In recent years it has become an issue whether to make a start in understanding religions with the beliefs that characterise each religion, or with the practices – with what religious believers and religious institutions actually commend and do in practice. Thus it is often pointed out that Christianity is unusual in its focus on beliefs epitomised in an emphasis on Creeds, hence also on orthodoxy. In contrast, the emphasis in other religions, so it is claimed, is on the practices that will lead to particular goals: the goals may, for example, be related to the learning and practice of particular forms of meditation (as, e.g., in samatha-bhavana and vipassana-bhavana for Buddhists, p.288, sadhana for Hindus, p.123), or to the observing of rules and laws (as in Torah for Jews or Sharia for Muslims). It has therefore been argued that in order to understand religions we need to observe what is done (and what is required to be done) in practice far more than we need to analyse the nature and cogency of beliefs.

On that basis, to give an example, the anthropologist Whitehouse has proposed two ‘divergent modes of religiosity’ (to quote the subtitle of his book): the ‘doctrinal’ and the ‘imagistic’. His argument is that “modes of religiosity constitute tendencies towards particular patterns of codification, transmission, cognitive processing, and political association” (p.1):

In fact, once again, we are drifting onto the lee shore of the falsely dichotomous question. Whitehouse was certainly aware of this because he wrote (p.1), “These fundamentally contrasting dynamics are often to be found within a single religious tradition, where they may be associated more or less strongly with different categories or strata of religious adherents.”