Scholars now argue there is no pure religion that folk belief corrupts
Folk religion covers everything believers do outside official doctrine, from Vodun's blend of African belief and Catholicism to the non-churchgoer who still wants a religious wedding. But the label itself is under fire: one folklorist argues it wrongly implies that real religion is pure and ordinary people contaminate it.
In religious studies and folklore research the term describes expressions of faith that sit apart from organised doctrine and practice. It usually means two things. One is the religious side of folk culture. The other is syncretism, the mixing of a formal religion with local traditions, as when African beliefs merged with Roman Catholicism to produce Vodun and Santería. Scholars also speak of folk Hinduism, folk Islam, folk Christianity and Chinese folk religion, and clergy use the phrase for people who rarely worship yet ask for church funerals or baptisms.
Definitions multiply. John Bowker's dictionary of world religions offers two: faith in small local communities that ignores the norms of big systems, or religion taken up at a popular level. The folklorist Don Yoder counted five approaches, including the evolutionary idea that folk practice preserves older layers, such as pre-Christian survivals in Catholic Europe or medieval Catholic ones in Protestant Europe. He stressed that folk religion lives alongside, and in tension with, the organised faiths of a complex society. The sociologist Matthias Zic Varul called it everyday transcendence.
Sociologists often set it against elite religion: beliefs and rituals that come from somewhere other than the leadership, which leaders frequently tolerate while privately calling them mistakes. It is rarely institutionalised, and its followers do not usually form communities separate from wider society.
Many researchers abandoned the term in the 1990s and 2000s. Émile Durkheim's insistence that religion is by definition organised left no room for it, and some writers confused it with ethnic religion. Leonard Norman Primiano proposed vernacular religion instead, meaning faith as people actually live and interpret it, which he considers true of every believer.
Source: Folk religion
