Religion is more than theology

 In an earlier chat this morning you said that Jehovah's Witnesses are particularly comprehensive in effecting all aspects of life.  I think we notice because they are different that way than most modern religions, but different and more are not the same.  Indeed, I would say that is much of what makes a tradition a religion rather than a set of beliefs.

Yes. I think that distinction is important, and I’d sharpen what I said earlier.

“Comprehensive” and “religious” are different dimensions. Jehovah’s Witnesses are unusually comprehensive in the sense that their religious system reaches into an extraordinary number of ordinary decisions: diet and blood, holidays, entertainment, dress, sexuality, political participation, relationships, education, work, speech, and so forth. That makes the comprehensiveness conspicuous to an outsider.

But that comprehensiveness isn't what makes something a religion. A tradition can be very demanding without being especially religious, and a religion can leave many areas of ordinary life relatively unconstrained.

What you're getting at, I think, is that a religion is not adequately described as a set of propositions about supernatural reality. It is a way of inhabiting the world. Beliefs are part of it, but so are practices, rituals, institutions, stories, symbols, calendars, moral expectations, communal relationships, and—perhaps most importantly—the particular kind of experience those things evoke.

That also explains something you said earlier about your experiences in Buddhist and Roman Catholic settings. You can regard the metaphysical propositions as unsupported, even probably false, while recognizing that the ritual and the experience are genuine phenomena. Kneeling, chanting, incense, music, architecture, sacred language, communal silence, pilgrimage, confession, Eucharist, meditation—these aren't merely ways of transmitting propositions. They create a framework in which certain human experiences become possible and intelligible.

And there is an interesting feedback loop:

belief → practice → experience → community → tradition → belief

None of those components necessarily depends entirely on the others. A person can doubt the belief while participating meaningfully in the practice; someone can inherit the practices before understanding the theology; and a community can preserve rituals long after its members have ceased to accept all the propositions that originally justified them.

That's why I'd distinguish religion from theology. Theology is principally the articulated system of claims. Religion is the larger human phenomenon in which those claims are embedded.

And your phrase “different and more are not the same” gets at a trap in comparative religion. The Witnesses look extraordinarily religious to a modern secular observer partly because they have retained a degree of institutional and behavioral integration that many Western religions have deliberately surrendered. But that doesn't make them somehow more religious. It makes their religion more visible.

In fact, a Theravada Buddhist monk who spends his entire life in a disciplined ritual and contemplative system may be every bit as comprehensively governed by his tradition, although the boundaries are drawn differently. And a Catholic who attends Mass weekly but makes almost no other changes to his life is still participating in a religion, even though his religion has a much smaller behavioral footprint.

So I think your formulation is the better one: religion isn't merely what a person believes; it is what a tradition causes people to do, experience, remember, celebrate, fear, revere, and share with one another. The propositions are only one part of the machinery.

They discourage going to horror movies.  The reasons cited are to me a bit absurd, but I agree such experiences are unhealthy.

Yes, and that's a nice example of the distinction you were making.

The Witness explanation may be theological—perhaps that deliberately exposing oneself to frightening or spiritually objectionable material is incompatible with Christian conduct. You may find that rationale unconvincing while nevertheless agreeing with the behavioral conclusion.

And there is a perfectly secular way of arriving at much the same conclusion: horror deliberately stimulates fear, disgust, suspense, helplessness, and sometimes images that linger afterward. For some people that's harmless entertainment; for others it is distinctly unpleasant or leaves an emotional residue. There is no requirement that the reason given by a tradition be the reason that makes sense to an individual member.

That actually illustrates something rather interesting about religious traditions. They often contain practical psychological observations embedded inside explanations we no longer accept. A prohibition may survive because generations discovered that a particular behavior tends to produce undesirable consequences, while the explanation for why it does so belongs to an entirely different cosmology.

Your own position is almost the reverse of the usual religious process: “I don't accept your metaphysics, but that particular rule turns out to make empirical sense.”

And horror movies are probably an especially good example for you, given that you already know you dislike them. You don't need demons to explain why you don't want to spend two hours deliberately frightening yourself.