1 | Page Moncadista as a Christian Sect: A Study of Moncadista Religious Beliefs in Light of their Binary Oppositions Abstract: Binary oppositions such as pure/impure, good/evil, self/others, male/female had long been of interest to the social scientists, and philosophers, among other disciplines. One of these scholars, Mary Douglas categorized the land animals from Deuteronomy and Leviticus as pure and impure. Her study will be used as a class example of studying binary oppositions in religion. Binary opposition is not just an imported theoretical framework with little or no significance in religious studies. Using an ethnographic data gathered from the adults living in Brgy. Limao, Island Garden City of Samal, this article argues that binary oppositions found in the Moncadista religious beliefs are the primary rhetorical tool to express totality and hierarchy. The binary opposites found are categorized in a broader theme—the good and evil. This study aims to characterize and reflect the Moncadista religious beliefs by analyzing binary oppositions found in their narratives and texts. Moreover, this article tries to dismiss wrong notions about their religion and suggest that the Moncadian religion is a Christian sect. Keywords: Moncadista, Samal, binary oppositions, religious beliefs, hierarchy, totality, Christian, category Introduction The emergence of religious studies as an academic field is recent. It was Morreall & Sonn (2012) only in 1960's that there have been a department of religious studies in universities. Long before then, as a part of their religious training, people studies the beliefs, rituals, practices, and history of their own traditions. Theories of culture, history, language and gender that seemed unfamiliar to most of the religion scholars in the past are being reframed and refocused on how we see religion. One Beal & Deal (2004) of these scholars is Ferdinand de Saussure who established structural linguistics. For him, language and meaning can be studied in the structures within a system and words do not have inherent meaning. Meaning resides in relationships of difference and similarity. Saussure's idea of the structure of language has a significant implication in the academic study of religion. One of it is the derivation of meaning from binary oppositions in religious narratives. Binary oppositions or dichotomous thinking is an early tradition of framing issues in terms of opposite pairs such as life/death, good/evil, reason/passion and the like (Elbow 1993). This idea of binary oppositions was rooted from Claude Levi- Strauss who was regarded as the father of structural anthropology. The structuralist paradigm in anthropology (Briggs & Meyer 2009) suggests that the structure of human thought processes is the same in all cultures, and these mental processes exist in the form of binary oppositions.