O Ye of All Kinds of Faiths
March 21, 2019 4:19 PM   Subscribe

 
I like this one because it gives a sense of diversity of religions. Lots of pie charts are not the most beautiful thing but it conveys something important. Compare to this map of majority religion by country, or this map of second largest religion by country.
posted by Nelson at 4:53 PM on March 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


Lifelong atheist here. It's fascinating how much of human history and culture is shaped by this thing that I seem utterly incapable of understanding.

It's also interesting that the Communist effort to eliminate religion seems to have actually succeeded in some places.

Thanks for sharing.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 5:00 PM on March 21, 2019 [9 favorites]


I had no idea Albania was majority Muslim. I need to read up.
posted by Bee'sWing at 5:20 PM on March 21, 2019


I've got some familiarity with US religion statistics, and I think that these charts are assigning faith to apostates.
posted by es_de_bah at 5:33 PM on March 21, 2019 [5 favorites]


One small bit of interest to me is that, as far as I know, no other major religion has expressed a symbolic attachment to a particular color. But long ago Islam decided green was their color, and everyone else went with it, and so pretty much every infographic you see has green for Islam.
posted by traveler_ at 6:08 PM on March 21, 2019 [6 favorites]


"Let them fight"
posted by Auden at 6:30 PM on March 21, 2019


On my monitor, the colors for Hindu and Buddhist were close enough that I spent several seconds in confusion wondering why there were so many Japanese Hindus.
posted by fings at 7:02 PM on March 21, 2019 [3 favorites]


That is a really well done infographic. It displays a lot of information elegantly and accessibly.

Fascinating to see the nonbelief gray and where it stands out.

(Naturally, as with any good map or infographic, I want more. I'd like to see Christianity broken up into Eastern, Catholic, and Protestant sect, then Islam into at least Shi'a and Sunni.)
posted by doctornemo at 7:07 PM on March 21, 2019 [4 favorites]


I knew there was a reason I liked the Czechs besides cheap pizza and beer. Also, not surprising that Uruguay could give a fuck.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:11 PM on March 21, 2019


There should be a distinction made regarding choice vs. default. In quite a few countries (Malaysia and Saudi Arabia for sure, I am guessing quite a few more) you are born into religion based on your parents and/or ethnicity, and that's it. The option of being atheist simply does not exist.
posted by Meatbomb at 8:03 PM on March 21, 2019 [5 favorites]


I think the infographic could have accommodated the distinction between different sects better. For instance, if you wanted to distinguish between Sunni and Shiite Muslims while still aggregating them, you could use dark green for one and light green for the other, and represent each green slice as a spectrum weighted towards the larger side. You could do the same for Catholics and Protestants, and maybe even Orthodox Christians. Also, given that India. Is. Huge., couldn't its religions be better identified? The same with the "others" in China.
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:31 PM on March 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


Choice vs default also impacts nations you probably don't consider having a state religion, like my native Norway. We did until 2012 have a state church with default membership at birth. I suspect that's why Norway's pie chart skews heavily Christian, as there are many, many non-active church members. Norway actually skews non-religious to the tune of 46% (Norwegian language article).
posted by Harald74 at 12:08 AM on March 22, 2019


Good point, Harald74, and my semi-informed guess is that most of the world would look more like Europe if adults were fully free to choose their religious affiliation.

I remember getting our birth certificate for the youngest, in remote rural Malaysia, and it took a good 15 minutes of animated discussion within the office when it came time to fill in the "religion" space and I kept trying to explain that it should be "none".

"You are from Canada... you mean Christian?"

Get out the translator and show them "atheist"... nope, does not compute.
posted by Meatbomb at 1:08 AM on March 22, 2019 [3 favorites]


I had a similar problem in Thailand trying to explain that I wasn't a Muslim. "You have one god, yes? ... you eat pig? No? See, Muslim eh?"
posted by Joe in Australia at 1:18 AM on March 22, 2019 [2 favorites]


Really nice graphic. Though I think she could have made the names of smaller nations more prominent.

If I had my druthers, the religious boundaries in East Asia (and maybe India) would be fuzzy. The idea that you can only belong to one religion is pretty Western.
posted by zompist at 2:27 AM on March 22, 2019


All of the points raised above are valid. But, as the writeup says, the point of this infographic was to be clear, not comprehensive. There are any number of complexities and wrinkles you could add – but each one makes the graphic harder to read and interpret easily.

Religious identification is notoriously difficult to define and categorize. We're conditioned to treat it – as this infographic does – as a simple set of mutually exclusive categories. Like, you can be Christian, Muslim, Hindu, one of various other descriptors, or "none of the above" – and that's it. But this is a hugely simplified model of how things actually work.

For starters, "religion" isn't just one thing. It's culture and identity; it's belief and creed; it's action and praxis. And what it means to be Blorbleist (to contrive a notional example) varies from community to community, and from individual to individual. There is no one Blorbleism. In fact, there are many cultural Blorbleisms, and theological Blorbleisms, and practical Blorbleisms, and even (in some cases) legal Blorbleisms.

You can ask a person, "are you a Blorbleist?", and they can say "yes" or "no" – but those answers can mean almost anything. These various social phenomena are certainly related, but to simply lump them into a single category and say "well, it's all Blorbleism" is more of a documentary convenience than a reality.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 4:29 AM on March 22, 2019 [8 favorites]


Anyone else notice that about 500 million folks or so in China were classified as 'other'? It made me wonder if the 'other' in China was a collection of different beliefs, or just one or two that they couldn't bother to break down into a different category.

This article breaks it down a little bit: "Chinese folk religion is made up of a combination of religious practices, including Confucianism, ancestor veneration, Buddhism and Taoism. Folk religion also retains traces of some of its ancestral neolithic belief systems which include the veneration of the Sun, Moon, Earth, Heaven and various stars, as well as communication with animals. It has been practiced alongside Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism by Chinese people throughout the world for thousands of years."

But I think they could have added "Chinese folk religion" to the chart given the 800 million or so adherents.

Other than that, it was a great visualization that I enjoyed.
posted by el io at 10:24 AM on March 22, 2019 [2 favorites]


Judaism at only 0.2%? I didn't realize my tribe was that poorly represented! I wonder what that statistic would be if events like the Holocaust, pogroms, Spanish Inquisition, etc. etc. didn't exist.
posted by theartandsound at 12:11 PM on March 22, 2019


Am I reading this right that only 0.2% of the Earth is Jewish? That seems unbelievable.
posted by Liquidwolf at 2:15 PM on March 22, 2019


At a very rough estimate based on Europe's pre-Holocaust Jewish population and average European growth rates, the world's Jewish population would be somewhere between 30-50% higher if the Holocaust had not taken place. As it is, there are only now possibly more Jews alive than there were before the Holocaust.

And yes: .2% is about right: roughly 16 million Jews in a world population of around 8 billion.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:33 AM on March 23, 2019 [2 favorites]


Quaker here, but our meeting's only barely hanging in there.
posted by goinWhereTheClimateSuitsMyClothes at 11:54 PM on March 23, 2019


"Judaism at only 0.2%? I didn't realize my tribe was that poorly represented!"

I imagine that's in significant part because Judaism isn't trying to recruit folks; virtually all the other religions have a heavy focus on converting other religions. Then, after you are born into Judaism, you have to decide to stay in.

(it's one of my favorite parts of Judaism; another is how it's scriptures stay in original original language - want to read the holy book, learn the language).
posted by el io at 1:56 PM on March 24, 2019


"Judaism at only 0.2%? I didn't realize my tribe was that poorly represented!"

I don't recall ever meeting a jewish person until adulthood, presumably my schools growing up had students of the faith but if they did it was never visible or brought up. Embarrassingly, a lot of jewish stuff I'd been exposed to in media/pop culture I kind of just associated with New York type city people, and looking back I guess I can understand how, usually when a character in a show talks about being a jew, it's almost never really about the religion or adherence to tennets of Judaism, it mostly seems to be a loosely shared cultural heritage. I'd be surprised if that 0.2 of the population flagged as Jewish were all particularly observant.
posted by GoblinHoney at 10:29 AM on March 25, 2019


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