Zhengyi (Orthodox Unity) Taoists affirm a married ritual priesthood, priests who marry, live among the people, and often pass their office and ritual knowledge within the family, rather than withdrawing into celibate monastic life. Ordained in the Celestial Masters tradition, the Zhengyi priest is a specialist in liturgy who performs rites of offering, exorcism, healing, and the marking of festivals and life-passages for the local community, then returns to ordinary household life. The priesthood is a vocation exercised within society rather than apart from it.
In practice, many Zhengyi priests today, particularly in Taiwan, hold ordinary secular occupations and perform ritual duties part time for their local community, a pattern of religious specialism embedded in, rather than set apart from, working life. Taiwanese Zhengyi Taoism itself divides further into so-called red-hat traditions, whose priests perform both auspicious rites, such as temple consecrations and blessings, and inauspicious ones, including funerals, and black-hat traditions, whose priests, associated with the Lu Shan tradition, decline to perform funerals and specialise in exorcism and healing rites, a distinction rooted in regional lineage differences within southern Chinese Taoism.