A single religion will sometimes be split into many distinct subgroups which have their own customs, traditions, and rules they follow. We call these subgroups “denominations”. But what about splits at a higher level, where there are entirely different religions that are following the same god? For instance, followers of Scientology follow the god Xenu. If another religion forms who also follows Xenu (called Xenuism) but significantly deviates from the tenants of Scientology, that would likely be considered a different religion. A subgroup of Scientology would be considered a denomination, but what term would describe a situation like this where two different religions follow the same god but are not the same religion?
There is the term “judeo-christian”, but that is just to describe aspects specific to Judaism and Christianity. It’s not a generic term that describes a religious split. And even in this case, it doesn’t include Islam. Along these lines, is there a term that means “the followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam”?
Just to note that I think you have a misunderstanding of Scientology here.
Though Scientologists are pretty secretive in general, and especially when it comes to the Xenu story, my understanding is that (a) Xenu was an alien leader, not a “god,” and (b) though Xenu plays an important role in the story which Scientologists believe, about the history of Earth and humans, my understanding is that they do not, in any real way, “follow” him, or worship him, in a traditional religious sense.
Yup. Those three religions are often referred to as the “Abrahamic religions,” as they can all trace their faiths and histories back to Abraham and his lineage, and all three effectively worship the same God.
That said, I know that there are Christian denominations which strongly dispute this; they insist that Judaism and Islam do not worship the same God which they do, because those other faiths do not recognize Christ and the Holy Spirit as parts of God.
The other major types of religions in the world besides Abrahamic are Indian, Iranian, East Asian, Asian traditional, American traditional, and Australian traditional. “Traditional” means that these are religions that existed in those areas before the more common ones of the world entered the region. You could also split up religions into monotheistic, polytheistic, deism, atheism, and non-theistic. The closer you look, the more complicated it gets.
Just throwing in that there a more than those three Abrahamic religion. Baha’i, Samaritanism (which is tiny, having only a few hundred followers in one or two villages in the North of Israel) and Rastafari are also widely considered to be part of this family.
When one religion’s deities are later “absorbed” into another distinct religion (as opposed to descendant religions splitting from a shared ancestor), it may be a case of syncretism, as in the Greco-Roman pantheon.
The whole notion of “different people’s deities” is kind of tricky to pin down in the first place, for polytheistic religions. When followers of the Greek gods met other cultures (the Norse, say), they didn’t assume that the other cultures were worshiping different gods; they just defined the gods by their traits, and assumed that the other cultures just had different names for them. Thus, for instance, there’s only one thunder god, so Zeus must be the same god as Thor.
Mandaeism is a little different and needs an asterisk because they don’t revere Abraham or Moses but do a lot of people in the Bible associated with them. And not Jesus but they really like his maybe relative, John the Baptist.
Then there’s Alawites, who sometimes got called non-Muslim by fundamentalists but are usually considered a branch off Shia.