This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A state entry records a political territory, a country, a subnational state or province, or a historical polity, considered specifically for its formal relationship to religion, whether it maintains an established church, extends legal recognition to particular traditions, or maintains a formal separation between religious and civil authority, distinct from the atlas's separate Country entries in focusing on that legal and institutional relationship rather than on a nation's general religious demographics or history.
An entry records a state's establishment status, whether it names an official religion, and its jurisdictional status, since these questions have genuinely different answers depending on the level of government being described, a country's national government maintaining formal separation while one of its constituent states or territories maintains its own religious establishment, or the reverse.
The entry also records a state's leading religious affiliation where that is documented as distinct from any formal establishment, since a state can carry no official religion in law at all while one tradition still holds an overwhelming demographic and cultural presence within it, and the two facts, legal establishment and lived demographic presence, are recorded separately rather than assumed to track each other.