Could state_religion or something like that become a tag?

General
,
1

It would be helpful for someone who wants to export only catholic/jewish/islamic/etc.countries/territories and also it just fits for a historical timeline map.

Although then there would be confusion over whether for example a catholic king in a protestant country (Saxony etc.) makes the state religion roman catholic despite the majority of the country not being catholic.

2

Very good idea ! I have thought about adding religion=christian and denomination=lutheran (e.g. to Sweden) as well, but I am still thinking about technical issues:

  • Need chronologies (like Sweden) technically a denomination for each relation or can it be inherited from chronology?
  • What about protestant towns in catholic countries (like Strasbourg / StraĂźburg ?)
3

How about the cases If the state religion wasn’t designated from the start, or if it was changed from another original religion? Should we tag the year it was introduced?

4

So far I’ve taken the approach of adding a wikidata=* tag to the country’s boundary relation, then ensuring that the linked Wikidata ítem has an official religion (P3075) statement (qualified by start and end dates if necessary). This makes it possible to query for the boundaries in QLever while filtering on that Wikidata property. Here’s a very crude QLever query for the boundaries of officially Lutheran countries. Click on the Map View button to visualize the results. The query needs some more work to require the dates to line up between OHM and Wikidata, to avoid some anachronisms.

This approach could work well for any secondary attribute that can change over the lifetime of a real-world feature. Wikidata’s data model allows modeling changes to characteristics without having to create duplicate entities or exotic data structures, as we do here in OHM.

This is not to say that we couldn’t have an official_religion=* or state_religion=* key in OHM. There’s always some amount of redundancy between the two datasets. It allows mappers to record the information they know on the spot, even if there isn’t a Wikidata item yet.

1 Like
5

What about banned religions, and law-mandated or theocracies? state_religion= doesn’t seem necessary yet, and it may be not accurate enough as you worried.
Eg

  • religion:*= + denomination=*
    • =state
      • =law / =constitution ?
      • =policy
      • =de_facto
    • =head_of_state ?
    • =recommended
    • =lawful / =legitimate / =recognized
    • =permissive
    • =discouraged
    • =penalty
    • =prohibited

Your example: religion=christian + denomination:protestant=state + denomination:catholic=head_of_state

For the opposite, need =secular