18 Facts About Folk religion

The first was a perspective rooted in a cultural evolutionary framework which understood folk religion as representing the survivals of older forms of religion; in this, it would constitute "the survivals, in an official religious context, of beliefs and behavior inherited from earlier stages of the culture's development".

The second definition identified by Yoder was the view that folk religion represented the mixture of an official religion with forms of ethnic religion; this was employed to explain the place of folk religion in the syncretic belief systems of the Americas, where Christianity had blended with the religions of indigenous American and African communities.

Yoder's third definition was that often employed within folkloristics, which held that folk religion was "the interaction of belief, ritual, custom, and mythology in traditional societies", representing that which was often pejoratively characterised as superstition.

The fourth definition provided by Yoder stated that folk religion represented the "folk interpretation and expression of religion".

Courses on the study of folk religion came to be taught at various universities in the United States, such as John Messenger's at Indiana University and Don Yoder's at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Folk religion lamented that many US -based folklorists neglected the subject of religion because it did not fit within the standard genre-based system for cataloguing folklore.

Folk religion highlighted the example of the prominent sociologist of religion Emile Durkheim, who insisted that "religion" was organized in order to contrast it with "magic".

Second problem with the use of "folk religion" that Yoder highlighted was that some scholars, particularly those operating in the sociology of religion, used the term as a synonym for ethnic religion, meaning a religion closely tied to a particular ethnic or national group and is thus contrasted with a "universal religion" which cuts across ethnic and national boundaries.

Folk religion argued that using such terminology implies that there is "a pure element" to religion "which is in some way transformed, even contaminated, by its exposure to human communities".

Folk religion cautioned that both terms carried an "ideological and semantic load" and warned scholars to pay attention to the associations that each word had.

Chinese folk religion is one of the labels used to describe the collection of ethnic religious traditions which have historically comprised the predominant belief system in China and among Han Chinese ethnic groups up to the present day.

Chinese folk religion is sometimes categorized with Taoism, since over the centuries institutional Taoism has been attempting to assimilate or administrate local religions.

Chinese folk religion is sometimes seen as a constituent part of Chinese traditional religion, but more often, the two are regarded as synonymous.

Folk religion Islam is an umbrella term used to collectively describe forms of Islam that incorporate native folk beliefs and practices.

Folk religion Islam has been described as the Islam of the "urban poor, country people, and tribes", in contrast to orthodox or "High" Islam.

Folk religion emphasizes that while Rabbinical Judaism dealt with orthodox Jewish ritual, and halakah, magicians claimed to use unorthodox magical rituals to help people in everyday life.

Folk religion Hinduism involves worship of deities which are not found in Hindu scriptures.

Folk religion is defined as the beliefs, practices, rituals and symbols originating from sources other than the religion's leadership.