Modern Japanese is the everyday working language of both Shinto and Buddhist religious life in Japan today, including contemporary shrine and temple signage, popular devotional publishing, and the sermons and pastoral writing of Buddhist priests across the country's major schools, even where specific ritual chants and sutras retain the older Sino-Japanese or Classical Japanese pronunciations inherited from their original transmission.
Modern Japanese has also become the primary language of Japan's numerous postwar new religious movements, including Soka Gakkai, a lay Buddhist organization whose extensive modern Japanese devotional and doctrinal literature has since been translated into dozens of other languages for its international membership, and of Shinto's own modern popular publishing, including guidebooks and prayer manuals sold at shrines nationwide.
Japanese Christian communities, a small minority within Japan, likewise use modern Japanese for worship and scripture, including multiple modern Japanese Bible translations produced across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by both Catholic and Protestant missionary efforts working to render Christian scripture into a language whose vocabulary of transcendence and divinity had developed along quite different lines from the biblical original.