This article argues that there is body of governing laws appearing widely throughout the global history of religions that warrants classification as constitutions. Like national constitutions, these religious constitutions present themselves as a form of “higher law” that declare the identity of a given a community, organize its structures of governing power, define its foundational norms, and authorize further acts of rulemaking. In this article, I offer an overview of these texts across several traditions and a defense of their importance in the study of comparative constitutional law. I then draw on fieldwork from Sri Lanka to provide a firsthand account of what a modern religious constitution looks like and how it works to govern one of the country’s largest communities of Buddhist monks. I conclude by urging scholars to view religion and constitutional law not as opposing legal domains but, rather, as homologous forms of social ordering that draw upon similar concepts and logics to address common human dilemmas.

本文认为，在全球宗教历史中广泛出现的治理法律体系值得归类为宪法。与国家宪法一样，这些宗教宪法将自己呈现为一种“更高法律”的形式，它宣布特定社区的身份，组织其治理权力结构，定义其基本规范，并授权进一步制定规则的行为。在本文中，我将概述这些文本跨越几个传统，并捍卫它们在比较宪法法研究中的重要性。然后，我利用斯里兰卡的实地调查，提供现代宗教宪法的第一手资料，以及它如何管理该国最大的佛教僧侣社区之一。