Culture vs. Religion
We use the word cultivar when discussing a mix of religion and culture that acts as a distinct memetic package. While in our society, most cultures heavily overlap with religions, the two are not intrinsically bound, making it more accurate for us to use a distinct word.
Contrast the cultivars of Irish and Latin American Catholicism to see how religion can be heavily associated—but not 100% correlated—with culture. Both cultivars ostensibly hail from the same religious background but feature many differences. Having lived among both for a period, we see it is not just a stereotype that drinking is much more important to the Irish than the Latin cultivar. Yet, this difference has no religious underpinning; it’s purely cultural. In fact, in Peru (one of the countries in which we’ve lived), people raise their eyebrows when we order beer with lunch—this is not surprising given that 60% of the population sees drinking alcohol as actively immoral.[[51]](#_ftn51) Contrast this with 84% of Irish adults who drink.[[52]](#_ftn52)
The Addams Family presents a great fictional example of a cultivar with an ambiguous religious underpinning. Unlike their derivatives, such as the Munsters, the Addams Family is not primarily monstrous because they are literally monsters but because they have a unique family culture (in most iterations at least). The family’s cultivar acts as a lens through which they view reality, transforming the way they interpret the world. For example, they might contextualize dying plants or an unplanned financial loss in a positive context. Because of their cultural lens, they may glean positive feelings from these otherwise “negative” stimuli. However, nothing about the family’s cultivar is specific to one religious perspective or another (outside of a few largely throw-away traditions mentioned here or there).
The Addams Family also helps to dispel the myth that there is some sort of universal “non-religious” cultivar. The Addams Family could very well be atheist, but their daily experience of the world would be radically different from that of most other atheist families. If one chooses to raise their kids in a secular household, there are still many choices about family culture to be made. It is not as though there is a single, correct, “logical” lens through which the world can be viewed. Even if a person is atheist, the culture they choose to live by or build for themselves fundamentally shapes how they experience the world.
Finally, it is important to remember that one person doesn’t just adopt one culture. People switch between cultures when in specific social contexts. Micro cultures often exist around specific activities such as sports, drinking, or secret societies—all with their own rituals, traditions, mystical beliefs, and value sets. While these micro-cultures do not matter in a civilizational context (thus, we will usually only focus on “core cultures”), we will touch on them occasionally as new core cultures can sometimes evolve out of them.