Religious community

Religious community - a community , a group of people who profess or practice the same religion . It is a religious study ^[1] and legal concept .

In a broader sense, it can describe members of one religion who live nearby or have mixed with representatives of other religions, often mixing in everyday life, but worshiping separately. You can talk, for example, about the "Greek Catholic community of Lviv" or the "Jewish community of France."

Religious society can be unofficially defined: people who practice, for example, Catholicism , consider themselves members of the Catholic community in their region. In Judaism , as well as a number of other religions, the division into communities takes place either on the basis of belonging to a particular religious movement (for example, the Lithuanian trend , Hasidism and others), or on a territorial basis, for example, the Jews of Odessa, Moscow, Israel. In other cases, the difference is more formal. For example, in order to be part of the community of a Baptist church, one must be accepted into its members. In some countries, only people from one officially recognized religious community can marry each other.

In a narrower sense, a religious community is a group of people living together directly for religious purposes, for example, at a monastery .