Global Religion

Religious traditions and communities have always been global. From ancient times, religious beliefs and customs would travel wherever people migrated, from one region to another, settling in disparate locations around the globe. Religious ideas and practices would also travel on their own, passed on from place to place and transmitted far from their communities of origin. The great historian of religion, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, described one such global transmission, the common religious practice of using prayer beads, an idea that spread from meditating Brahmans to chanting Buddhist monks and then to pious Muslims and observant Catholics, who took those transient beads and made them into the rosary, its users unaware of its multireligious global heritage.

Virtually, no part of the world is unaffected by the ideas and cultures of other parts of the planet; and no region consists purely of this religious tradition or that one. The cultural maps with neatly demarcated religious regions are highly deceptive. For instance, though India is largely Hindu—its Indian name, “Hindustan” implies that it is the land of the Hindus—15% of the country is Muslim, and before the 1948 partition of the South Asian subcontinent into the nations of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, Muslims constituted 25% of the region. Large Muslim communities in supposedly Buddhist China and Orthodox Christian Russia make those two nations among the largest Muslim countries in the world. Even the world's largest Islamic country, Indonesia, is not exclusively Muslim; it houses a Hindu culture in Bali, Christian communities in Malacca and Timor, and an ancient Buddhist temple at Borobudur. Muslim Egypt has an ancient and thriving community of Egyptian Coptic Christians. China's religious identities are so diverse that most scholars choose to describe the religion of China as “Chinese religion” rather than Buddhist, Daoist, or Confucian, even though most of its population simultaneously accept all of these strands of religiosity as part of one syncretic, Chinese mix. Then there are other faiths in China as well. In addition to the large Muslim communities in China, there are also Christian ones and a Chinese Jewish community that dates back to antiquity. The same [Page 458]situation exists in Korea and Japan, where traditional Korean and Japanese religious traditions are fused with Buddhism and ancient philosophical traditions, and communities of Christians, Muslims, and members of rapidly developing new religious movements exist as islands within these syncretic Korean and Japanese cultures. The religious beliefs in Haiti are both Christian and African; the same population that venerates the saints of Catholicism also sees in them the African gods as interpreted by the local form of Africanized spirituality, Vodou.

The old idea that you could have a map of the religions of the world has dissolved into an image of constant flows and interactions. This was probably always the case. Religious identity throughout history has been more fluid and interactive than static views of religious geography would imply. The case of Christianity is an example. The tradition spread from the Middle East to Europe during the first centuries of the Common Era and then to Asia, Africa, and Latin America during the colonial period, with these regions of the world having the largest percentages of Christians worldwide. And at the end of the Cold War in the last decade of the 20th century, there were missionary expansions of evangelical Protestant Christians into areas of the former Soviet Union. At the same time, religious traditions from around the world were making inroads into Christianity's cultural fortress of Europe and the Americas. The establishment of global communications makes it possible for Caucasian Americans in Los Angeles to adopt Buddhism, for instance, and for Episcopalians in Pennsylvania to practice Hindu yoga. Pacific Island cultures have turned toward the Mormon faith. In the 21st century, almost no region in the world consists solely of members of a single traditional religion.

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