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Creeds
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Key Events
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Our Mission
Documenting the creeds that shaped religious tradition
The Creed Archive preserves the creeds that shaped religious tradition. Every creed has a story of origin, development, and consequence — the people, the moments, the patterns, and the lessons that still resonate today.
5 Chapters Per Story
Origins, Development, Turning Point, Consequences, Legacy.
Key Figures
Detailed profiles of the people whose decisions shaped each creed. Explore the people and networks behind each creed.
Key Events
Pivotal moments in each creed's arc — the founding decisions, the turning points, the consequences.
The Documentary Format
How Each Story Unfolds
Origins
How it began — the context, the players, the early signals
Development
How it took shape — the patterns, the dynamics, the unfolding logic
Turning Point
The decisive moment — the choices, the shifts, the consequential acts
Consequences
What followed — the responses, the investigations, the changes set in motion
Legacy
The lasting impact — what it taught, what it changed, what it means today
Philosophy
Why It Matters
Behind every creed lies a story — patterns of human choice and consequence that reveal how religious tradition is built, tested, and reshaped.
Understanding how these patterns emerge, develop, and resolve helps us comprehend the structures that repeat across time and context.
Latest Additions
Recently Added
Quakerism
By the early 2020s Quakerism remains a living Christian movement with several hundred thousand adherents worldwide, historically concentrated in the British Isles and the United States and with substantial and growing communities in parts of Africa and Latin America; its forms range from unprogrammed silent worship to programmed evangelical meetings and organized social service bodies such as the American Friends Service Committee.
A Christian movement that placed the experience of a present, inward divine presence — the 'Inner Light' — and communal silence at the center of worship, Quakerism has combined a distinctive devotional practice with outsized influence on abolition, prison reform, and other social causes.
Raëlism
Raëlism is an active new religious movement founded in France in 1974 that claims a global following with organized national branches; by the early 2020s scholars estimated membership in the low tens of thousands with concentrations in France, Japan, Brazil, and North America. The movement remains visible through public campaigns, a corpus of texts by its founder, and institutions it has spawned (notably Clonaid), while scholarly attention has focused on its combination of UFO belief, secular modernity, and biotechnological advocacy.
A movement that fuses UFO cosmology with a programmatic embrace of science and sensual liberation, Raëlism presents itself as a religion of extraterrestrial creators and human self-directed evolution.
Rastafari
Rastafari is a living, practiced religious and cultural movement that emerged in 1930s Jamaica and by the early 21st century had adherents and communities across the Caribbean, North America, Europe, and parts of Africa; estimates of membership vary widely by source and by definitions used (from tens of thousands to several hundred thousand globally by the early 2020s), and the movement remains internally diverse in belief, practice, and organization.
A 20th-century Jamaican movement that reimagined an Ethiopian emperor, African return, and everyday holiness into a global, lived faith of liberation, identity, and sacrament.
Reconstructionist Judaism
As a small but influential current within North American Judaism, Reconstructionist Judaism is centered on institutions and communities in the United States and Canada; by the early 2010s–2020s it numbered tens of thousands of adherents and roughly a hundred to a few hundred affiliated congregations and educational institutions, and it continues to articulate an adaptive approach to Jewish law, ritual, and identity.
A twentieth‑century American movement that treats Judaism as an evolving religious civilization, Reconstructionist Judaism reframes authority, practice, and theology around communal creativity and historical change.
Reform Judaism
By the early 2020s Reform Judaism remained a prominent, living stream within global Judaism, historically strongest in North America and with organized presences in Europe, Latin America, Israel and elsewhere; by the early 2020s roughly a third of American Jews identified with Reform or progressive Jewish movements, and institutional bodies such as Hebrew Union College and the World Union for Progressive Judaism continue to train clergy and coordinate congregational life.
A modern, historically minded stream of Judaism that sought to harmonize Jewish life with Enlightenment values and changing societies, reshaping liturgy, law, and communal institutions across Europe and the Americas.
Roman Catholicism
By the early 2020s Roman Catholicism remained the single largest denominational family within Christianity, with adherents distributed worldwide and principal historical and institutional centres in Rome (the Holy See) alongside local episcopal sees on every inhabited continent.
A global branch of Christianity shaped by a claim to apostolic continuity, a centralized papal office, sacramental life, and an institutional history spanning two millennia.
Sample
A Taste of the Archive
Roman Catholicism
Paragraph 1
Roman Catholicism traces its self-understanding to the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth in first-century Roman Palestine, and to the missionary activity of his earliest followers. Adherents hold that Jesus appointed apostles who continued his mission; historians situate the movement that became Christianity within the social, religious, and political milieu of the Roman Empire after 30 CE. The material and textual evidence that scholars examine includes the New Testament corpus (letters attributed to Paul, the four canonical Gospels), early Christian writings such as the Didache, and archaeological remains in cities like Rome, Antioch, and Jerusalem.
Paragraph 2
Tradition within Roman Catholicism emphasizes a special place for the apostle Peter and for the Christian community in Rome. The tradition asserts that Peter exercised a distinctive leadership among the apostles and that his successors, the bishops of Rome, inherited a unique pastoral responsibility. Historical scholarship accepts that a Christian community existed in Rome by the mid-first century and that the city became a major centre for Christian thought and martyrdom; it is less able to reconstruct in precise detail how a single line of episcopal succession came to be construed as the basis for later papal claims.
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The Creed Archive preserves the creeds that shaped religious tradition. Every creed has a story of origin, development, and consequence — the people, the moments, the patterns, and the lessons that still resonate today.