Classifying Religions as a Whole (Plus a Peak into Islamic Classification)

Before I attempt to create a system of classifying New Religious Movements (NRMs) on my own, I decided to do some research into how religions in general are classified. From a religious perspective, religions may be “true” (what you should believe in) or “false” (what you shouldn’t believe in). This idea extends into the concept of believers and disbelievers (or Muslim and Kafir respectively from an Islamic perspective). There is also the concept of “revealed” (originating from God) versus “natural” (originating from Man). A revealed religion is distinct from a true religion, however, because a revealed religion originates from God but could also become corrupted and end up not being true (or the revealed religion could remain uncorrupted and true). Each religion has its own concept of true vs. false and revealed vs. natural, so this form of classification isn’t something that can be standardized and easily accessible to all; however this classification is extremely useful to understand the theology of a religion, and the theology of a religion is very important to classifying religions in a standardized way.

Classifying religions based on theology is probably the most well-known way to classify religions. Catholicism vs. Protestantism, Sunni vs. Shia, and Theravada vs. Mahayana Buddhism are all examples of theological classifications of religions. Perhaps even more commonly known is the classification of monotheism, believing in one God, and polytheism, believing in multiple gods. (And just as a note, I will be using God to refer to one, all-powerful being and will be using god to refer to the concept of something being worshiped). Classifying religions based on the being(s) worshiped is extremely useful because the quantity and qualities of being(s) worshiped affects the behavior of followers. Additionally, such classification is relatively objective since how many gods or the qualities of those gods are typically laid out clearly in a religion’s theology.

I still have to continue my research into the current classifications of religions since the research I have conducted so far was from a more historical lens, specifically from the early 1900s. Because of how long ago the systems I researched are, there are quite a few issues with them involving political correctness, but I have gained a lot from this research. I have seen very intricate detail in classifying religions (such as fetichism, religions that take “ordinary” objects as sacred, and totemism, religions that associate aspects of the natural world with religious importance). At the same time, too much detail in classification does lead to problems of being too divisive, such as placing religions on different “stages.” Another major problem I noticed was that the scope of the classifications was too large and many of the qualities of a religion were not being considered when using one classification over another. For example, calling both Islam and Christianity “instituted religions,” which are religions coming from a single person, doesn’t take into account the differences the two have in the main religious personalities of both religions.

Wanting to narrow the scope of research into classification, I began a tangent in my research to study an important aspect of the classification of traditional Islam (Sunni, Shia, and Sufi): historiography, the study of how history is recorded. I will be discussing more of the aspects of Islam that lead to additional factors affecting classification, but I wanted to tease that discussion with a small discussion on the importance of the beliefs in Islamic historiography. One of the main differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims is how they have recorded the history of the Prophet Muhammad (S), the last prophet of Islam. This difference in how history was recorded has led to many theological differences ranging from certain views on the Prophet’s family to the belief in predestination. The reason I mention this tangent is because this kind of nuance gets ignored in the macroscopic scale of classifying religions. This is one of the reasons that I am excited to take my current research and start applying it into Islamic NRMs. Next week, I’ll share my working classification of Islamic NRMs as well as my continued research into this topic.