I brought this up in my religious symbols thread, but figured it was worth its own discussion. Currently, we have tags for specific priests of other religions such as shrine_maiden, but Catholic priests get lumped in with the general "priest" tag. This makes it harder to cleanly include or exclude Catholic priests from searches.

(There is also the question of if and how we should tag non-Catholic Christian priests.)

It would probably be too common (in the case of Catholic priests) or too niche (in the case for specific non-Catholic priests) if we started tagging the subtypes/denominations for priest.

I feel that it would be more beneficial if people started tagging the specific religion/denominations more (e.g., christianity, catholicism) as well as the specific type of clerical clothing worn.

Well, we have tags for rabbi, imam, and shrine_maiden already, though the former two have very few examples. We could alias shrine_maiden to miko_outfit if that's preferred, though I don't know if there are opinions on whether there should be tags to distinguish characters who are actual priests vs. characters who are cosplaying.

beholding said:
Well, we have tags for rabbi, imam, and shrine_maiden already, though the former two have very few examples. We could alias shrine_maiden to miko_outfit if that's preferred, ...

No, those are fine. What I meant earlier is that we don't need a christian_priest, catholic_priest, etc. subtags when priest christian or priest catholic could have easily done the same thing.

though I don't know if there are opinions on whether there should be tags to distinguish characters who are actual priests vs. characters who are cosplaying.

We don't need separate tags. Searching -cosplay would be sufficient enough.

It is worth noting though that we sometimes have separate profession & uniform tags (e.g., police_officer & police_uniform) and sometimes we don't (e.g., maid is aliased to maid_uniform).

thegreatwolfgang said:
No, those are fine. What I meant earlier is that we don't need a christian_priest, catholic_priest, etc. subtags when priest christian or priest catholic could have easily done the same thing.

Under that logic, though, wouldn't priest shinto be sufficient to search for shrine maidens, etc.?

We do also have a bishop tag, though I'm not sure if we really should since the posts are either TWYK or tagged based on the character wearing a mitre, which we already have a separate tag for.

beholding said:
Under that logic, though, wouldn't priest shinto be sufficient to search for shrine maidens, etc.?

Ideally yeah, but most people don't associate the term "priest" as to meaning shrine_maiden (even though they technically are priestesses), so that justifies a separate tag.
On the other hand, tagging christian_priest would be too common as that is the default for priest posts from what I can tell.

We do also have a bishop tag, ...

Having a separate bishop or pope tag is fine, though oddly enough there is no cardinal tag in the religious sense.

... though I'm not sure if we really should since the posts are either TWYK or tagged based on the character wearing a mitre, which we already have a separate tag for.

The issue with profession vs. outfit is that it is ambiguous in most cases, though not always.
Ideally, the profession tag should be used when the character is actually doing the job (as opposed to just cosplay) while the outfit tag is used in both the actual case and cosplay (or simply as an unworn outfit).

The profession tags do not inherently violate TWYS since you can safely assume that someone is an actual priest from the actions they are performing (e.g., marriage officiant, preaching, baptism).
In contrast, it would be very inappropriate to lump instances of fetishised costume_play into the same tag as the actual profession, though this is often ignored.

In the case for shrine_maiden, it is also worth noting that there is also a separate miko_outfit tag for it.
Whether all characters who are wearing the miko_outfit can be considered as shrine_maiden (or whether priest_robes = priest, etc.) is up for debate.