Excerpt from Robert J. Brym, John Lie and Steven Rytina, Sociology: Your Compass for a
New World, 3rd Canadian ed. (Toronto: Nelson, 2009) pp. 479-86
Major World Religions
There are five major world religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. They
are major in the sense that they have had a big impact on world history and, aside from Judaism,
continue to have hundreds of millions of adherents. They are world religions in the sense that their
adherents live in many countries.
About a third of the world’s population (2.1 billion people) is Christian. Christianity is the
predominant religion in 114 countries and is most widespread in North and South America, Europe,
Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, etc.), and southern Africa. The second-most-widespread religion
in the world is Islam. Muslims compose about a fifth of the world’s population (1.3 billion people).
Islam is the predominant religion in 39 countries in the Middle East, central and northern Africa,
and parts of Asia. Hinduism is the world’s third-largest religion. Although only three countries are
predominantly Hindu, one of them is India, so about 1 billion people adhere to Hinduism. The
fourth major world religion is Buddhism, the predominant religion in eight Asian countries. About
400 million people are Buddhist. Although numerically small on a world scale, Judaism must also
be included in any list of major world religions because Christianity and Islam have their roots in
Judaism. There are 14 million Jews in the world and Judaism is the predominant religion only in
Israel.
Other religions have many adherents too. For example, some scholars consider Confucianism a
major world religion. Certainly, Confucianism has had a tremendous impact on East Asian
societies, and we still find East Asians who claim to be Confucian, especially in Singapore.
Furthermore, some Confucian rituals, such as ancestor worship, resemble religious practice.
However, we believe Confucianism is best seen as a world-view or a philosophy of life (Ivanhoe,
2000). Few East Asians regard Confucianism as a religion.
The five major world religions have much in common. First, with the exception of Hinduism,
charismatic leaders helped to turn them into world religions. Second, and again with the exception
of Hinduism, all five major world religions had egalitarian and emancipatory messages at their
origins. That is, they claimed to stand for equality and freedom. Third, over time, the charismatic
leadership of the world religions became routinized. The routinization of charisma is Weber’s term
for the transformation of divine enlightenment into a permanent feature of everyday life. It involves
turning religious inspiration into a stable social institution with defined roles, such as interpreters of
the divine message, teachers, dues-paying laypeople, and so forth. The routinization of charisma
often involves the weakening of the ideals of freedom and equality. Under some conditions it gives
way to their opposite: repression and inequality.
Judaism
According to the Bible, the first Jew was Abraham, who lived nearly 4000 years ago in ancient
Mesopotamia, now Iraq (Gottwald, 1979; Roth, 1961). Abraham’s unique contribution was to
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assert that there is only one God; before Abraham, people believed in many gods. The Bible says
that God promised Abraham abundant offspring and, for his descendants, a land of their own.
Abraham’s great-grandson, Joseph, was sold by his brothers into slavery in Egypt. There, Joseph
became a trusted adviser of the Pharaoh. However, a later Pharaoh enslaved the Jews, and about
400 years after Joseph’s arrival in Egypt the prophet Moses led them out of bondage. The
emancipation of the Jews from slavery still stands as a defining moment in the history of Judaism.
It has inspired generations of Jews and non-Jews to believe that God sanctions freedom and
equality. Practicing Jews celebrate the emancipation annually during Passover, which has become
one of the most important Jewish festivals.
After 40 years of wandering in the desert, during which time Moses received the Ten
Commandments, the Jews arrived in Canaan, the land that God had promised Abraham. (Modernday Israel and ancient Canaan occupy roughly the same territory.) Thereafter, Judaism spread
throughout the Middle East and established itself as a major religion during Roman rule. Increased
persecution in the Roman period led the religious leaders (rabbis) to settle in Galilee. There,
between the second and the sixth centuries ce, Judaism assumed its contemporary form,
characterized by the centrality of the rabbis and the Torah (the five books of Moses, known to
Christians as the first five books of the Old Testament).
The central teachings of Judaism rest above all on belief in one God, Yahweh. However, many
commentators argue that the core of Judaism lies less in belief than in the performance of the 613
divine commandments or mitzvot mentioned in the Torah. The mitzvoth include prescriptions for
justice, righteousness, and observance: rest and pray on the Sabbath, honour the old and the wise,
do not wrong a stranger in buying or selling, do not seek revenge or hold a grudge, do not eat the
meat of animals with hooves, and so on. Temples or synagogues are common places of worship for
Jews, but they are not essential. Worship can take place wherever there is an assembly of 10 adult
Jewish males (or females in the more liberal branches of Judaism).
Like some other Middle Eastern peoples, the Jews were involved in international trade long before
the birth of Christ. They therefore settled in many places outside the area that is now Israel.
However, after the Romans destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem in 70 ce, the Jews dispersed
even more widely to the far reaches of Europe, Asia, and North Africa, forming what became
known as the Diaspora (“dispersion”). Jews retained their identity in the Diaspora because in premodern times they specialized in mercantile activities that separated them from peasants and
landowners, because they tended to be strictly observant, and because they were periodically
persecuted, mainly by Christians. (In general, Muslims were more tolerant of Jews until recently.)
In 1948, Israel was returned to Jewish sovereignty.
There are roughly 5.5 million Jews in North America—about the same number as in Israel. The
considerable diversity among Jews in North America derives from disagreements that began nearly
400 years ago. In seventeenth-century Eastern Europe, ecstatic and mystical sects of Hasidim broke
away from the staid and bookish Judaism of the time. Today in Toronto and Montreal we can still
see Hasidic Jews dressed in their characteristic black robes and broad-brimmed hats (ironically, the
garb of seventeenth-century Polish noblemen). In nineteenth-century Germany, the Reform
movement also broke with traditional Jewish practice. Influenced by Lutheranism, Reform Judaism
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was a liberal movement that involved a loosening of strict rules of religious observance, prayer in
the German language, the integration of men and women in worship, services that followed the
kind of decorum associated with Protestant worship, and the introduction of choirs and organs to
enhance prayer. The Reform movement transplanted itself to North America with the immigration
of German Jews. Orthodox Judaism emerged as a reaction against the liberalizing tendencies of the
Reform movement. It involved a return to traditional observance, including strict adherence to
dietary rules, the segregation of men and women in prayer, and so forth. Conservative Judaism
crystallized in Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century as an attempt to reconcile
what its practitioners regard as the positive elements in Orthodoxy with the dynamism of Reform.
Finally, Reconstructionist Judaism is a smaller, twentieth-century American offshoot of
Conservatism, known chiefly for its liberalism, social activism, and gender-egalitarianism.
Christianity
Observant Jews believe that God promised them a Messiah, a redeemer whose arrival would signal
the beginning of an era of eternal peace, prosperity, and righteousness. Jews believe the Messiah
has not yet arrived. Christians believe he has. In the Christian view, the Messiah is Jesus (Brown,
1996; McManners, 1990).
Jesus was a poor Jew and his early followers were all Jewish. Yet he criticized the Judaism of his
time for its external conformity to tradition and ritual at the expense of developing a true
relationship to God as demanded by the prophets. Believe in God and love him; love your
neighbour—these are the two main lessons of Jesus. What made his teaching novel was his demand
that people match outward performance with inner conviction. Thus, it was not enough not to
murder; a person could not even hate. Nor was it enough not to commit adultery; a person could not
even lust after a neighbour’s wife (Matt. 5: 21–28).
These lessons made Jesus anti-authoritarian and even revolutionary. Criticizing ritual by rote put
Jesus at odds with the established Judaism of his time. Admonishing people to love their
neighbours impressed on them the need to emancipate slaves and women. It also challenged people
to recognize the essential equality of the beggar and the wealthy merchant in the eyes of God.
Roman authorities could hardly be happy with such teachings because they attracted the poor and
the dispossessed and they were a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the Roman Empire, built as it
was on slavery and privilege. Little wonder that the Romans persecuted Jesus and his followers,
eventually executing him by crucifixion, a cruel and painful death reserved for slaves and the worst
criminals.
Christians interpret the death of Jesus as atonement for the sins of humanity. For at least a century
after Jesus’s death, the Christians formed a minor Jewish sect. Aided by 12 of Jesus’s main
followers, the apostles, Christianity gained adherents largely from within the Jewish community.
However, because they encountered opposition from Judaism, the Christians soon began to preach
their message to non-Jews. This required that they redefine Jesus’s message as a correction and
fulfillment of Greek and Roman philosophy. This helped Christianity spread, but even as it did, the
Roman Empire continued to persecute Christians. Many heresies and schisms also beset the
Christians in these first centuries after the death of Jesus. There thus arose the need for stable,
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recognized leadership and set, recognized holy texts. The clerical rank of bishop and the canon date
from this period. They were the routinization of Jesus’s charisma in practice.
In 312 ce, the Roman emperor Constantine I the Great converted to Christianity. He soon turned
Christianity into a state religion. It then spread rapidly throughout Europe. By allying itself first
with the Roman Empire and then with other earthly powers—European royalty and the landowning
class—the Church became the dominant institution, religious or secular, in Europe until the
sixteenth century. It also contributed to gender inequality insofar as women played a marginal role
in its affairs. Just as Judaism had been transformed from an emancipatory religion into one that
could be criticized by Jesus for ritualistic staleness, so Christianity was transformed from a
revolutionary force into a pillar of the existing order.
In the sixteenth century, Martin Luther, a German priest, challenged the Christian establishment by
seeking to establish a more personal relationship between the faithful and God. At the time,
ordinary people were illiterate, and they had to rely on priests to hear the holy word and have it
interpreted for them. However, by insisting that Christians come to know God themselves, as Jesus
demanded, Luther called into question the whole Church hierarchy. His protests and his ideas
quickly captured the imagination of half of Europe and led to the split of Christianity into the two
major branches that persist to this day: Catholicism and Protestantism.
This is by no means the only division within Christianity. In the Middle Ages, Christianity split into
Western and Eastern halves, the former centred in Rome, the latter in Constantinople (now
Istanbul, Turkey). Various Orthodox churches today derive from the Eastern tradition.
Protestantism has been especially prone to splintering because it emphasizes the individual’s
relationship to God rather than to a central authority. Today, there are hundreds of different
Protestant churches.
Christians retained the Jewish Bible as the Old Testament, adding the Gospels and letters of the
apostles as the New Testament. The Bible is the most important text for Christians. Especially for
Protestants, reading the New Testament is an important part of what it means to be a Christian.
Traditionally, the most important holiday for Christians was Easter but increasingly Christians have
celebrated Christmas, which became especially popular in the nineteenth century.
Christianity remains the dominant religion in the West. Because of its successful missionary
efforts, it can be found almost everywhere in the world. Yet Christianity remains a truly
heterogeneous religion. Some Christians are fundamentalist and conservative, others are
mainstream and more liberal, while still others are socialist and even revolutionary. Some support
feminists and homosexuals, while others regard them as abominations. Its success is due in part to
its ability to encompass diverse and even contradictory currents.
Islam
Christianity emerged in a society dominated by Roman conquerors, a society in which ordinary
people were burdened by heavy taxes and temple levies. Several military revolts against the
Romans took place in this period, and some scholars view Jesus’s message as a religious response
to the oppressive social conditions of his time.
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Islam originated more than 600 years later in the city of Mecca in what is now Saudi Arabia. It, too,
can be seen as a religious response to a society in crisis. Mecca was a rich trading centre, and the
powerful merchants of that city had become greedy, overbearing, and corrupt. The merchants
ignored the traditional moral code that originated with the surrounding nomadic tribes (the
Bedouin). The Bedouin themselves were heavily indebted to the merchants and became so poor
that some of them were sold into slavery. On a larger canvas, many people in Arabia thought that
the Persian and Roman Empires, which dominated the Middle East, might soon fall, heralding the
end of the world (Rodinson, 1996).
Into this crisis stepped Muhammad, who claimed to have visions from God (Hodgson, 1974;
Lapidus, 2002). His teachings were later written down in the Koran. Certain episodes and
personalities that appear in the holy books of Judaism and Christianity also appear in the Koran;
Muslims recognize both Moses and Jesus as prophets, for example.
The central belief of Islam is that there is one true God, Allah, and that the words of his prophet,
Muhammad, must be followed. Islam also emphasizes important teachings of Christianity, such as
egalitarianism and universal love. Even more than the Bible for Judaism and Christianity, however,
the Koran is important for devout Muslims because they believe it is the direct word of God.
Like Judaism with its Talmudic commentaries on the Bible, Islam stresses the significance of
hadith (traditions), a corpus of anecdotes and commentaries about Muhammad. Like rabbis in
Judaism and priests in Catholicism, ulamas (scholars) maintain religious authority in Islam. Unlike
Christianity, however, Islam has never had a central Church. Although any place can become a site
of prayer and learning, mosques are the traditional places of worship.
People who profess Islam have five core duties. At least once in their life they must recite the
Muslim creed aloud, correctly, with full understanding, and with heartfelt belief. (The creed is:
“There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.”) Five times a day they must worship in
a religious service. They must fast from sunrise to sunset every day during the ninth month of the
lunar calendar (Ramadan). They must give to the poor. And at least once in their life they must
make a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca.
By the time of his death, Muhammad had founded an empire, and a dispute broke out over how his
followers could identify his successor (the khalifa, or caliph in English). One group claimed that
the caliphate should be an elected office occupied by a member of a certain Meccan tribe. These
were the Sunni Muslims. A second group claimed that the caliph should be the direct descendant of
Muhammad. These were the Shia Muslims. Today, the great majority of Muslims are Sunni, while
the Shia are concentrated in Iran and southern Iraq. The Shia are generally more conservative and
fundamentalist than the Sunni.
Islam spread rapidly after Muhammad’s death, replacing Christianity in much of the Middle East,
Africa, and parts of southern Europe. It ushered in a great cultural flowering and an era of
considerable religious tolerance by the standards of the time. Significantly, the Jews flourished in
Muslim Spain and North Africa at the very time they were being persecuted and expelled from
Christian Europe.
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Only a few Islamic sects developed in the modern era. The most noteworthy was Wahhabism, an
extreme fundamentalist movement that originated in the eighteenth century in what is now Saudi
Arabia. Its founder, Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, upheld ritual over intentions, opposed
reverence of the dead, and demanded that prayer and honours be extended only to Allah and not to
Muhammad or the saints. He opposed all music and all books other than the Koran, and favoured
the extermination of anyone who disagreed with him, especially if they happened to be Shia.
Characteristically, in 1801 Wahhabis stormed the Iraqi city of Karbala, wrecked and looted the
sacred tomb of Muhammad’s grandson, Hussein, and slaughtered thousands of the city’s Shia
residents.
Wahhabism might be ignored as a minor fanatical sect if it were not for one important historical
fact. In 1747, al-Wahhab made a pact with Muhammad ibn Sa’ud whereby ibn Sa’ud became the
political ruler of the Arabian peninsula and al-Wahhab its religious authority. In effect, Wahhabism
became the state religion of what is now Saudi Arabia. This extreme form of fundamentalism
continues to flourish in Saudi Arabia today, where its tenets are taught in the Saudi school system.
It is not coincidental that nearly all of the suicide bombers who attacked the United States on
September 11, 2001, were Saudi citizens, as is Osama bin Laden himself, and that Saudi money
finances schools throughout the Muslim world that propagate anti-Western ideas (Schwartz, 2003).
Hinduism
Hinduism is the dominant religion of India but it has no single founder and no books that are
thought to be inspired by God. Its major texts are epic poems, such as the Bhagavad-Gita, the
Mahabharata, and the Ramayana. Like Judaism, Hinduism originated nearly 4000 years ago, so we
have little sense of the social context in which it first emerged (Flood, 1996). What is clear is that
its otherworldliness and mystical tendencies make it very different from the three main Western
religions.
Hindus believe in reincarnation, a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Only the body dies according to
Hindu belief. The soul returns in a new form after death. The form in which it returns depends on
how a person lives his or her life. Hindus believe that people who live in a way that is appropriate
to their position in society will live better future lives. In rare cases, a person reaches a stage of
spiritual perfection (nirvana) that allows the soul to escape the cycle of birth and rebirth, and
reunite with God. In contrast, people who do not live in a way that is appropriate to their position in
society will supposedly live an inferior life when they are reincarnated. In the worst case, evildoers
are expected to be reincarnated as non-humans. This way of thinking helped to create a caste
system, a rigid, religiously sanctioned class hierarchy. Vertical social mobility was nearly
impossible because, according to Hindu belief, striving to move out of your station in life is
inappropriate and ensures reincarnation in a lower form.
There are many gods in the Hindu tradition, although all of them are thought to be aspects of the
one true God. This too makes Hinduism different from the Western religions. A final difference
between Hinduism and the Western religions is its propensity to assimilate rather than exclude
other religious beliefs and practices. Traditionally, Jews, Christians, and Muslims tended to reject
non-believers unless they converted. God tells Moses on Mount Sinai: “You shall have no other
gods before me.” In contrast, in the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna says that “whatever god a man
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worships, it is I who answer the prayer.” This attitude of acceptance helped Hinduism absorb many
of the ancient religions of the peoples of the Indian subcontinent. It also explains why there are
such wide regional and class variations in Hindu beliefs and practices; Hinduism as it is practiced
bears the stamp of many other religions.
Buddhism
By about 600 bce, Hinduism had developed into a system of rituals and sacrifices that was widely
considered a burden. For example, a person could escape the consequences of committing
inappropriate or evil acts but only by having priests perform a series of mechanical rituals. In a
sense, Gautama Buddha was to Hinduism what Jesus was to Judaism. Like Jesus in Palestine 600
years later, Buddha objected to the stale ritualism of the established religion and sought to achieve
a direct relationship with God (Gombrich, 1996; Lopez, 2001; Robinson and Johnson, 1997). He
rejected Hindu ideas of caste and reincarnation and offered a new way for everyone to achieve
spiritual enlightenment. Rather than justifying inequality, he promised the possibility of salvation to
people of low status and women, who were traditionally marginalized by Hinduism.
Buddha based his method of salvation on what he called the Four Noble Truths: (1) Life is
suffering. There are moments of joy, but poverty, violence, and other sources of sorrow
overshadow them. (2) All suffering derives from desire. We suffer when we fail to achieve what we
want. (3) Suffering ceases by eliminating desire. If we can train ourselves not to lust, not to be
greedy, not to crave pleasure, not even to desire material comforts, we will not suffer. (4) We can
eliminate desire by behaving morally, focusing intently on our feelings and thoughts, meditating,
and achieving wisdom. Nirvana can be achieved by “blowing out” the futile passions of existence.
Buddhism does not presume the existence of one true God. Rather, it holds out the possibility of
everyone becoming a god of sorts. Similarly, it does not have a central church or text, such as the
Bible. Not surprisingly, then, Buddhism is notable for its diversity of beliefs and practices.
Numerous schools and scriptures make up the Buddhist tradition. Many Westerners are familiar
with Zen Buddhism, especially influential in East Asia, which emphasizes the possibility of
enlightenment through meditation.
Buddhism spread rapidly across Asia after India’s ruler adopted it as his own religion in the third
century bce. He sent missionaries to convert people in Tibet, Cambodia (Kampuchea), Nepal, Sri
Lanka (formerly Ceylon), Myanmar (formerly Burma), China, Korea, and Japan. Ironically, the
influence of Buddhism in the land of its birth started to die out after the fifth century ce and is
negligible in India today. In India, as we have seen, Hinduism predominates. One of the reasons for
the popularity of Buddhism in East and Southeast Asia is that Buddhism is able to coexist with
local religious practices.
Unlike Western religions, Buddhism does not insist on holding a monopoly on religious truth.
The Cycle of World Religions
Little historical evidence helps us understand the social conditions that gave rise to the first world
religions, Judaism and Hinduism. We are on safer ground when it comes to understanding the rise
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of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Insofar as we dare to make sociological generalizations about
thousands of years of complex religious development spanning many cultures and virtually the
entire globe, we can venture four conclusions.
First, new world religions are founded by charismatic personalities in times of great trouble. The
impulse to find a better world is encouraged by adversity in this one. Second, the founding of new
religions is typically animated by the desire for freedom and equality, always in the afterlife and
often in this one. Third, the routinization of charisma typically makes religion less responsive to the
needs of ordinary people, and it often supports injustices. For this reason, and also because there is
no lack of adversity in the world, movements of religious reform and revival are always evident,
and they often spill over into politics. For example, the Catholic Church played a critically
important role in undermining communism in Poland in the 1970s and the 1980s, and Catholic
“liberation theology” animated the successful fight against right-wing governments in Latin
America in the same period (Kepel, 1994 [1991]; Segundo, 1976 [1975]; Smith, 1991). It is for this
reason, too, that we venture a fourth, speculative conclusion, namely that new world religions could
well emerge in the future.
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