CLASSIFICATION OF RELIGIONS is necessitated by the diversity, complexity, and greatly increased knowledge of religions and by the development of the scientific study of religion during the past hundred years. The student of religion seeks to find or bring some system of intelligibility to the manifold expressions of religious experience, not only to make the data manageable but to discern common characteristics by which religions and religious phenomena can be grouped together and compared with or distinguished from others. Basically, there are two kinds of classification. One orders historical religions in terms of their similarities and differences; the other orders religious phenomena into categories (e.g., sacrifice, purification, rites of passage).

Early Modern Classification Schemes

The work of F. Max Müller (1823–1900), the father of the comparative study of religions, gave impetus to the classification of religion. Primarily a linguist, Müller used his...