Christianity, they're two fake things in a fake world of their own existence,'' he said. 'If you don't believe in it, of course you will think that of it. But my own personal experience of my Christian faith is that it is alive and living, and it is true. The wrestling world, if you really believe in it, you believe that it's true and you can suspend your disbelief.'
The Rev. Natasha Thomas, priest in charge at a church that's hosted several Wrestling Church events, told the AP that embracing the unique activity is a way to keep her church relevant at a time when less than half of English people now consider themselves Christian.
'It's not church as you would know it. It's certainly not for everyone,' she said. 'But it's bringing in a different group of people, a different community, than we would normally get.'
As IVF becomes more accessible in the U.S., doctors, government officials and even religious leaders will need to spend more time thinking and talking about the ethics of preimplantation genetic screening, according to a recent New York Times column, which argued that the country is at risk of entering an era where we seek not just healthy babies, but optimized ones.
The question often comes up when I'm talking to friends and colleagues: Is it time to quit social media? I'm not ready to log off sites like Facebook and X yet, but even I was shaken by a new American Storylines essay about the ways social media use can actually make us less social.
Please make time in the week ahead to read Taffy Brodesser-Akner's beautiful essay for The New York Times Magazine about what we lose when we lose interest in learning about the Holocaust.
My family checked an important task off our faith-related to-do list on Friday by going to a fish fry event at a local church. They're common fundraisers in our area of Wisconsin since several of our neighbors are Catholic and abstain from eating meat on Fridays during Lent.