This lecture asks if it is possible to disentangle the threads of religion from the knot that binds communities through language, culture and shared history. Drawing on a number of empirical cases from my research on ethno-religious minority groups in Romania, Moldova, Hungary and Ukraine, I will make some comparative remarks addressing the question of (perceived) incongruities, ambiguities and incompatibilities that colour ethno-religious identities. I will interrogate the categories we use and the concepts we employ when we seek to make sense of the incongruity of otherness, such as minority, borderland, syncretism or hybridity. In so doing, I highlight some of the ways these are implicated in the various shades of methodological nationalism that colour our understanding of the role of religion in the formation and transmission of these identities. I frame my arguments historically and geographically presenting religions as transnational and transtemporal affairs that seldom coincide with the geography or history of nations and that rarely comply with ethnic or linguistic boundaries. In doing so I suggests some alternative ways of approaching Churches and minorities in the region we sometimes chose to call East-Central Europe.