Hagia Sofia, Istanbul, Turkey © John Suddath
Hagia Sofia has been a church, a museum, and a mosque.
Buddhism evolved in India and spread to China and Japan. Over time it was practiced concurrently with Taoism and Confucianism in China and with Shintoism in Japan. Although India is a confusing mixture of dialectics and religions, Hinduism is now the primary religion. It is endorsed by the government, but it is not considered the state religion. When the Communists took over China in 1949, they officially abolished all religions, but the ancient religions are still practiced – just on a smaller scale.
The era of the Egyptian Empire had its own religion that disappeared with the collapse of the empire. Modern Egypt is Moslem. The ancient religions in Europe and the Americas can be put in a general class of animism, that is the worship of the gods represented in the natural world.
The Greeks and Romans had a catalog of about 67 Gods and Goddesses. They just had different names for them. Twelve were considered to be the major deities. Later on, the emperors became Gods. The history of the Gods reads like a soap opera. We call it mythology.
Christianity was a relative newcomer that didn’t grow until it became the state religion of the Roman Empire. The first split was between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. Christianity spread over Europe and the Americas. In the 16th Century, Protestantism split off from the Catholic Church. After a series of military conquests in the 8th Century, Islam rapidly spread across the Middle East.
Today 27 countries have Islam as their official state religion. Christian countries vary between 9 and 13, depending upon whether it is just a common practice or if it is official. Only two countries, Cambodia and Bhutan, are officially Buddhist. India promotes Hinduism. Israel proclaims that it is a Jewish state.
I discussed state religions in a previous article. (Separation of Church and State, July 11, 2022.) There still are several ancient religions that have survived as small minorities.
How much correlation is there between the spread of a specific religion and military conquest? Unfortunately, that too often has been the case. During the Crusades, the allegiances swapped back and forth quickly. When the Communists conquered Russia, they officially abolished the Russian Orthodox Church. In reality, the church never disappeared. Now the Russian Orthodox religion is common practice in the country although Russia is declared to be an atheist state.
What does the history of religion offer as a lesson for us today? The contemporary question is about the division between sectarianism and religion. The sticky question is how religion has become controlled by politics and the quest for power. We have seen throughout history that no matter how pious the clerics may have claimed to be, they often succumbed to the temptations of power. With Christianity spread over 700 Protestant denominations, the Roman Catholic Church still has the most political power and members.
Considering the history of religion, why don’t more people become agnostics? A lot are, and they even claim that to be a form of religion. The kind of religion where you can worship God on the Golf course on Sunday morning. Most people find that a passive religion is not satisfying of a basic human need in the search for God. We still reach out for some form of connection outside ourselves. For all the evil that has been done in the name of religion, it still has a powerful appeal to our psyche. We need to reach out to the world of the Spirit. Of course, we have many ways of how we do that. The world of the Spirit also in many ways is still more powerful than conquest.
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