Honestly I could imagine a very weird system where you like ... pick almost nonsense sounding 'dictums' that may or may not be opposites and then nothing happens for awhile and then one day your priests announce 'the Tenants' and now you can pick between two or three tenant packages and that's your religion which you can add a couple of reforms to - one when you discover movable type, two or three times when the faith accumulates like it does now, and, maybe once more when you discover radio (evangelical - citizens or traditional - holy sites). Maybe a few times you can modify or flip a tenant during the branching of a few events.

In it's current iteration, the religion system added little of value. I see the following problems and have some suggestions for improvement.

Problems with Religion

1. Spread is (too) passive: 'set it and forget it'. Just build some holy sites.
2. Religion has little to no effect on other systems, making it a 'set it and forget it' system running in the background.
3. Tenet Choices boil down to: "Which resource do you want more income for?"
4. Faith serves no purpose beyond tenet progression, becoming useless after tier 4

1. Allow us to influence spread: e.g. faith-generating infrastructure, wonders, sites, or quarters contribute to spread in local and (to a lesser extent) neighbouring regions. Maybe units that cost faith which can be bought to spread religion (though care must be had not to slide into religious unit spam and tediousness like in Civilization 6). Maybe a producible city project like the parades that gives a flat faith boost.
2. Let State Religion =/= Dominant religion give stability maluses. Have it affect diplomacy also.
3. Tenets should have (narrative-driven) trade-offs like other posters mentioned (e.g: Refrain from Intoxicants: +production -stability) or narrative-driven specific bonuses/maluses (e.g. harmony with nature buffs exploitations but nerfs quarters, or buffs/nerfs to certain building types)
4. Let Faith buy some things. Maybe (religious) wonders, faith-related infrastructure/sites/quarters. Maybe it can be used to buy (temporary) stability bonuses that ramp up in cost so that it maintains some late-game usefulness.

Tenets are unbalanced. Some of them too strong (FIMS per follower on Holy Site), some of them weak (+10 on Holy Site). Also their choise comes down to what FIMS I need most now, the religion itself doesn't feel unique and important.

Secularism - Yikes!  This needs a bigger warning that you will be dropping out of the religious side of the game.  I had this choice relatively early, and liked the idea of not having religious grievances.  However, I would never choose it so early if I'd known I would not be allowed to build another holy site, or set another religious tenet.

I like how religion can build and adjust to your overall empire balance, but it really felt like I could just ignore it.  Some of the bonuses made a huge difference later on, but even if I didn't prioritize "religion" I'd still run away with it compared to other empires.  I often build holy sites not to exert pressure, but just to gain stability.  It really felt like religious spread was out of my control, even as my religion dominated the world (both playthroughs).  As others have said, I think having more than just polytheism/shamanism as your initial split could help.  I always chose shamanism for it's benefits, and I still gained enough faith to convert pretty much the whole world.  As a mechanic this is a good start, but I'd like to have more control over it and see some more distinction between it and influence/civics.

As new ideas come to surface when time goes forward. I think adding a general faith district for everyone and changing/adding some tenets into adjacency bonuses for holy sites&faith districts would make the religion system more active.
It would be possible to fight against other religions more actively with a district that is not only locked into certain civs. As a result there wouldnt be civs that are completely helpless against religious pressure. This would probably require buffs for some EQs that have faith bonuses right now.
Adjacency bonuses would be a lot more balanced than the Tier3 per follower per holy site tenets, and they wouldnt be something completely passive, but something you build up yourself with active choices in production.
Also holy site placement within a territory would be more meaningful.

I think the idea of faith as a yield (separate from the “passive religious pressure”, similar to influence) is good. Allow us to spend faith on actions, (religious and otherwise).  That can make tenets more varied.  Some tenets could enable/buff different faith spending actions instead of (or in addition to) just boosting yields.

https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude-studios/humankind/forums/168-general/threads/40158-religion-could-just-away-or-you-could-rework-it-as-public-works-or-ideology?page=1#post-316486  My final opinion has come down to this though.

I appreciate that we may have different views of religion but there is so much wrong with this portrayal and this mechanic, you'd be better off removing it for a litany of reasons. Religion is central to cultural identity and while true there are now long standing orthodox religions and it might be intellectually gratifying to try and incorporate that into a gaming simulator environment I think I've come to a point where it's all going to be disingenuous. Religions can vary wildly depending on so many factors. Reading up about the indo-australian migration that occurred in the 'ancient/classical' time period and how many distinct religions and cultures were practiced by those people who might be separated by islands and a few generations. Some of these cultures had vastly different religious values but you want to create a game around the mutability of culture and ideology by making a macro level game which charts a larger open ended journey through human history I don't think you should try to simplify religion as a minigame of monoliths and population customization. You've designed a system where having a state religion let you choose population bonuses that suit you (Complete state control over the religion? What? No.) and also gaining additional bonuses for having built monoliths while also generating political grievances against your opponents or having them generated. Not based on the actual tenants of a belief. Not based on any historical or even in game history / reputation that your religion and it's followers have, but just it's difference. I think it may be an unfortunate simplification but take all the 'faith bonuses' and determine if they are better for food (religions support their communities growth or fail) or influence, or potentially stability.

Honestly I have more feedback about the game that almost doesn't seem relevant now. Until this is cut you're not going to be creating an interesting historical game you're just making some kind of meta commentary about how you view human populations as serfs to the state no matter their supposed social values, their religious values, or, what their moral tenets are.

Well, I see that I am not the only one to feel like this aspect of the game could be greatly improved. However, I do not think the system should be removed altogether. Of course, this will not simulate reality properly, this is just a game, the system must stay relatively simple for entertainment reasons.

I love the basis of the system, having the religion spread independently, without a need from the player to send missionaries or else; and the fact that your religion "upgrades" itself when it reaches a critical amount of followers. I also like the fact that all the states following the same religion compete to become the leader.

There are two main problems with religion as it currently exists: balance, and blandness.

First, balance: Somme tenets are too strong compared with the others. For example, the per follower per holy site is way better than the per correligionnist state. I also find smite unbelievers to be super strong, because it can give quite a lot of influence in the early game, when influence is critical. The 5 stability per follower on capital is also very strong, it allows you to ignore stability cost in your capital no matter what. The main problem here is that I think that 90% of the time, I would pick these two as my first tenets, and it adds to make religion feel always the same.

The per follower per holy site doesn't have this problem, as it only restricts viable choices to 3, which still allows for variation. The main problem here is that these tenets are the only one I feel are overpowered in the sense that they give you a very extreme advantage in some part of the game. +600 science is game changing. +600 gold as well. +600 influence is also great but I am unsure of how useful that influence would be because influence only allows you to do limited things, so that one is not as much of a problem. There is clearly some balancing to do, but overall I am sure it can be done: tune down the strongest bonuses or increase the weakest, and completely change the per pop per follower to something else, less overpowered.

One aspect of these tenets being overpowered also comes from the AI, which in my games in normal difficulty was completely unable to compete on the religious level and allows you to have all the holy sites of your religion as well as hundreds of followers. Not sure how strong it would be in multiplayer.

Now, on the blandness: It does not feel like you are dealing with a religion, just another kind of stat that propagates to other countries and gives you loads of yields. Moreover, whatever tenets I take, It does not feel like different, because most of them are variations on the same theme, just with different FIMS. As we compare two identical tenets with different FIMS, it just look likes the game tells you to chose which kind of FIMS you want right now, rather than an interesting choice that will define your religion. I think the tenets should be more diverse, less comparable one to another. Another thing that would be good is having some tenets that allow for different kind of gameplay: for the first 3 tiers of tenets, you have nothing to do to benefit from your religion boni: maybe build the Holy sites if you haven't built them yet, but besides that there is not much you can do. You just benefit from the FIMS, without having much control on how many you will get because all the religion spread happens in the background. It contributes to make this system feel forgettable: you take your tenets, and then nothing is in your control to influence how much you will get from your boni.

I suggest having more tenets that need actual actions from you to get the most benefit from them: for exemple, getting additionnal yields for trade routes, add adjacency boni on quarters or holy sites... Not sure how to link that to religion, but there are a lot of other suggestions on this thread.

I also think that even though states have no control on how the religion spread, they should control how the followers express their religion. What I mean is that maybe adding a religious quarter, such as a temple or something like that, does not seem out of place since you can contruct farms or research quarters. These quarter would yield faith, I guess, and it does not seem impossible to think of interesting adjacency boni for them, to keep things interesting. Just adding this quarter could help resolving some problems, like the lack of actions to counter a strong religion when all the holy sites are taken. It could also be a good source of new tenets, having these quarters have half the stability cost, add them adjacency boni, add them boni to construct them next to a river or other interesting terrain... It woul allow some interesting combinations, and you will have to plan to actually benefit from these boni, which should make things more involving.

Finally, to fight against the tranquility of being forever the religious leader with your 8 holy sites, maybe make the religious leader the player following the religion with the highest faith generation. Holy sites give a great advance, but if some other empire commit to construct "faith quarters", they could be able to overtake you, forcing you to fight to keep control of the religion.. Even if right now, there does not seem to have great incentives to do so, once all the tenets are taken.

Other ideas that come on the go but are probably difficult to implement: make events of schism, where an AI with sufficient faith decides to take its religious independence, using your religion as a base but modifying it. If it has enough faith to counter yours, it can be able to spread its new religion to its own cities, and then even further. Maybe make this possibility accessible to the player too, if it is under the control of a religion whom he is not the religious leader. Maybe make the new religion start in the capital, so that while the player has not converted its own land, it suffers from the penalties of having citizens following a different religion than the state religion (I don't even know if such penalties exist, I have never encountered the problem).

Well, I think I wrote way too much, that were just my two cents, right now religion is not as good as it could be, I just wanted to share some thought and ideas.

I agree with most of what is being said in this thread.  The biggest issues being that the system is far too passive and Faith as a resource doesn't seem valuable since it is unclear what is does or how it works.  It is likely that higher Faith makes your Religion spread faster and/or further, but again it's just very unclear how this works.  As mentioned above it would be nice to have buildings or units that can be purchased with Faith or possibly certain actions on cities/empire that cost Faith and have some impact on the Religion system.  It did not feel valuable to pick a Culture that had a district that provided Faith due to this issue.

Some of the tenant bonuses were also incredibly powerful and require rebalancing.  For example, the science tenant in tier 3 that provided science per follower on Holy Site could cause an absolute explosion of science if you focused on it with many Holy Sites and Wonders that counted as Holy Sites.

The AI also seemed really bad at religion and my religion would usually dominate all of them relatively quickly even on Nation and Empire difficulties.  And thus Religion progressed really quickly and I would unlock the Tier 4 tenant half way through the game and not worry about Religion ever again.

I think as a concept the way Religion is designed makes sense.  Passive spread through accumulating Faith and upgrading your Religion based on more followers.  I just wish the values were more concrete and I could understand how Faith works.  And as I mentioned I would like more active things to do with Religion and Faith as opposed to it being a very passive and background concept that just gives more FIMS bonuses as you go along.

The religion game is a little too easy to dominate. In all but a few cases I was the only one really spreading my religion in my local area, and anywhere my religion butted up against other religions it either overtook their religion, or led to little interplay between us. Though in one game, an AI overtook my place as the leader of my religion, which really deserves a bit of a warning that it is about to happen or that it has happened at all, because I had no idea they became the leader until I decided to check the faith tab on a whim.

It's also worth noting that it was very easy to reach the final tier of religious tenets before the end of the game, yet the pace at which you unlock them felt decent enough, so I do feel like another tier of tenets would be good.

All in all, religion does not feel very interactive. We need more dilemmas that do more than move your ideologies around and provide different kinds of faith production bonuses. I feel like more dilemmas are needed that move beyond moving your ideologies around and getting certain faith production bonuses. Does a heresy pop up? If I try to suppress it maybe there’s a chance that a rebellion of heretics rises up against my unjust rule. Or if I welcome the heresy by saying that all viewpoints are welcome within my empire, perhaps “Egyptians Polytheism Heresy” becomes a new religion, unguided by any empire, that start attracting converts within my empire. Then if I want to keep people within the fold of my religion I have to out-faith the heresy in order to keep my religious tenets active. Religion throughout history is just a complicated mess of interesting factions, beliefs, and events that I don't feel the current system models very well.

Historically, there have certainly been religions whose tenets were shaped by the ruling class, but religion also has a way of getting away from them in a way that isn't particularly well represented. In other words, I feel like we shouldn't have full control of our religion and certain things should happen that are unexpected.

To accompany the idea of having more interaction with your religion, it would also be really cool to have more diplomatic options related to your religion. For instance, a religious leader could declare a crusade against empires that follow a different state religion, and any other empire that follows that religion would be obliged to either join that war, send a stack of units to the leader's capital that reverts to their control, or refuse and take a massive hit to stability. That's just one example that maybe requires a civic declaring yourself the "pope," but whatever options are pursued, we just need more!

I do like how religious tenets can help you fill in gaps in your FIMS, stability, influence, etc. but many feel far too overpowered, and the fact that is all they do and have no real tradeoffs is kind of boring. I found that the tenet that gives stability per territory basically nullified the penalty for attaching territories, and the tenets that give +FIMS on Holy Site per religious follower are way overtuned, especially Develop the Intellect.

What exactly does coreligionist state mean? I think I could hazard a fair guess, but there are a few things like this that need to be explained far more clearly.

I have some feedback on the first-tier religious tenets: The +5 influence on territories is just objectively stronger than all other tenets, since (a) influence is king in the early game and there are few ways to get influence, and (b) the fact that gold, science, and influence all get the same nominal value even though in a typical game you will have way more science and gold per turn as influence makes it somewhat unbalanced since influence has results in the highest relative increase in value. I'd make the other tenets stronger.

Also, the tenets adding value to holy sights currently are just generally weaker since it is very unlikely that one has more holy sights than religious territories. Either giving a larger bonus for the holy sight tenets mixes it, or potentially giving people access to more of them.

I think having religion "activate" before you place your first holy site was a mistake. Religion should only kick in bonus wise after you build your first holy site.

What if instead of religious tenants being based off population they were based off faith and faith generation? Religious population could generate faith but not as much as the dedicated faith producing buildings, I mean the mechanics are already there. There's still the issue of the broken tenants but I think this is better in terms of founding a new region, especially since it makes agrarians less naturally better at it due to their population growth.

The new religious founding method would be something like;
1. You receive a message saying your faithful want to enact a shrine to their religion (It's safe to say early cultures were more religious than not, so this should be unlocked straight into the ancient era.)
2. Build the Holy site (Tenants still haven't been activated so their are no religious bonuses going on)
3. Now the holy site generates faith, you need to hit x faith empire wide to trigger your first tenant bonus
At this point your empire is religious, they follow a religion and have a holy site dedicated to it, but they have no bonus yet as they need to generate enough faith.
Population generates 1 faith per faithful person, but the holy site should generate the majority, around 20 like it does now)
4. After reaching that faith threshold tenants can now be chosen and religious gameplay opens up

Again I don't have any ideas on how to rebalance the current tenants other than removing the "per population" ones since they'll never be balanced but I do like this way of starting up religion better.

After some consideration on religion i am convinced that the innate +1 faith per pop should be removed.

As it is right now,  there is a positive feedback loop with Faith and populace. More population yields more Faith which convert more population which yield more faith so on and so forth. Couple this runaway effect with the fact that you unlock more tenets by converting a high population and those tenets (especially the stronger ones) have bonuses that scale with population and you have a recipe  for making population the #1 factor in religion, this contributing to making growth and agrarians too Strong early game. In addition, it contributes do the feeling that "religion is too passive", since you're there growing your population for other reasons and suddenly your religion get stronger for "no reason".

So by removing the +1 Faith per pop, how can one play the religious game? You need to work or build for it.

Work for it is the simpler option: create a "clergy " worker on cities (akin to the researcher, trader, farmer, etc) that grants faith per turn. Do you want your religion to spread? You'll have to do it consciously, using workers that could be doing Science, Money, food or industry. 

Build it i slighly more demanding (dev-wise): to gain Faith, you'll have to build religious districts, infraestructure,  and repeatables in your cities. Maybe the Holy sites are not special projects, but spammable (1 /territory? ) districts with much lower bonuses; maybe the Holy sites are as is, but there's a temple district; maybe theres several infraestructures that (along the holy sites and religious EQs) Grant faith or open Clergy jobs; maybe the Holy day repeatables is unlocked at game  start and becomes your main Faith income.

These ideias may be combined to make sure that Faith grows not passively from your pops, but as an active and conscious effort by the player. This change should help religion be more engaging and open for more strategic options for players. 

Ok, misunderstandment cleared, I retract my post since I was wrong (will let it there for historical purposes), but I still think that the religious game can be more involved with Clergy Workers and/or more faith build-ables.