The post 7 Things People Blame on Religion That Are Actually Just Culture first appeared on Crafting Your Home.
California added caste to its state university anti-discrimination policy in 2022, and the backlash that followed said everything about how tangled religion and culture get in the popular imagination.
Roughly 80 faculty members of Indian heritage, along with the Hindu American Foundation, argued the move stigmatized an entire faith over a hierarchy they say colonial administrators hardened, not scripture. Two sides, one practice, and neither one agreeing on where the religion ends and the custom begins.
That fight is not unique to caste.
Anthropologists and religious historians keep running into the same confusion across faiths, continents, and centuries: a practice gets coded as sacred, gets defended or attacked as sacred, and turns out, under closer reading, to be tribal, colonial, ecological, or just old money dressed up as morality.
Below are seven of the clearest cases, grouped by what they were actually protecting: a woman’s body, a food supply, or a rung on the social ladder.
Cutting has outlived every religion that supposedly demands it
The Center for Reproductive Rights went looking for the doctrinal basis of female genital cutting back in 2006 and came up empty.
Its Advocate’s Guide to Action found the practice among Christian, Muslim, Jewish and indigenous African communities living in the same countries, which is a strange coincidence if only one of those religions actually required it. None of them do.
What the guide did find was a consistent thread of controlling female sexuality dressed in whichever religious language happened to be locally available.
A killing gets called honor, but the rulebook is tribal, not scriptural
Sociologists Dietrich Oberwittler and Julia Kasselt spent enough time with the data on so-called honor killings to write the chapter on it in the Oxford Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Crime. Their conclusion is blunt: it is a pre-Islamic tribal practice, not a feature of Sharia law, and it turns up among Christian and Sikh families just as often as Muslim ones.
Taj Hargey, director of the Muslim Educational Center of Oxford, said it more plainly than any academic paper could. “There is nothing in the Quran that justifies honor killings.”
Worth noting too that the practice is nearly absent in some Muslim majority countries, Oman among them, which undercuts the idea that it flows naturally from the religion itself.
The veil predates the Prophet by well over a thousand years
Assyrian law was already regulating who got to cover her head in the 13th century BCE, reserving the veil for high-status women and specifically forbidding it to prostitutes and slaves.
Historian Leila Ahmed traced that custom through Byzantine, Persian and Mediterranean Christian societies long before the early Islamic conquests carried it further east.
Even Tertullian, an early church father, told the women of Carthage to veil themselves centuries before anyone had heard of the Quran.
Purity rings are a 1990s remix of a Victorian class anxiety
Sara Moslener, author of Virgin Nation and a researcher at Central Michigan University, traces American evangelical purity culture back past scripture entirely, landing on the true womanhood ideal that took shape alongside the growing 19th-century middle class.
That ideal got dusted off a hundred years later and marketed as biblical through books like Joshua Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Same script, new packaging, and far less to do with the Bible than the sales copy suggests.
Skipping pork might be an ecology problem wearing a religious label
Anthropologist Marvin Harris made his name arguing that the pork ban owes more to geography than piety.
Pigs need shade and standing water that Middle Eastern terrain rarely offers, and they eat grain rather than graze on scrub the way sheep and goats do, putting them in direct competition with people for food.
Harris’s cultural materialism reads the taboo as a practical survival rule that calcified into religious law once nobody remembered why it started.
Prohibition had a temperance choir, but nativism wrote half the sheet music
The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti Saloon League genuinely believed alcohol was a moral rot, and the Sage Encyclopedia of Religion in America treats that belief seriously.
But the same historical record shows the movement zeroing in on German and Catholic immigrant brewers with a specificity that had less to do with theology and more to do with who was pouring the drinks.
Concerns about alcohol fueled domestic violence, raised loudly by the same women organizing for suffrage, ran right alongside the religious argument the whole time.
Related: Countries Where Religion and Politics Are Inseparable: 10 Powerful Case Studies We Can’t Ignore
Caste got its rigidity from the British, whatever the scripture says
Scholars writing for Janata Weekly point out that while caste vocabulary does appear in Hindu texts, the hereditary, immovable version familiar today crystallized under British colonial administration, and it now stratifies Muslim, Christian and Sikh communities across South Asia as well. That is not the only reading.
The Hindu American Foundation argues the rigid hierarchy is itself a colonial misreading of a more flexible Vedic social order, and that treating caste as core Hindu doctrine punishes the religion for someone else’s bureaucracy.
Both camps agree on one thing at least: whatever caste is, it stopped being simple a long time before anyone tried to legislate it.
Other Posts You May Like
- How Secular Societies Keep Traditions Alive Without Traditional Religion
- 12 Common Misconceptions About World Religions—and the Nuance Behind Them
If you like what you just read, then subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on social media.
