CHAPTER INTRODUCTION
Religion is one of the key components of culture and, like language, can both unify or divide humans. Like language, but in a different way, religion confers identity. Religion dominates the lives and behavior of billions of people worldwide. In the world of the late 1990s, modernization, urbanization, secularism, and resurgent fundamentalism appear to be on a collision course. The question facing the world of the twenty-first century will be whether the modern-secular fundamentalist religious countries can coexist. The study of religion has many geographic dimensions today.
Like languages, religions are constantly changing. In the process, the great religions of the world have diffused across cultural barriers and language boundaries. Persuasion will not lead people to change the language they speak, but it can induce them to convert to a new faith—conversion still goes on today. Just as the map of languages continues to change, so do patterns of religious affiliation. The cultural landscape is marked by religion—churches and mosques, cemeteries and shrines, statues and symbols, modes of dress, and personal habits. In industrialized societies, such overt religious displays have declined, but they are still common in more traditional societies.
The Geography of Religion
In many parts of the world, especially in non-Western areas, religion is such a vital part of culture that it practically constitutes the culture. Thus it becomes difficult to define exactly what a religion is, because religion manifests itself in so many different ways. In some societies, religion—at least in organized form—has become less significant in the lives of many people. In many societies in Africa and Asia , religious doctrine exerts tight control over much of the behavior of the people, through ritual and practice and even the orientation of the sleeping body at night. Even where religion is less dominant, its expression is still evident in many practices and beliefs.
Organized religion has powerful effects on human societies. It has been a major force in combating social ills, sustaining the poor, educating the deprived, and advancing medical knowledge. However, religion has also blocked scientific study, supported colonialism and exploitation, and condemned women to an inferior status in many societies. Like other bureaucracies, large-scale organized religion has all too often been unable to adjust to the times.
Major Religions
The distribution of the major religions among various world regions is depicted in Figure 11-1. The information on this map should be viewed as a generalization of a much more intricate set of distributions. Nevertheless, the map does reveal the dominance of the Christian religions, the several faiths of Christianity having been diffused through European colonialism and aggressive proselytism, Thus Christianity is today the world’s most widely dispersed religion (see also Table 11-1). There are more than 1.6 billion Christians in the world today, divided between Roman Catholics (the largest segment), the Protestant churches, and Eastern Orthodox. Together, Christians account for nearly 40 percent of The members of the world’s major religious.
The second true global religion (also called ‘universal faiths”) is Islam. Despite the fact that it is the newest” of the global religions—it arose in the western Arabia area in the sixth century—it is today the fastest growing of the worlds major religions, and like the other major faiths has more than one branch. Like Christianity, Islam has diffused widely, but mainly in Africa and Asia . It dominates in Southwest Asia and North Africa and extends eastward into the former Soviet Union and China , with clusters in Indonesia , Bangladesh , and the Philippines . It even has adherents in the United States (see: Focus on: Americas Black Muslims). Islam has more than I billion adherents, of whom more than half are outside the cultural realm often called the Islamic World. Southwest Asia and North Africa , however, remain the Islamic heartland, with about 400 million adherents. A comparison between Figures 11-1 and 7-1 shows that the largest Muslim country is Indonesia , with about 165 million believers. Christianity and Islam together hold the allegiance of nearly half the world’s population (see Table 11-1); no other faith even comes close. The third global religion, Buddhism, claims slightly less than 350 adherents. The third largest faith numerically, Hinduism, is not a global but a cultural faith concentrated In a single geographic realm, and is regarded as the worlds oldest organized religion. The vast majority of the 750 million Hindus live in India , although Hinduism extends into Bangladesh , Myanmar , Sri Lanka , and Nepal .
In this chapter we have viewed the spatial distribution of the world’s major religions and assessed their strengths in terms of number of adherents. In the next chapter we will examine the three geographic characteristics of religions: their locational origins, routes of diffusion, and their imprints on the cultural landscape.
