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Some problems in the interpretation of alien belief systems, which were suggested to this article's author in his own fieldwork on Aladura churches among the Yoruba of Western Nigeria and by the analysis of other belief systems by social anthropologists, in ethnographies and in general surveys are considered. To 'understand' human belief and behaviour is, despite its ambiguity, the universally agreed programme of these studies. Since people are social beings it might seem adequate initially if, when confronted with other people with different social standards of what was right or true, they were able to encompass them in their mental system, to show how others had gone wrong and to preserve and validate their own beliefs. It is in this sense that convinced Communists are able, to their own satisfaction, to show how those who disagree with them are the prisoners of their own social situation, and so to understand them. Any successful ideology must be able to do this with competing belief-systems. The understanding of sociology is rather different, however. Sociology models itself on biology to the extent that just as the biologist aspires to produce a theory to account for the forms of all organisms, none excluded, so the sociologist aspires to account for all belief systems.