Person of faith

The description person of faith (plural: people of faith) refers to any person who can be delineated or classified by an adherence to a religious tradition or doctrine, as opposed to those who do not publicly identify or in any way espouse a religious path. The term people of faith has been increasingly used in the 20th and 21st century by religious adherents in Westernized countries who are critical of a perceived increase in public disenchantment or de-emphasis upon accommodation for religious adherents, although the term itself is used more as a catch-all term which is intentionally non-denominational or non-specific to any particular religious path. A person of faith is said to belong to a faith community or faith-based community.^[1][2]

The term is also criticized by advocates of nontheistic positions for being inaccurate in its assumption of an underlying, unifying commonality between all religious observants - despite stark doctrinal differences and oppositional stances - simply for the purpose of reducing the influence of secular-minded individuals (similar to the term person of color as a catch-all descriptor of non-white persons, or the Islamic description of people of the Book to describe the communities of adherents to Islam, Christianity and Judaism).

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