Article one describes syncretism as a label almost no tradition accepts for itself, applied from outside and nearly always as a demotion. Cao Dai is the sharpest exception on record, because it was founded explicitly to be exactly what the word describes and says so in its own teaching.
Established in Vietnam in 1926, Cao Dai deliberately combines elements of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Christianity and Islam, together with a distinctive practice of spirit communication through which its early leadership claimed to receive guidance, and its own iconography includes a "Divine Eye" alongside images of figures including Jesus, Confucius and, controversially, secular writers such as Victor Hugo, honoured as spirits who communicated with the movement. Where Sikhism firmly rejects being described as a Hindu-Muslim synthesis, as article one notes, Cao Dai's founders presented unifying the world's major religions as the tradition's stated purpose rather than an outside characterisation to be resisted.
Scholars of Caribbean and Atlantic religion have proposed "creolization" as an alternative to syncretism for cases such as Haitian Vodou, where Kongo, Yoruba and other West African traditions combined with the Catholicism enslaved people were required to practise under colonial law. The term is preferred by some because it treats the resulting religion as a distinct new creation with its own coherence, rather than as an incomplete mixture measured against two purer originals it supposedly diluted, which is precisely the framing article one identifies as syncretism's persistent problem.