An unpaid lay ministry rather than a professional clergy

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A religious role is the atlas's entry for a generic function a tradition recognizes, priest, pastor, imam, shaman, monk, medium, the kind of position many different individuals across many different communities can hold, rather than one specific named office within one specific body. That second, narrower kind of entry, a particular office such as a named papacy or a specific archbishopric, is recorded separately under Religious Office; a role is the general category an office is one instance of.

Each entry describes what the role is understood to do within its tradition, how a person typically comes to hold it, whether by training, ordination, inheritance, calling or election, and what authority or restriction attaches to it. Several roles recorded here belong to closed or initiatory traditions where becoming, or acting as, that kind of specialist involves knowledge or standing the tradition does not share outside itself; those entries describe the role's place in its community without describing how to become or perform as one.

An entry also notes where a role carries formal training or examination, an ordination process, a seminary curriculum, an apprenticeship under a recognized elder, since the path into a role is frequently as distinctive as the role itself and says a great deal about how a tradition understands religious authority to be earned.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The sociologist Max Weber gave the comparative study of religious roles a framework it still leans on. In Economy and Society, published after his death in 1922, Weber distinguished priestly authority, exercised by an official trained and installed by an institution, from prophetic authority, claimed by an individual on the strength of a personal revelation the institution did not grant, and from a third, more diffuse charismatic authority resting on a leader's perceived personal gifts rather than on office or revelation alone. Most named religious roles blend the three in different proportions rather than sitting purely in one category.

A parallel line of study grew out of anthropology's long interest in ritual specialists outside the major world religions, shamans, mediums and diviners among them, beginning with nineteenth century writers such as Edward Tylor and James Frazer and continuing today through fieldwork based ethnography that takes far more care than that early scholarship did to describe a role in the terms its own community uses for it.

Early scholarship in this line, Tylor and Frazer included, is now read as much for its historical assumptions as for its findings, since both writers tended to rank the roles they studied against a European template of proper religion rather than describing each one on its own community's terms, a bias later fieldwork has spent decades correcting.