¹ This distinction largely underlies inchoate popular attempts to contrast religion and ‘spirituality’ or to distinguish religion in a ‘narrow and a wide sense’.

² In Judaism, fit is participation in the manifestation of the Godhead in human history: it is constituted by keeping the covenant and the law of God ‘who has sanctified us by His commandments’.

³ Of course, philosophies of life are often unsophisticated: also the theory of the good and the practical instructions are sometimes contained in one statement. The view that what matters most in life is affectionate relations with one's family involves a rough-grained theory of the good – affectionate relations with one's family are what matter most – and the practical locus of the good is obvious: to have the good one ought to spend plenty of time with one's family, not sacrifice family relations to work, and so on. So this single proposition constitutes a philosophy of life.

⁴ A non-religious theory of the good is simply any theory of the good which does not identify the good with fit.

⁵ I owe this witticism to Lyle Downing.

⁶ The emergence in the community of a shared idea of holiness or piety can be an indication that this has happened. Recall the insistence of Euthyphro, Plato's fundamentalist polytheist, that holiness is what the gods all love and unholiness is what the gods all hate.

⁷ Consider Euthyphro's suggestive contention that holiness is not holy because the gods love it; rather the gods love holiness because it is holy. Holiness does not owe its value to the gods. But surely holiness does owe its value to some extent to the divinity to which the believer is related. This suggests that holiness transcends the gods – the terms of the relation are the believer and The Divine.

⁸ Cults can also arise within religions. A figure (supernatural or human) may arise against the background of a pre-existing religious world view, who is taken to have the power to provide a quick route to fit for those who worship her. This person is too limited and local in her features to provide an account of fit by herself – so she is a cult object. She is not a mere representative of The Divine (The Divine in one of its forms); we worship the cult object, not The Divine, believing that in return she will use her power to place us in the right relation to The Divine. Early Christian theology (including the selection of ‘heresies’) is motivated by the need to construe Jesus so that he is neither a cult object within Judaism on the one hand nor a mere representative of the Jewish God on the other. Otherwise Christianity could not emerge as a separate religion with its own constitutive practice. More recently, the Virgin Mary has arisen as a cult object within Roman Catholicism.

Further, cult practices (for example, the practice of propitiating animal kinds to ensure good hunting) may be part of a whole way of life that emphasizes a relation of man to nature which constitutes fit. What I know of the religion of American plains Indians suggests that a whole way of life (of which a cult practice is a significant expression) can constitute fit: an entire culture can be a religion. The cult practice significantly expresses a religious way of life in that the cult, though it is chiefly productive, provides an opportunity to apologize to the animal kind for the necessity of hunting. This courtesy is a mark of the fundamentally appropriate relationship to nature that the whole way of life constitutes. Here the cult practice neither develops into a religion nor arises within one; it may always have been part of a religion.

⁹ The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. Cross, F. L. (Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 1425.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Kent, John writes ‘It is worth remembering that, while the Eucharist has not been celebrated as often as the sixteenth-century reformers would have in some Protestant traditions, the actual service has never lost the social character of the people of God sharing in the means of grace.’Google ScholarIbid. p. 119.

¹¹ I owe this sentence and much of my description of Evangelism to Scott Calef, who brought this objection to my attention.

¹² Ephesians 2. 8–9.

¹³ Could identical systems of practices be rationalized by wildly divergent religious beliefs? Only if the practices are underdescribed. The words ‘We believe in the one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only son of God … ’ could mean in another culture ‘I hereby adore the Great Pumpkin’. But the Catholic practice is to say these words meaning that we believe in the one Lord, Jesus Christ. When the priest says of the wafer ‘This is the body of Christ’, he is declaring that it is the body of Christ by saying those words. The recipient, in saying ‘Amen’, is affirming her belief that the wafer is the body of Christ. In reciting the Psalms, Jews are praying to the God of Moses. Just as the same physical movement can be described as waving hello or merely stretching, depending on the agent's intentions, religious practices are described in terms of the beliefs which motivate them. We are not just making sounds and collapsing in a heap, but praising Allah and bowing to Mecca. Substantially different beliefs generate different act-descriptions, hence different practices.

¹⁴ Recall our discussion in footnote eight of the possibility that an entire culture might constitute fit.

¹⁵ Majjhima-nikaya, I, 55–63 in Buddhist Texts Through the Ages, ed. Conze, Edward (Harper and Row, 1964), p. 59.Google Scholar

¹⁶ I am indebted to many people for helpful comments and discussions, including Alan Soble, Scott Calef, Judith Crane, Kenton J. Clymer, Lyle Downing, Ed Johnson, Carolyn Morrillo, Joe Cowan, Will Coe and Don Hanks. My thanks to the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies in Simla, where much of the research for this paper was done.