The Global Religious Landscape (2023)

FAQs

What does religious landscape mean? ›

3Firstly, the notion of “religious landscape” includes the ritual and cultural practices in the sphere of religion.

Religion leaves an imprint on landscape, through culture and lifestyle. Religious structures - such as places of worship, and other sacred sites - dominate many landscapes. Religious traditions - Hindu ritual bathing in the Ganges, for example - leave their mark on the physical appearance of an area.

Roughly 48.9% of Americans are Protestants, 23.0% are Catholics, 1.8% are Mormons (members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). Christianity was introduced during the period of European colonization. The United States has the world's largest Christian population.

The NPS identifies four cultural landscape types: historic designed, historic vernacular, historic agricultural, and ethnographic.

Key Takeaways

The major types of religious organization are the church, sect, and cult.

Landforms might include physical features like mountains or oceans. If you live in the mountains, you're likely to develop a particular culture that adapts to life at a high altitude. For example, you might wear heavier clothing and tend to be physically stronger as a result of climbing often.

Religious belief and practice contribute substantially to the formation of personal moral criteria and sound moral judgment. Regular religious practice generally inoculates individuals against a host of social problems, including suicide, drug abuse, out-of-wedlock births, crime, and divorce.

Religions spread over time through a process called diffusion. The map shown above indicates where the identified religions are most prominent. There are two methods of diffusion: expansion and relocation. In expansion diffusion, beliefs of a religion transmit by direct contact between believers and nonbelievers.

Traditionally, faith, in addition to reason, has been considered a source of religious beliefs. There are an estimated 10,000 distinct religions worldwide. About 84% of the world's population is affiliated with Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or some form of folk religion.

Why is there a decline in religion? ›

The decline in church membership, then, appears largely tied to population change, with those in older generations who were likely to be church members being replaced in the U.S. adult population with people in younger generations who are less likely to belong.

Of the world's major religions, Christianity is the largest, with more than two billion followers. Christianity is based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ and is approximately 2,000 years old.

Christianity. The world's largest religion, Christianity, is practiced by about 2.4 billion people. The country with the highest number of practicing Christians is the United States, with a Christian population of 253 million. Brazil and Mexico follow closely with 185 million and 118 million Christians, respectively.

coastal landscapes • riverine landscapes • arid landscapes • mountain landscapes • karst landscapes. levee, and a flood plain or terrace.

Cultural landscapes include tangible and intangible characteristics, including: Natural systems and features. Spatial organization. Land use.

The Cultural Landscape Foundation: "Cultural landscapes provide a sense of place and identity; they map our relationship with the land over time; and they are part of our national heritage and each of our lives."

The world's religions are similar in many ways; scholar Stephen Prothero refers to these similarities as “family resemblances.” All religions include rituals, scriptures, and sacred days and gathering places.

The most common classification of religion in sociology differentiates between four major types of religions: theism, animism, totemism, and the New Age.

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Describe the four dimensions of religion: Belief, ritual, experience, and community.

In general, geographers divide the ways in which people value landforms and landscapes into four categories: • cultural value • spiritual value • aesthetic value • economic value. The aesthetic value of a landscape is closely linked to its beauty and uniqueness.

What are the three types of landscape? ›

The first four, past landscape experience, travel, present living environment and recreational activities, would all seem to provide support for the influence of familiarity on landscape preferences.

Religion serves several functions for society. These include (a) giving meaning and purpose to life, (b) reinforcing social unity and stability, (c) serving as an agent of social control of behavior, (d) promoting physical and psychological well-being, and (e) motivating people to work for positive social change.

[16] More specifically, religions maintain the Golden Rule: “what you do not wish done to yourself, do not do to others.”[17] Therefore, through such religious values, globalization engenders greater religious tolerance in such areas as politics, economics, and society.

Why religions became global. So what they're saying is that religion provided structure and meaning for large groups of people in ways that small, tight-knit village communities used to do. Religion, especially faiths that were shared by large groups of people, actually provided stability in cities.

With the exception of Buddhists, all of the world's major religious groups are poised for at least some growth in absolute numbers in the coming decades. The global Buddhist population is expected to be fairly stable because of low fertility rates and aging populations in countries such as China, Thailand and Japan.

The world religions paradigm was developed in the United Kingdom during the 1960s, where it was pioneered by phenomenological scholars like Ninian Smart. It was designed to broaden the study of religion away from its heavy focus on Christianity by taking into account other large religious traditions around the world.

America's Christian majority is shrinking, and could dip below 50% by 2070 The U.S.'s Christian majority has been shrinking for decades. A Pew Research Center study shows that as of 2020, about 64% of Americans identify as Christian. Fifty years ago, that number was 90%.

Islam: The world's fastest growing religion.

Is there a future for religion? ›

We obey laws made and enforced by governments, not by God. Secularism is on the rise, with science providing tools to understand and shape the world. Given all that, there's a growing consensus that the future of religion is that it has no future.

Hinduism is the oldest religion followed by Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Jainism and Confucianism.

Religion serves several functions for society. These include (a) giving meaning and purpose to life, (b) reinforcing social unity and stability, (c) serving as an agent of social control of behavior, (d) promoting physical and psychological well-being, and (e) motivating people to work for positive social change.

Christianity has been estimated to be growing rapidly in South America, Africa, and Asia. In Africa, for instance, in 1900, there were only 8.7 million adherents of Christianity; now there are 390 million, and it is expected that by 2025 there will be 600 million Christians in Africa.

For all of these reasons – psychological, neurological, historical, cultural and logistical – experts guess that religion will probably never go away. Religion, whether it's maintained through fear or love, is highly successful at perpetuating itself. If not, it would no longer be with us.

More recent study published in 2022 by Pew Research Center, have found a retention rate among American Christians closer to 67%, and cited that the decline of Christianity is primarily due to people leaving Christianity and choosing to have no religious affiliation (rather than due to people converting to other ...

The word Hindu is an exonym, and while Hinduism has been called the oldest religion in the world, many practitioners refer to their religion as Sanātana Dharma (Sanskrit: सनातन धर्म, lit.

In short, James tells us that true religion is a devotion to God, demonstrated by love and compassion for fellowmen, coupled with unworldliness. Such a statement seems too simple to be sufficient, but in its simplicity it speaks an important truth.

What religion doesn't have higher power? ›

2 The literal definition of “atheist” is “a person who does not believe in the existence of a god or any gods,” according to Merriam-Webster. And the vast majority of U.S. atheists fit this description: 81% say they do not believe in God or a higher power or in a spiritual force of any kind.

Christianity developed out of Second Temple Judaism in the 1st century CE. It is founded on the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and those who follow it are called Christians. Islam developed in the 7th century CE.

God is the father of humanity and the father of each religion.

An atheist doesn't believe in the existence of a god or divine being. The word atheist originates with the Greek atheos, which is built from the roots a- (“without”) and theos (“a god”). Atheism is the doctrine or belief that there is no god.

Another aspect of the relationship between religion and geography is religious geography, in which geographical ideas are influenced by religion, such as early map-making, and the biblical geography that developed in the 16th century to identify places from the Bible.

The National Park Service defines a cultural landscape as a geographic area, including both cultural and natural resources and the wildlife or domestic animals therein, associated with a historic event, activity, or person, or exhibiting other cultural or aesthetic values.

: a religion validated on the basis of human reason and experience apart from miraculous or supernatural revelation. specifically : a religion that is universally discernible by all men through the use of human reason apart from any special revelation compare revealed religion.

Churches are the dominant landscape expression of Christianity. Churches play a critical role in the landscape expression of Christianity because they are commonly considered holy ground, because they are built to express religious principals, and because community worship is extremely important for most Christians.

Religion, like any other cultural practice, can readily be assessed from a geographic lens. Geographers study the spatial distribution of organized religious systems, specific religious practices, and the impact of religion on the landscapes of culture and institutions.

Religion is also studied within cultural geography, which studies how cultural processes spread.

Why is geography important in religion? ›

Geography does not only affect where particular religions or belief systems, such as the world's major faiths, are located but it can affect how specific beliefs are practiced and behaviors that it encourages.

Cultural landscapes include neighborhoods, parks and open spaces, farms and ranches, sacred places, etc.

In the simplest sense, religion describes "the relationship of human beings to what they regard as holy, sacred, spiritual or divine". ². It is usually accompanied by a set of organised practices which foster a community of people who share that faith.

Religion ideally serves several functions. It gives meaning and purpose to life, reinforces social unity and stability, serves as an agent of social control, promotes psychological and physical well-being, and may motivate people to work for positive social change.

Religious experiences can be characterized generally as experiences that seem to the person having them to be of some objective reality and to have some religious import. That reality can be an individual, a state of affairs, a fact, or even an absence, depending on the religious tradition the experience is a part of.

Dewsbury and Cloke (2009) refer to “spiritual landscapes”, which, for the authors, means moving beyond religion to “open out spaces that can be inhabited, or dwelt in different registers” (696), echoing Foley's (2010) reference to the interplay of meanings for particular sites.