Needless to say, Religion has been with us from the beginning. It must not come as a surprise that all the languages in the world have their own religious metaphors for describing reality.
When it comes to idioms from the Bible, usually the metaphors are very simple and straightforward: God is good, Devil is evil and chaos, Religion is order. English, in particular, has most of its religious idioms taken from christianism, for obvious historical reasons. "Losing my religion", for example, might be the most famous of them all. This metaphor, meaning “losing one’s patience”, is the title of one of R.E.M. 's most famous songs of all times.
There are countless English idioms referring to God, the Devil, Jesus or the prophets, and you probably use them on a daily basis. We are not here, however, to look for ever-famous, christian-compliant English sayings. Those, you can find everywhere. We are here to have a look at religious idioms in English that the population absorbed by other cultures, throughout the centuries of British world exploration and colonisation.
Not only the British Empire accumulated countless figures of speech from the populations around the world, but also the Americans contributed to nourish the English language with new idioms taken from the peoples they got in touch with.
What follows here is a sum of the most used religion-inspired idioms of the English language that do not belong to the christian tradition. Ready? Let’s go!
To be the Mecca for someone or something
It means to be the ultimate destination or source of inspiration for someone, and the origin is muslim. According to Islam, the holy city of Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, is a place of pilgrimage for Muslims. The pilgrimage to Mecca is so important for Islam, that is one of the five pillars on which the good muslim conduct is built: Shahadah (profession of faith), Salah or Salat (daily prayers), Zakah (doing charity), Sawm or Saum (fasting during Ramadan) and Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, at least once in a lifetime. Mecca is such a foundational symbol and place for Muslim people, and the English have been dealing and trading for so long with Islamic communities, that also the Anglo-Saxons started to make sense out of Mecca, and kind of got one of their own by adopting this idiom.
To be the high man on the totem pole
This one has also its contrary: “to be the low man on the totem pole”. It is rather self-explicative, right? It refers to being the boss, the most important or powerful subject in a determined situation or occasion. The totem pole is the sacred object representing the spiritual guide to someone or to a certain community of North American and generally Native people of the American lands. According to this idiom, the animal sculpted on the lower part of the pole is less important than the one depicted at the top of the pole. However, this hierarchical vision might not exactly coincide with the real meaning of the order in which the animals are represented. Totems told stories related to the clan or the tribe they belonged to and, although they had to be read from the bottom to the top, I haven’t found any documentation that states that the top crest is more important than the bottom one. That might be a Western, hierarchical-based interpretation of it.
Hallelujah
You may argue that this one is christian, but to be fair, as much of today’s christian vocabulary, this is a word that comes from biblical hebrew. Its literal meaning is “praise ye Jah!”, where “Jah” stands for, of course, god. Christians, Jews and Muslims, as you may know, have all three one book in common, from which they developed their own creeds. That’s why they’re called ‘the religions of the Book’, that’s why many idioms that are thought to come from the christianity actually have more ancient, jewish origins.
May The Force Be With You
To all my nerds out there, don’t panic. I know this one sounds very Star Wars and not very religious to you, but if you love Lukas’ saga at least as much as I do, you may also know that George got the inspiration for the doctrine of the force somewhere. Somewhere east, to be precise. The Force, this spiritual entity that governs the world and that can be mastered through painfully hard training of body and mind, is in fact the same entity described by Taoism as the driving force of the natural and the spiritual worlds. Taoists have been calling it “the force” for thousands of years and Lukas, quite transparently, declared that taoism is the main doctrine from which he built Yoda’s creed. One may argue that this idiom has not much to deal with religion anymore since it spread worldwide thanks to Star Wars, but I leave this provocative thought with you: if the source of the idea from which the idiom is born is taoist, can’t we, afterall, consider it religious?
Sacred Cow
Sacred cow is a figure of speech for something considered unquestionable and immune to criticism, often unreasonably so. This idiom’s origins are thought to be original of the American English language, although many other languages around the world have the same–or very similar– figure of speech. It is based on the popular understanding of the sacred role of cows in Hinduism, and appears to have spread in America during the 19th century. According to Hinduism, cows are divine creatures that must not be killed, and the polemic nuance of this idiom probably comes from the fact that Americans thought this belief particularly odd and unreasonable.
Scapegoat
Scapegoat, literally “Escape-goat”, or an idiom that refers to the ancient practice of sacrificing this precious animal on the altar to ensure God’s favour and benevolence. The sacrificial goat was a common practice for many ancient cultures. This one, according to my research, has its origins in the jewish biblical tradition, more specifically in the Old Testament. However, also ancient Greeks used to sacrifice a strong male goat to obtain the Gods’ favours for an imminent war or bad crop times. Today, the practice only remains in the form of these idioms, which stands for someone or something ...
Armageddon
It indeed got an extensive fame for the Michael Bay colossal of 1998, but the title of the movie is itself a reference to a biblical prophecy which stated that one day, the kings of evil will start a war against god, as a sort of apocalypse. Again, this is Hebrew, and before it came up as a christian reference, it was the jews that named it. Now, we use it as a metaphor for chaos, or for a catastrophic event. Rastafarianism also have its own version of the “Amagideon”, according to which, it is a slow apocalyptic process that started plunging the world in an era of darkness since the 1930s.
To conclude
Whether you like it or not, English is filled with religion-inspired idioms and vocabulary, but unlike many would think, it is far from being exclusively christian. Do you know any other non-christian, religious idioms in English?
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